Possible Movies of the MCU (Michael Clayton Universe)

The modern thriller classic “Michael Clayton” (2007) is currently streaming on Netflix and so perhaps that’s why just recently I saw someone on Elon Musk’s Latest Attention-Grabbing Venture to Eventually Abandon (i.e. Twitter) lauding the MCU – Michael Clayton Universe, that is, as opposed to more fashionable Marvel Cinematic Universe. I can’t source the Tweet now, though in trying to I found a few other people who have, in the last few years, made a variation of this same joke. So, it’s nice to know that there are other “Michael Clayton” fans and, more crucially, Thriller-heads out there too. Now, Cinema Romantico is generally against such cinematic universes. This blog believes it stifles creativity rather than encouraging it and has gone a long, long way into turning Movies, glorious Movies, into TV. But we also not-seriously demand equal CU time. As we have argued before, if you get your MCU, why can’t we have our NKCU (Nicole Kidman Cinematic Universe)? That’s only fair. And that brings me to the Michael Clayton Universe – namely, what films could we create for it? This post is incredibly niche, I know. but then, Marty Bach (Sydney Pollack) compliments Michael Clayton on having a “niche,” so maybe that’s appropriate.

Possible Movies of the MCU (Michael Clayton Universe) 

1.) Let’s get the ball rolling with an easy one, the obvious one – Mr. Verne (Robert Prescott) and Mr. Iker (Terry Serpico), the rival fixers cum assassins. We wouldn’t see what they were up to after their botched hit of Michael goes wrong but see what they were up to before, a Mr. Verne and Mr. Iker prequel of sorts, beginning with them being called away from another round of golf to attend to another dastardly job, probably involving a sweaty charlatan played by Sam Rockwell with a greasy moustache, a frantic Winona Ryder, and Keith David as a detective who is too old for this shit.

2.) Clearly a whole movie is waiting to get out of the poker game in the basement of the Chinese restaurant. 

3.) Mr. (Denis O’Hare) and Mrs. (Julie White) Greer could effect a whole riff on “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” during the former’s hit and run trial.

4.) “He’s an asshole,” Marty Bach says of Barry Grissom (Michael O’Keefe), one of his firm’s attorneys, “but he knows it.” And doesn’t that, the self-aware asshole, sound just like a burgeoning protagonist of a John Grisham Movie in the Michael Clayton Universe? I mean, merging the JGU with the MCU unlocks all sorts of golden doors. Suddenly you’re looking at the potential for George Clooney & Sandra Bullock or Tilda Swinton & Mickey Rourke as co-headliners. The sky’s the limit. 

5.) But then, part of what makes “Michael Clayton” so great is that eschews romanticizing The Law a la Grisham. So. What if we make an entire movie of Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson) “grind(ing) away on this case for six years without a break”? Like Irv Blitzer in “Cool Runnings” showing the prospective Jamaican Bobsled team footage of bobsled crashes to let them know what they’re getting themselves into, we will show this MCU movie to prospective law school students. Maybe this how we can begin infusing the world with more English majors. 

6.) Speaking of which…remember all those apple-faced law firm newbies who look scared witless in the hotel room after Arthur goes off the deep end during the deposition (including a pre-fame Katherine Waterston)? Let’s follow them as they quit their jobs to follow The Grateful Dead. Roll up those billable hours and smoke ’em.

7.) Michael flaming out at trying to get into the restaurant business with the mob would make for a killer MCU movie. We’ll convince Marisa Tomei to ditch the MCU for the MCU to play a New York State Liquor Authority commissioner.

8.) When Karen Crowder (Swinton) is going through Michael’s credentials it’s noted that in 1986 he worked with the Joint Manhattan-Queens Organized Crime Task Force. A 1980s crime thriller in the MCU?! “Jonathan, bring me my green light!”

9.) Remember the part where Michael is on the phone in his office, kind of going through the motions in doing his job, talking to who-knows-who about some 22-year old charged with reckless endangerment in Key Biscayne? I’m seeing “Michael Clayton...Goes to South Florida” with Clooney looking miserable, just absolutely miserable, in a floral print shirt and Andy Garcia as some corrupt local politician conducting his business outside a walk-up coffee window.

10.) A Blank Check Movie in which we give Merritt Wever a blank check to just take her character wherever she wants.

11.) Karen Crowder’s Law School Adventures, in which we discover young Karen Crowder (still played by Swinton somehow) is both hyper-ambitious and problematically conceited, forced to enlist the law school version of Mr. Verne and Mr. Iker (Abbi Jacobson, Awkwafina) to help her graduate at the top of her class.

12.) A wacky body switch comedy in which Michael Clayton the fixer magically changes places with Michael Clayton the football player!

Some Drivel On...Tokyo Vice

There’s nothing to recap in the first episode of HBO’s crime drama “Tokyo Vice.” I mean, there’s plenty to recap, sure, in so much as an American journalist named Jake Adelstein (Ansel Elgort) earns a job with the Meicho Shimbun, inspired by the Japanese daily newspaper Mainichi Shimbun, in the late 90s and gets put on the cop beat where he begins asking verboten questions. But that suggests the first episode of “Tokyo Vice” is like all other narrative TV, which is to say a straight-forward series of plot details often recounted in straight-forwardly shot dialogue-laden scenes, or dialogue-laden scenes jumbled and mixed up into some sort of puzzle calculated to induce all manner of post-watching theorizing, nothing more than a delivery device for just the kind of recap that I do not want to write here. The first episode of “Tokyo Vice,” bless its heart, is a full-fledged experience, less an IMDb plot summary in visual form than a painting hanging on the wall in a museum to let yourself get close to and linger over. It was, we should now note, directed by one of the show’s executive producers – Michael Mann.

Indeed, adhering closely to his preferred modus operandi, Mann opts for total immersion, dropping us straight into the show the same way Jake has since been dropped straight into Tokyo culture. Mann carts his camera all over the Japanese capital to give an indelible sense of place, from the kappo style outdoor counter where Jake orders liver and leek to him losing it in the music at a dance club, both illuminating the character’s level of comfort and enjoyment in this foreign place. Not to say he doesn’t stick out. He does, and Mann seems to have cast Elgort specifically for that purpose, his height and gait among the Japanese people implicitly denoting him a fish out of water just as his newspaper supervisor’s stupefied (hysterical) look of indignation upon realizing this fish in his jurisdiction is rendered with two heads encroaching either side of the frame, like this gaijin’s mere presence is already squeezing his brains so much they hurt. 

Rather than laying out specifics of the entrance exam Jake takes to work for the Meicho Shimbun in the first place, Mann emphasizes the moment’s stress through music and edits while also allowing the innate significance of this ritual to become an unspoken reflection of the Yakuza ritual at episode’s end. This is where “Tokyo Vice” is leading, hinted at in the opening scene and snippets of dialogue throughout both from Jake’s editor (Rinko Kikuchi) and a vice detective (Hideaki Itō), that murder is a prohibited word in Japan. In one sequence, Jake tags along with that vice detective to a neon infused karaoke bar where simply in the way both a nameless Yakuza and Jake ogle an American woman Samantha (Rachel Keller) doing a decent “Sweet Child O’ Mine” you see the thin line between reporter and the person he reports on. When Jake has a conversation with Samantha, the dialogue might fill in some blanks but the mood, how the scene ends, Elgort’s punch-drunk naivety, all evoke something more ephemeral, not set-up for what is to come but the fleeting, fraudulent beauty of life. 

But ephemera’s no good for TV. What’s HBO Max going to automatically cue up next? And so when the Pilot gave way to Episode 2, it departed Mann-land for Narrative TV-land, all short scenes of dialogue, characters who had barely said a word in the first episode now chattering away, the kinetic visual language reduced to the functional, the atmosphere drained. The characters were the same, the plot was similar, the city identical, but it felt as I had stepped into a whole other dimension, the very one the Pilot had refreshingly transcended. The second episode was fine, just another TV show, which is what made it so much worse. I stopped watching. 

The Outfit

As “The Outfit” opens, English cutter Leonard Burling (Mark Rylance) enters his Chicago bespoke suit shop in the early hours of a 1956 morning and goes to work at his table in back. His receptionist Mable (Zoey Deutch) enters and exits, but Leonard doesn’t look up. Grim mobsters in topcoats and fedoras walk past him to a lockbox in back, depositing packages, removing packages, but Leonard bats not an eye. It’s only when one of these mobsters, Richie Boyle (Dylan O’Brien), less grim than the others, perhaps because he’s the son of the boss, playfully smacks Leonard on the shoulder while cracking a joke that the English cutter has his working trance broken and looks up. Don’t presume, though, that Leonard has not been paying attention. Still waters run deep, as they say, and rarely have still waters run deeper than Mark Rylance in “The Outfit”, a knotty crime chamber piece directed by Graham Moore. Though Moore and his co-writer and Johnathon McClain can’t help but deploy one twist too many, while also negating the power of one of their niftiest twist by having set themselves a chamber piece obstacle in the first place, Rylance is so convincing throughout that he might just convince you of that surplus twist too. 

Leonard’s carefully crafted existence begins to implode when a wounded Richie is brought to the shop late one night by his colleague Francis (Johnny Flynn) after a confrontation with the rival LaFontaine crime family goes wrong. Francis forces Leonard to stow a briefcase with a FBI recording purporting to identify a rat in Boyle’s organization, the object and the question that will drive the remainder of the movie as various characters come and go, including Mable, who is dating Richie on the sly, and the biggest Boyle, Roy (Simon Russell Beale), as loyal to Leonard as he seems to be to his own flesh and blood. Who will wind up with the briefcase? Who is the rat? All this unspools over the course of a single night and entirely within Leonard’s shop, the opening sequence as he walks from front to back laying out the scene for the subsequent 106 minutes. To Moore’s credit, he evades any sense of staginess, and even eschews claustrophobia. It’s not just that he switches scenes between the shop’s front and back but that he provides a sense of breathing room all while favoring long shots that not only show the whole space but tend to include all the characters, most notably Leonard, who anchors nearly every moment he’s in even when he’s not the focal point, Rylance’s eyes always wary and thinking. After an apparent ruse to get Francis out of the shop fails, meaning Francis returns to the back room from the front, the camera simply contemplates Leonard in a medium long shot, where the actor’s countenance of readiness for what may come mesmerizes. 

There is, however, a downside to this limited locale, dampening the power of a late movie turn by Nikki Amuka-Bird as Violet LaFontaine, head of Boyle’s rival criminal outfit. She gets a monologue about herself and other immigrants, like Leonard himself, being underestimated by the mobsters on the block who would seek to impose their will. The words are moving, and so is Amuka-Bird’s delivery, though the deliberate lack of world-building leading up to it also causes the moment to suffer contextually. Without seeing the world she’s describing, save for this lone shop in which we spend all our time, it can’t help but reduce her monologue to a delivery device of theme rather than the righteous excoriation on behalf of immigrants everywhere it yearns to be. Indeed, at one point Leonard explains that cutting is a craft, not an art, and Violet’s speech comes across like a minor breakdown in craftsmanship that, in turn, causes the overall art to suffer.

It’s clear Moore wants us to feel the potent metaphor of a suit and how “The Outfit” itself is meant to go together like one Leonard’s creations. Mable’s emergent dreams of seeing the world, however, along with little details such as an uber-timely phone call and Leonard’s shears, referenced so frequently you know precisely the moment when they are about to be summoned for bloody effect, mean that dramatic elements conspicuously stick out as dramatic elements rather than elements properly dramatized. Even so, at the center of all this stands the cutter, Leonard, Rylance, who is giving an A+ plus performance that never ever tips its hand as to whether playing dumb or playing everyone for fools, the mystery that truly drives “The Outfit.” Indeed, there are moments here when like characters in the film, I was trying to size him up, to see if I could call his bluff. Finally, I had to fold. 

The Lost City

If “The Lost City” comes across as an answer to present-day Hollywood’s intellectual property obsession by instilling the spirit of older Hollywood, it also evokes how older Hollywood was, in its way, as formula driven as modern I.P. Because even if directors Aaron and Adam Nee are not making a straight remake of “Romancing the Stone”, they are nevertheless heavily cribbing from Robert Zemeckis’s 1984 adventure-comedy in fashioning an adventure-comedy where a romance novelist finds herself in a comical life and death struggle in a tropical jungle. That novelist, though, Loretta Sage (Sandra Bullock) is a little less Joan Wilder and a little more Marion Ravenwood, just as her emergent love interest is a little less Jack Colton and a little more The Man Who Knew Too Little. (The subplot of Da’Vine Joy Randolph as Loretta’s publicist playing concurrent hero evokes Matthew McConaughey’s agent in “Tropic Thunder” but doesn’t dovetail with the main plot inventively enough.) This mixture is evoked in the movie’s opening scene, where Loretta’s revisions to her latest manuscript are imagined on screen, wiping away what we see because she deems them too derivative, more a knowing concession to its own influences than a mission statement to render something brand new. Call “The Lost City” not a remake, then, but a kind of cinematic jungle juice. And yet, despite this ample concoction, The Brothers Nee (full disclosure: Adam Nee once said he wanted to give this reviewer a big kiss for a positive notice of his previous feature film) highlight the most crucial ingredient – the stars.

The kick of “Romancing the Stone” was that Joan Wilder believed in the fantasy world she had created almost too much whereas Loretta hardly believes it at all, illustrated in the movie’s opening book launch where the author is forced to share the stage with her doltish if hunky cover model, Dash McMahon née Alan Caprison (Channing Tatum). Loretta is forced into a purple sequin jumpsuit by her publicist, all the worse (better) for eventually traipsing through the jungle, but also an effectively funny counterpoint to Bullock’s burned-out countenance. And if Loretta feels her true archaeological chops are under-appreciated by the Dash-adoring masses, she finds them utilized in a less than desirable way by billionaire Abigail Fairfox (Daniel Radcliffe), who kidnaps her to a remote island where he demands she decipher a map to uncover a priceless treasure – The Crown of Fire. Given his English nationality and youth, Radcliffe is an entertaining blend of colonialist and tech billionaire air, like if John Bull had gone into a cocktail shaker and come out as Jack Dorsey, the character acting like he’s Loretta’s friend, like he’s doing her a favor, until her results don’t match his timetable and he gets ticked off, amusingly personifying an impatient corporate bigwig as your fake friend.

Rather than merely create one romantic interest for Loretta, “The Lost City“ essentially creates two, in the form of both Alan, his travel neck pillow an emblem for his persona much more than his flowing man which is revealed as fake, and Jack Trainer, an ex-Navy SEAL who Alan enlists to conduct a rescue operation of Loretta. The latter is played by Brad Pitt with a real flowing mane of hair and an air that can be debonair or dickish, depending on the light so to speak, both a foil for the hapless Alan and an ostensibly unapproachable ideal that Alan will ultimately live up to. Though the rhythmic effortlessness of the Pitt-led action sequences sing in harmony with his amusingly wry performance, The Brothers Nee are more content to let Bullock and Tatum carry their more haphazard scrambling version of adventure on their own. Not that this is a bad thing. The only movie special effect this reviewer needs is Sandra Bullock struggling to ascend a stool in high heel pumps.

True, Bullock and Tatum never smolder in the manner of Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas. Despite the latter movie being PG, the romance was more PG-13, while the former romance is more PG despite the movie being PG-13, a conundrum that might well define the two eras. But that does not mean Bullock and Tatum fail to evince their own romantic vibe. Theirs is a gradually blooming mutual attraction where Alan realizes Loretta does not necessarily need rescuing and Loretta realizes Alan is not incapable, a familiar arc invested with charming believability by the leads. Even if Bullock seems to take the subplot of her being a widow more seriously than the movie, which can sometimes threaten to flatten the proceedings rather than ground them, she succeeds at playing irritated and irritable without ever becoming irritating, a key distinction, while allowing that exasperated emotional cloud cover to innately pass. Tatum, meanwhile, might merely be repurposing the stock role of himbo with a brain but man alive does this guy have a gift for playing good-natured dufuses more attuned to their inner-worth than their outer allure. The sequence where a frightened Alan strips so Loretta can pick leeches from his body is nothing new in theory but elevated in the acting, one of those sublime movie moments where kooky and poignant merge to improbably make us believe that in seeing his what-have-you up close and personal she somehow really is seeing him for the first time. 

Kult of Kidman Kwiz

Q: What’s more thrilling?

Those eyes, those eyes that stare so deep into your soul that you, reader, suddenly feel compelled to leave your deepest, darkest secret in the comments…

…or those feathers from “The Northman” premiere, those feathers that symbolize Nicole Kidman being the first human to independently fly. (Australian authorities deny this flight took place, but I have sources on the ground that confirmed she was in Sydney airspace for roughly 30 seconds.)

A: The eyes, my God, those eyes. But it’s close.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Sorcerer (1977)

When Scanlon (Roy Scheider), an American crook on the run, wakes up in a flop house in a remote Latin American village, he climbs out from beneath the mosquito set adorning his cot and takes a walk to the filthy water basin. The look on Scheider’s face here, it resembles the one he gets while pouring the wine in “Jaws” except siphoned of any wry comicality. This expression – it’s nothing. And that’s what he is, or what he has come to be, this walk is a funeral march of the living. Not for nothing does the movie open with Nilo (Francisco Rabal) entering the residence of a nameless man in Veracruz and shooting him dead. It doesn’t matter who he is or even why he’s being killed because Death, see, comes for us all. A pat point, perhaps, at least in theory, though director William Friedkin’s unrelenting existential epic makes that observation count for more than ever. In a way, “Sorcerer’s” fatalism is remarkable given the movie’s backstory, released in the summer of 1977 and subsequently buried by “Star Wars,” the public turning from the dourness of so much 70s cinema to the popcorn tentpoles we have now. The film was so forgotten that at one point Friedkin did not even know which studio owned it, jumping through myriad hoops to reclaim the rights, allowing for a rerelease last decade clearing the way for a reappraisal, a fatalistic movie resurrected.

Based on Georges Arnaud’s 1950 French novel “The Wages of Fear,” “Sorcerer” opens with a prologue cutting between the backstories of its four main characters – Scanlon, Nilo, investment banker Victor Manzon (Bruno Cremer), and Palestinian terrorist Kassem (Amidou) – and how each one of them for his own reasons winds up hiding out off the grid in an unnamed Latin American country with nebulous hopes of escape. Friedkin infuses these introductory passages with an indelible sense of docudrama realism. The bombing carried out by Kassem is recounted in fragments sans subtitles that unnerve more than they explain while the walls of financial fraud closing in on Manzon are rendered with an excruciating sense of verisimilitude. 

Whereas Friedkin’s famed “The French Connection” was all grim forward momentum, in “Sorcerer” he lingers over the living purgatory of his crooks and killers. The despondent quartet’s skin color might differ from the locals but the plights are roughly the same, evoked in Scanlon’s obviously phony alias Juan Dominguez, which feels like both the film and the film’s universe mocking him. The town might be propped up by an American petroleum company, but none of the wealth has trickled down, posters of the nation’s dictator like taunts. When Scanlon drinks a beer at the village watering hole, a Marilyn Monroe neon Coke sign teases him in the same way it has doubtlessly teased the backwater’s residents for years, America bottling up its amber waves of luxury living and selling it as something you can never hope to buy.

The oil company can, however, buy the services of these people. When one of their wells 200 miles away catches on fire, a scheme is concocted to cap the fire by blowing up the well. That, however, means six boxes of nitroglycerin need to be hauled 200 miles through and over jungle and mountain roads to the site of the blaze, necessitating a substantial reward. Seeing the money as their ticket out, Scanlon, Nilo, Manzon, and Kassem take the job. Now we here at Cinema Romantico have discussed The Nitroglycerin Factor before, named for the 2000 mountaineering opus “The Vertical Limit,” a way to infuse your action-adventure with just that much more crucial high-stakes lunacy. But the nitroglycerin in “Sorcerer” functions as something else entirely, not so much a MacGuffin as the Sisyphian boulder reimagined as a powerful explosive.

When this nitroglycerin train is thwarted by a fallen limb, it’s as much eternity’s cruel joke as it is a convenient excuse for the bombmaking Kassem to devise a bomb and blow the tree trunk apart. That sequence, though, has nothing on the one mid-movie when the massive trucks are forced to cross a swaying wooden bridge in a blinding rainstorm. This bridge, it’s like the one in “Romancing the Stone,” the one so rickety Kathleen Turner couldn’t even cross it. As one man guides and the other drives, Friedkin implements every tool in the auteurist toolbox, the practical effects of an actual truck crossing an actual bridge, sound effects of wind and rain and grinding wheels and planks snapping mixed with the throbs of Tangerine Dream’s eerie synth score, raising the tension to almost unbearable levels, a manifestation of nothing less than a cry into the void. The immensity of the moment is juxtaposed against Manzon’s end, coming almost immediately after smiling at a memory of his wife, that flash of serenity giving way to one bump in the road blowing him to kingdom come. The abruptness is as jarring as it is revealing, underlining how “Sorcerer” conjures up that most durable of idioms: life’s a bitch and then you die.

In Memoriam: Liz Sheridan

They’re all gone now, all the actors who played the parents to “Seinfeld’s” illustrious quartet. Lawrence Tierney (Alton Benes), Sheree North (Babs Kramer), Barney Martin (Morty Seinfeld), Jerry Stiller (Frank Costanza), Estelle Harris (Estelle Costanza), and now less than two weeks after Harris died at the age of 93, Liz Sheridan (Helen Seinfeld) has died at the age of 93 too. She went peacefully in her sleep. May we all be so lucky. That Sheridan lived so long is apropos given the full life she led. She dated James Dean, for God’s sake, and wrote a book about it, lived and worked for a decade in the Caribbean, both on St. Thomas and Puerto Rico, as a nightclub singer and dancer. I always felt a little let down that “Seinfeld” failed to utilize her real-life backstory by having Helen Seinfeld run a cabaret in Phase II in The Pines of Mar Gables.

Once Sheridan returned to the States, she found consistent work on TV, guest starring in nearly every 1980s show that anyone who watched them on a Zenith Chromacolor will no doubt recall: “St. Elsewhere”; “Scarecrow and Mrs. King”; “Newhart”; “Moonlighting”; “Family Ties”; “The A-Team”; “Who’s the Boss”; “Cagney and Lacey”; “Empty Nest”; “Hill Street Blues”; “ALF.” The latter was a recurring role, foreshadowing the recurring role to come the same year “ALF” ended, in the second episode of “Seinfeld” (which was spiritually really the first, being the retooled version after the Elaine-less “The Seinfeld Chronicles” pilot in 1989). Because Jerry’s dad was portrayed by a different actor in that episode (Philip Bruns), it meant Sheridan was the only actor playing a parent to appear in all nine seasons, which proved appropriate.

Sheridan more than kept pace with the show’s sometimes screwball patter and delivered withering putdowns demonstrating that Jerry was really just a chip off the old block. But what she really did was keep it real. Frank and Estelle Costanza were often written larger than life and performed that way, while Morty Seinfeld reflected the somewhat unfortunate aesthetic arc of the show over its nine seasons, from leisurely and dyspeptic to freewheeling and cartoonish. Sheridan, though, always maintained one foot in that original world, maybe because she had been there longer than anyone. The way she admonishes Jerry for making his father too excited in Season 9 felt no different than the way she admonished Jerry for claiming a softball game was the greatest moment of his life in Season 2. There was always something familiar and lived-in about Sheridan’s work. The more absurd the social decorum of her Florida retirement community, the more genuine she rendered it. And in the big 1994 “Schindler’s List” make-out session episode, when Helen was delightfully charged with delivering Jerry’s famed greeting to his despised mailman neighbor – “Hello, Newman” – Sheridan did not simply recite it as an inside joke among the show’s fans. She infused it with an invisible backstory, like she, Helen Seinfeld, held as much long-running animosity with Newman as her son. (Seinfeld’s delivery of “Newman” was always curt but Sheridan really drew that “Newman” out, letting this steam of exasperation rise off of it.) Or perhaps that was just maternal instinct.

If Estelle had essentially given up on George, Helen only ever saw the best in Jerry, and despite occasionally critiquing his dating habits she treated him like she was dropping him off on the first day of school. When Helen discovers her son has become the sworn enemy of Joe Davola in Season 4, Sheridan does not play the moment scared or stunned but disbelieving and outraged. “You’re a wonderful, wonderful boy,” she decrees in a voice with no room for equivocation. “Everybody likes you. It’s impossible not to like you. Impossible.” In Season 6 when Jerry gets fleas and has to find another place for his parents to stay, another show might have turned this into a moment of sputtering explanation from the lead. Here, however, as Helen enters the apartment to greet her son, Sheridan has Helen stop short of even hugging her son, putting a hand to his chest, evincing a motherly sixth sense. When he tries to beg off, she is not having it, reminding him “Jerry, I’m your mother.” There has never been a truer evocation of the emotional homing beacon every mom attaches to her child at birth. 

The Ten Best Romantic Comedies from 1998-2001

If one person typically becomes Twitter’s Main Character for a day with some rash or contentious take, on Monday the entire Ringer website became the social media platform’s unfortunate protagonist when its staff ranked “the 50 best romantic comedies in movie history.” “In movie history” is the key phrase there. Indeed, movies go back to the turn of the previous century and yet this list included but one romantic comedy released before 1980 (1971’s “Harold and Maude.”) “The Philadelphia Story” and “Some Like It Hot” and “Annie Hall” and “Roman”-freaking-“Holiday?” These were nowhere to be found. Such sorts of woebegone Internet listicles are not new, of course. Just a few years ago The Athletic’s ranking of the 100 greatest sports movies contained a single movie pre-1950 – “The Pride of the Yankees.” (It was #100.) These were sportswriters, however, and I’m more forgiving of such a modern bent with sportswriters. As disappointed as I am that college football writers spend the offseason scouring recruiting rankings rather than watching Golden Age college football comedies to expand their CFB movie scope beyond “Rudy,” I know that’s not possible. But while The Ringer might bill its site as “Sports” first, “Pop Culture” comes second. Its Head of Content has a Bachelor of Arts from Ithaca, known for a strong film program. Then again, The Ringer was created by Bill Simmons, who despite his penchant for classifying things in terms of All-Time is notoriously ahistorical. 

Not one of the greatest romantic comedies “in movie history.”

In the wake of the uproar, Ringer staffer Amelia Wedemeyer tweeted that the list was only “giving the piece more eyes and more clicks and more ad dollars.” This was awe-inspiring. She seemed to confess the list was literally nothing more than content. She has since deleted the tweet, completing the circle of social media, and maybe it’s best to view these weirdly modern rankings in that most depressing of lights – content, nothing more. It’s just a list, many weighed in as so many social media Copernicuses do, why do you care and why are you giving them the engagement, etc. I care because I think it is more than content, honestly, and not just because the participating staff seemed sincere in their various assessments. No, I think The Ringer’s 50 best romantic comedies “in movie history” is an incredible snapshot of where movie culture is headed…or maybe just is right now and for the rest of eternity. 

I don’t know the average age of the participating Ringer staffers and so I don’t want to completely cast aspersions here. At one time in my life I, too, would have thought the 1980s were the height of romantic comedies. But I overcame my incuriosity and that’s what troubles me – the incuriosity of anything old. When Roger Ebert began publishing his Great Movies in the 90s, I did not recoil at the ones I was unfamiliar with; rather I became intrigued to seek them out. They were a starting point, as Ebert himself essentially noted, as opposed to an end point, and the latter is how a list like The Ringer’s 50 greatest romantic comedies “in movie history” seems to function, not as a conversation starter or even in conversation with other lists but cordoned off from them, wholly subjective and of a limited viewpoint. In a vacuum, that’s not a bad thing. I love subjective lists! The more subjective, the better. But when you deem it the 50 best romantic comedies “in movie history,” that’s a whole other thing.

Steve Van Zandt has talked about how when he was coming up, bands would copy the bands that came before them in order to gradually find their rock ‘n’ roll voice. It was a connective tissue, in other words, from past to present to future, and that lists like The Ringer’s seem to suggest that link is also being severed with movies. Their sort of movie history feels in line with Disney stuffing its Fox Movies in the vault and not letting them out, Netflix restricting its classic movie streaming options to virtually nothing, and old film prints that are literally lost forever. The future has never felt further from the past. Anyway, apropos of nothing, here’s the ten best romantic comedies from 1998 to 2001.

The Ten Best Romantic Comedies from 1998-2001

10. Blast From the Past. I remember having one of those I’m-the-Only-Person-In-the-Theater-Laughing moments when Christopher Walken says “I was just examining the rear hatchway.” 

9. Love & Basketball. Honestly can’t believe this wasn’t on The Ringer’s list. 

8. Summer Catch. Appropriately, this was released at the tail-end of the summer of 2001, the wistfulness of summer’s end and the ostensible wistfulness of “Summer Catch” itself all cosmically underlining how this, unbeknownst to anyone at the time, this was essentially the end of the Prinze Jr. rom com run at the turn of the century. 

7. Simply Irresistible. I remember nothing about this one, which feels just right, its nondescript title an unmemorable representation of all the nondescript rom com titles of era (“Head Over Heels,” “Down to You”).

6. Never Been Kissed. Did you know Drew Barrymore is hosting a talk show now? What in the world is going on? I mean, maybe she’s happy as a talk show host, and Lauren Bacall bless her if she is, but is the Hollywood think tank really so dry we can’t muster up another a rom com for Drew. When I flew home from the Roman COVID hotel, I watched “Music and Lyrics” on the plane and let me tell you, it was something close to manna. 

This is “Music and Lyrics,” which is from 2007 not 1998-2001, but which I would probably throw on my Top 50 Romantic Comedies list. Maybe I’m as basic as The Ringer.

5. Drive Me Crazy. Melissa Joan Hart’s one crack at the rom com crown before turning 25 a couple years later which I guess rendered her a spinster in Hollywood Years. She’s been wandering in the wilderness of the Lifetime Channel ever since. 

4. Happy Accidents. Like Rob in “High Fidelity” sticks “Radiation Ruling the Nation” on his otherwise conventional Top 5 Side 1 Track 1 list, this is my chest-puffing curveball. 

3. Boys and Girls. The Prinze Jr. aficionados know “Boys and Girls” is the “Tunnel of Love” to “She’s All That’s” “Born in the USA.” 

2. Get Over It. A snapshot of how seemingly every Shakespeare play was at one point translated into a romantic comedy between 1998-2001, “Get Over It” was objectively (subjectively) the best not just because it starred Kirsten Dunst but because it also starred Martin Short and, wait, why haven’t they starred in another movie together.

1. Serendipity. Duh. 

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Robe (1953)

Henry Koster’s “The Robe” (1953) was not one of the Biblical epics we watched in my Lutheran Sunday school or Confirmation classes. No, those were “King of Kings” (1961) or, of course, Cecil B. DeMille’s “The Ten Commandments” (1956). The former was unendurable in any condition, at any age, but while I was more liable to point and laugh at the latter when I was younger, probably just because everyone else was, I have come to appreciate it for its soap opera grandeur. “The Robe”, I take no pleasure in reporting, trends more toward “King of Kings.” In fact, part of me is a little surprised we didn’t watch Koster’s would-be epic in Sunday school or Confirmation class. Because even if “The Robe” was the first movie released in Cinemascope, widening the image projected on screen to almost twice the size of the traditional squared off Academy ratio, it is totally square. There is a long scene where a woman sits down with a harp and sings a song about the resurrection, like Harpo Marx with a Christian bent, and it flashed me back to my little Lutheran church, singing Beautiful Savior, dreaming of getting home and putting on Boogie Down Productions.

Based on a 1942 novel by Lloyd C. Douglas, “The Robe” is a mixture of Biblical account and myth, told from the perspective of Roman military tribune Marcellus Gallio (Richard Burton), who is just sort of wandering through a slave market as the movie opens, taking in the sights and sounds, a chance to show off that Cinemascope. And Burton’s disinterested air here, hardly tempted with so many temptations surrounding him, evince the character’s drunken, spoiled (he’s the son of a senator) air. At the same time, however, when Marcellus re-encounters his childhood sweetheart Diana (Jean Simmons), now pledged to Emperor Caligula (Jay Robinson), Burton cannot transcend that rotted air to evince anything like romance and neither can Simmons. There the widescreen images only seem to emphasize the palpable dead air between them. Hot or not, Caligula still schemes to send Marcellus away, lest he interfere with his would-be marriage, dispatching the tribune to some backwater called Jerusalem.

That is where Marcellus will oversee the crucifixion of one Jesus, never seen in full, always obscured, like by the cross he is made to drag up Calvary Hill, or out of the frame entirely, a way to underscore just how little he seems to mean to this military tribune. Indeed, as Jesus is nailed up on the cross, bleeding out, Marcellus plays a game of dice behind him, which might be how picnickers looked at the Battle of Bull Run. Marcellus wins Jesus’s robe rolling dice and after the Nazarene dies, he feels some sort of mystical pull toward the Christian faith. Such histrionics might be meant as counterpoint to the movie’s overall austere sense but are not always effective. When Marcellus’s Greek slave Demetrius (Victor Mature) encounters Judas, a strike of thunder so uber-thunderous sounds when the apostle says his name that it seems as if “The Robe” has inadvertently wandered onto a Mel Brooks set. What’s more, this wind and wrack, never mind the magical powers of Jesus’s Robe itself, seem to compel Marcellus more than any theology, inadvertently underlining Rome’s accusations that Christianity is just sorcery and unintentionally suggesting that Marcellus has merely been swept up on some kind of magic carpet ride. Come to think of it, maybe that’s why they never showed it in my Sunday school class.

“The Robe”, however, is never as entertaining as the phrase magic carpet ride makes it sound. Even when the movie drifts into Robin Hood territory, with Marcellus playing prince of thieves, so to speak, Diana as Maid Marian, and Caligula as Prince John (Robinson’s performance even suggests a more hysterical Claude Rains), it never matches the suddenly merry musical score, still just a drag. And the conclusion, in which a couple characters take up Jesus’s promise of meeting him in paradise, fails to render the immense dreamlike sensation it suggests, leaving me, I swear, to imagine a David Lynch Biblical epic instead. They couldn’t have shown that one in Sunday school either. Maybe that would be more of a Midnight Mass movie. 

It's Time to Retire The Final Countdown

Loyal frustrated followers will recall that a few years ago, after an unfortunate encounter with “You Sexy Thing” outside a Chicago dining venue, I borrowed an exercise from NPR’s All Songs Considered and decided that Hot Chocolate’s 1975 anthem should be retired. I argued it should be retired because Paul Thomas Anderson had succeeded in siphoning every ounce of sexiness from the song in “Boogie Nights” (1997). When Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s hapless Scotty J. makes his entrance to it, the song instantly became pathetic rather than provocative, meaning it could never hope to mean what it was intended to mean again. This occurred to me recently when I saw “The Lost City.”

I generally liked “The Lost City”, but we’ll get to that later on the blog, maybe next week. In remixing “Romancing the Stone”, “The Lost City” is about a romance novelist who finds adventure and romance with her doofy book cover model Alan (Channing Tatum). We know Alan is doofy from his introduction, his fake long hair waving in the fake breeze, making karate moves like Mac on “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” and, oh yes, because of his entrance music: “The Final Countdown” by Europe. 

It’s not that “The Final Countdown” is bad, per se, even if a Rolling Stone reader poll ranked it the second worst song of the 80s. Indeed, Rolling Stone itself disagreed in its original review. “The words to ‘The Final Countdown’ make almost no sense on paper,” wrote J.D. Considine, “but there’s genuine drama to the way Tempest’s keening vocals surge through the mock-orchestral morass of synths and guitars.” Allmusic’s Doug Stone agrees, deeming it “bombastically brilliant” and “glorious garbage.” “You could live without ‘The Final Countdown,’” reckons Stone, “but why?” Well Doug, I’ll tell you.

The song was both made famous for a whole new generation and ruined forever by the cult TV show of the mid-aughts “Arrested Development,” utilized as the entrance music for its vain yet insecure and utterly hapless magician – nay, illusionist – GOB (Will Arnett), as in George Oscar Bluth, son to the family’s patriarch George Sr. In this context, the triumphant synthesizer line only casts a harsh, comical light. Indeed, in writing about the song and the song as GOB’s anthem for March Shredness, a 2018 March Madness-inspired bracket of hair metal, Nick Greer wrote how in the hands of Arrested Development the song becomes “a critique of the same bluster it was meant to celebrate.”

Greer goes further than that, noting that given the lyrics of “The Final Countdown,” released as a single a couple months before Chernobyl, about blasting off from Earth and heralding “the decline of western civilization,” it’s strange the song itself hasn’t died yet. “It’s ‘The Final Countdown,’” he writes, “but it’s still being played, deeming it even more of a joke if not also a lazy but effective way to sell car insurance, but during a time when the country is being run by suits as absurd as the schlockiest corporate villains of a save-the-community-center movie, it’s hard to laugh along.”

I take his point, and I am not inclined to disagree, but I also see Tatum dancing to GOB’s song in more simple terms. Like some modern comedian kvetching that he gets “no respect,” or explaining how he employs Robitussin to cure all ailments including broken limbs, at this point when you enter a room to “The Final Countdown,” you’re just stealing Will Arnett’s bit. 

Kimi

As an agoraphobic snoop, Angela Childs (Zoë Kravitz), the heroine of Steven Soderbergh’s HBOMax affair “Kimi”, will draw comparisons to both Anna Fox (Amy Adams) of last year’s “The Woman in the Window” and, of course, the illustrious Jeff Jefferies (Jimmy Stewart) of “Rear Window.” Angela, though, both in terms of her character and  Kravitz’s accompanying performance is much less loopily fragile than Adams’s Fox while the people she spies on through her apartment window prove more like allies than Jeff’s emergent enemies. No, in “Kimi” the enemy is within – the apartment, that is – in the form of the eponymous Alexa-like virtual assistant where, in a nod to “The Conversation”, Angela discovers a disturbing recording. That recording connects to the usual corporate malfeasance and murder, of course, and though Soderbergh renders those familiar machinations with substantial verve, he even more acutely ties Angela and the ensuing murder mystery plight to our present. If paranoid thrillers of the 70s were products of their paranoid time so, too, is “Kimi.” Because even if Angela’s agoraphobia stems from past trauma, her plight proves analogous to our post-vaccination, post-Omicron COVID present, where re-entering the world can feel to a person of a certain disposition like entering the void. 

Though the first 45 minutes of “Kimi” takes place almost exclusively within Angela’s apartment, Soderbergh is less inclined to predictably induce claustrophobia than to open things up, both through the airiness of the windows, the expansiveness of the loft, and the big bank of computers that Angela deftly navigates in her job correcting errors for the Kimi corporation in their device’s algorithm. True, the character is deliberately set up as having O.C.D, in the way she makes her bed and brushes her teeth, and yes, scenes of a noisy construction crew upstairs and an off-kilter coworker (Alex Dobrenko) are clearly thriller seeds being planted by David Koepp’s script. But what Soderbergh most demonstrates throughout these fluidly rendered sequences are the control Angela has – or at least feels – over her own life. Then again, Soderbergh’s camera is not exactly yoked to Angela’s point-of-view here, freely darting around the apartment, zooming in around the desk, laying a subtle vibe of the outside world’s intrusion. And it is only when she goes to her door to go downstairs to meet her handsome neighbor (Byron Bowers) for coffee that we suddenly glean all is not well. The tone of the movie and Kravitz’s performance suddenly shift as she cannot make herself unlock the door to leave, recalibrating her control as less than.  

Eventually Angela discovers audio and video evidence of a murder buried within the logs she checks, and when her direct supervisor stresses she destroy it, she becomes determined to deliver it to Kimi headquarters instead, necessitating a terrifying excursion outside. The ensuing quest is at once urgent and urgently awkward. Soderbergh opts for canted angles, suggesting a world off balance, echoed in Kravitz’s indelible movement in these moments, rushed but rigid, head-down, seeming to walk a kind of metaphorical tightrope between all those around her. Together it brews an incredible sense of tension from nothing more than being in the world, which, given her mask and the conspicuous lack of masks on those around her, epitomizes a specific sort of present-day nightmare, a zombie apocalypse among the living. 

At Kimi headquarters, Angela meets with a corporate muckety-muck, Natalie Chowdhury, a tremendous performance by Rita Wilson who slyly deploys her usual inherent sunny disposition to devilish effect by skewering the I-Hear-You, I-See-You, We’re-All-In-This-Together of the moment corporate credos as so much horse hockey. The character even references Angela’s trauma, only magnifying it as an empty gesture - “I’m with you, ya know,” Natalie says as a way to let you know she is not with Angela at all. Rather than act as an ally, Natalie sicks a couple henchmen wolves on her underling, transforming the back half of the movie into a game of survival cat and mouse in which the crisp editing illuminates Angela’s quick-thinking.

Even with such quick thinking, however, she remains stricken by Climbing Killer Syndrome (coinage: Roger Ebert) in so far as she leads the bad guys right back to her own front door. But rather than mere dumb plotting, this proves emotionally revelatory. Because Angela thinks once she’s inside her apartment with the door locked, in her contained world, she’s safe. She isn’t, of course. And yet even as the bad guys compromise her inner sanctum, Angela finds unexpected support in the outside world. A little too neatly, perhaps, to suggest her agoraphobia has been conquered, though as a metaphor for overcoming the perpetual dread of Right Now, “Kimi” proves pretty damn potent. 

Parallel Mothers

In a Pedro Almodóvar movie, everything is in its place. The maternity ward of a hospital bearing the eponymous “Parallel Mothers” is painted green just as the mouse that will click through the results of a DNA test rests on red mousepad, the former nurturing, the latter portending how such seemingly straightforward parental roles will be scorched. The We Should All Be Feminists t-shirt, well, that speaks for itself. Even the ham resting in the background on a countertop, its leg conspicuously protruding out, no doubt represents something, maybe just an inside reference to Almodovar’s own “What Have I Done to Deserve This?” Indeed, that 1984 film was only Almodóvar’s fourth but already evocative of its exacting aesthetic, one juxtaposed against swirling melodrama and florid emotions. There are myriad narrative twists and turns in “Parallel Mothers” too, though the tone is more restrained, brought home in the performance of Penélope Cruz who gracefully renders what might seem larger-than-life as utterly true to it instead. 

Cruz is Janis Martinez, a fashion photographer shooting Arturo (Israel Elejalde), a forensic archaeologist, as the movie opens. Afterwards she expresses her desire for a mass grave where her great-grandfather and many other men were killed and unceremoniously buried during the Spanish Civil War. Arturo suggests he might be able to drum up enough national interest to excavate it. But first things first, the two have an affair, since forensic archaeologists can be sexy too, Janis gets pregnant, and before we know it, the movie has flashed ahead to Janis wandering the maternity ward alongside an expectant single teen mother, Ana (Milena Smit). At first this might seem like a mere evocation of how time gets away from us, one big idea giving way to an unexpected detour. But mass grave excavation is a seed that Almodóvar plants, rumbling beneath the movie’s two-hour garden, waiting to sprout, and then gradually dovetailing with Janis’s own unlikely journey of motherhood.

If the two new mothers initially drift apart after the births of their children, they reunite by chance. Ana has lost her daughter to a freak crib death and moved out of her mother’s home, underlined in her blond pixie cut, which at once makes her seem so young and so intent on not being young at all, dueling sensations that Smit plays straight to, brimming with confidence in one moment and insecurity the next. At Janis’s invitation, Ana becomes a live-in nanny to her daughter Cecilia. If there is baked-in privilege here, there is also the arduousness of single mothering, working a job all day, tending to your baby at night, the mental and physical toll of trying to do both, the brunt of which Cruz wears in her performance even as the love of her child shines through. The difficulty of that love becomes reflected in a different parallel mother, the estranged one of Ana, Teresa (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón), who neglected her daughter in pursing dreams of becoming an actress. Another movie might have rendered her a cartoon villain, but Almodóvar demonstrates empathy in a mid-movie monologue where Teresa weighs the professional costsacrifices of single mothering, professional cost. Cruz has Janis receive this with small, pained, knowing nods, like she can see just how easily this might have been her, summarizing the empathy that Almodóvar deliberately writes into the scene.

I should confess, the movie has a twist lingering in the air. But crucially, it is not one Almodóvar waits until the conclusion to spring, reshaping everything we have just seen. No, he places the revelation early, shaping so much of what is to be seen. It is a twist that calls into question Janis’s true motherly motivations, painting her as selfish as she is selfless in other moments, and in a sense putting her on equal footing with those who would bury Spanish’s fascist past, a key delineation as that subplot eventually loops back around and intertwines with Janis’s emotional crisis. Those bodies waiting to be exhumed are ghosts of Franco’s White Terror, but Janis becomes haunted by nothing less than a kind of ghost of herself, visually manifested in a shot post-revelation when we see Janis’s shadow on the wall as she approaches her daughter’s room. As for why she does what she does, “Parallel Mothers” suggests but never says, and neither does Cruz, where simply in the way she watches her child cradled by Ana across the table seems to imply happiness, sadness, and even a sense that she, herself, can’t quite be certain why she’s doing what she’s doing. Maybe it’s all of those. Maybe that’s life.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Sahara (1943)

In Stefan Kanfer’s book “Tough Without a Gun: The Life and Extraordinary Afterlife of Humphrey Bogart,” he notes the actor dismissing his 1943 “Sahara” as one nobody remembered. Bogart’s theory of this run-of-the-mill product seemed to stem from his playing a hero rather than a heavy. But the movie’s transience comes across more indebted to the fact that Bogart does not have much of anything to play to, and that he does not have anything to play to because the movie was specifically designed to exist only unto its exact moment in time, an effort to drum up support for WWII, its purpose expiring roughly on about V-J Day. True, the movie only has one real flag-waver of a speech, unfurled near the end, but it evangelizes plenty for the armed forces nonetheless. When Sgt. Joe Gunn (Humphrey Bogart) is asked where he’s from, he replies, “No place, just the army,” just as he continually refers to the M3 Lee tank he commands as “Lulabelle,” frequently describing her – I mean, it – in terms of a “dame.” Regardless of WWII’s necessity, regardless of any war’s necessity, you have to admire the jingoistic fluid drip hooked up by director Zoltan Korda, the way he renders the army as the only family a man needs and the tank he fights in as the only companion. In this light, it even sorta makes sense that the too-old Bogey would, in fact, not be too old for the army at all; spiritually, he’s a lifer. His name is Joe Gunn, but he’s really Uncle Sam in Joe Gunn’s clothing.

Taking place exclusively in the African desert after the fall of Tobruk, Gunn and his tank crew become separated from the rest of their unit and steer south across the Libyan desert in the hopes of reuniting. Along the way, several other characters enter the fold, like a Sudanese General and his Italian prisoner, a British Army medical officer and a French corporal. After shooting down a German plane, they wind up with a Luftwaffe pilot prisoner too. It’s nothing less than an African Theatre tableau, allowing for these unlikely allies and enemies to mix and match, to quarrel and come together. Not that we don’t know for one moment who’s in charge. When Captain Halliday (Richard Aherne), the British officer, and Gunn have a disagreement, Halliday resists the urging of his fellow English soldiers along for the voyage across the sand to keep at it and backs off, citing confidence in Gunn’s commanding ability. If it strangely fails to maximize potential drama, it is also a moment you can imagine American audiences of the time cheering along to. It’s important to work together, yes, but only so long as everyone is united in taking orders from us. (On the other hand, maybe it was just because Bogart’s name came first on the poster.)

Gunn is, however, convinced to have a change of heart after he cuts the Italian POW, Giuseppe (J. Carrol Naish), lose to conserve water, condemning his foes to death in the desert. As the tanks roll away, though, Bogart gets that damn it all to hell grimace as Gunn orders the tank back. And that Giuseppe turns out to be sympathetic, in a moving mid-movie monologue decrying Mussolini and what he and his fellow Italians were to made to fight for, Gunn’s humanity is rewarded. Even the Germans, the vile Germans, are afforded a measure of dignity in so much as Captain Halliday observes they have not been afforded the dignity of freedom in the first place, a reminder that freedom is what’s at stake overall. In moments such as these, the music swells and your heart rises, or it’s meant to anyway, to leave the theater and go put some money into war bonds. There is another moment though when the makeshift crew, deep in the desert and thirsty, is forced to ration water in a canteen to three sips each. Gunn watches each man closely, making sure he sticks to his mandated amount. Throughout this sequence no music swells. It is just the quiet of the desert and the hollow rattle of the canteen. It’s the one moment that imparts that other important lesson about war: it’s hell.

In Memoriam: Paul Herman

2 That Guys & Jacki Weaver

At several points in David O. Russell’s “Silver Linings Playbook,”  Shea Whigham and Paul Herman share the screen together. Whigham, of course, is one of our most distinguished That Guys - as in, you see him pop up in a small role in some movie, like as Captain Ted in “The Wolf of Wall Street,” and say aloud to yourself “Hey! That guy!” More than merely illustrating his onscreen prevalence, however, this is suggestive of how Whigham always leaves a mark, prompting you to remember him the next time, no matter how small the part. That is the That Guy quality. 

Herman is one of Whigham’s That Guy forefathers. (In a way, his name, appropriately, is as close as we will get to a Bizarro Paul Newman.) He’s That Guy in seminal films and in films by seminal filmmakers and in seminal films by seminal filmmakers, often with exquisitely appropriate That Guy monikers. He is Maitre d’ in “Bullets Over Broadway”; he is Dealer in “Goodfellas”; he is Gambler in Phone Booth in “Casino”; he is Schizo in “Big”; he is E-Z Rent-A-Car Clerk in “In the Soup.” True, he was Phillip the Apostle in “The Last Temptation of Christ,” but even then he was very much playing second fiddle to, like, you know, Jesus f***ing Christ. His preeminent That Guy role, however, is undoubtedly “Goodfellas.” (We should note Paul Herman perhaps transcended his cinematic That Guy status through a role on “The Sopranos.” But having never watched it, I cannot comment.)

You will remember that in “Goodfellas”, as Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) becomes more addled by drugs and more paranoid and less reliable, he begins dealing on a regular basis with what he frequently deems his Pittsburgh Connection. Remember during the Busy Day denouement when Henry tries selling Jimmy (Robert DeNiro) the paper bag of shoddy guns? “What fucking good are these things?” Jimmy demands like Henry is some hapless door-to-door salesman. “I’m not paying for this shit.” Ah, but do you know who will pay for this shit? The Pittsburgh Connection, that’s who, which tells you all you need to know about how the Pittsburgh Connection rolls. And when Grandmaster Marty needed to cast someone to embody this Pittsburgh Connection, who was he gonna call? That guy. Because Paul Herman capture such Steel City sleaze in just a breath. 

Even so, when I read that Paul Herman died on Tuesday March 29th at the age of 76, I thought of “Silver Linings Playbook.” His character there is friend to Pat Sr. (Robert DeNiro), rabid Philadelphia Eagles fan. Randy, on the other hand, is a Dallas Cowboys fan, America’s Team, no doubt a deliberate choice, sort of the Yankees of NFL fandom, personifying king of the hill American sports fan arrogance. They are friends, but adversaries in a way too, as sports fans tend to be, and the movie’s climax turns on a complicated parlay bet between the two men involving, first, a Christmas Eve football game in which Randy’s Cowboys are heavily favored over Pat Sr.’s Eagles and, second, a dance contest featuring Pat Sr.’s son (Bradley Cooper) and his lady friend Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence).

The two events essentially happening at once, the football game concluding right as the dance begins, with Pat Sr. and his other son Jake (Whigham) and Randy and Pat Jr.’s pal Danny (Chris Tucker) all gathered together just outside the dance hall to watch, the dueling reactions of DeNiro and Herman becoming a kind of cinematic diptych.

The Eagles’ unexpected victory is conveyed in this image, one evoking sports fandom as religion, your team’s triumph as a benediction. 

And that image gives way to its disbelieving inverse, comically edifying in the “Oh my God, what have I done” nature of Herman’s agape mouth. That guy, that guy right up there, that is what happens when sports betting breaks your brain.

In Memoriam: Estelle Harris

After giving up acting until her kids were grown, Estelle Harris did not earn her first proper Film/TV credit until she was nearly 50 years old, evoking Robert Duvall’s “Crazy Heart” observation that it’s “never too late.” In explaining her gradual ascent to the Los Angeles Times in 1995, Harris noted that one year she did 27 national commercials. And that makes sense, given the need for a distinct voice in ad land and given the unique nature of her voice, a New York accent that even when deployed at a low volume still sounded like a powerful shriek on charge, biding its time, a voice she would deploy to great effect in the role that made her a pop culture icon: Estelle Costanza, mother to George (Jason Alexander), on “Seinfeld.”

When you think of the famed “Serenity Now,” you think of how Frank Costanza, as played by Jerry Stiller, minimized the mantra’s ostensible tranquility by bellowing it. Truth is, the fiercest line reading in that episode might well be Harris’s, when Estelle discovers her husband plans to give away their Waterpik as a prize in his cockamamie scheme to sell computers out of their garage. “You’re not giving away our Waterpik!” she screams. And she’s not even on screen when she screams it! This not only suggests how Estelle always had one ear out for Frank’s idiocy, but how Harris could leave an imprint on a scene she was not even technically in.

Her first appearance on the show was in perhaps the series’ most celebrated episode, “The Contest,” in which our fearful foursome sees who can go the longest as master of their, ahem, domain. This contest is born of Estelle falling and hurting her back when she returns home, suddenly confronted with her son’s mastery of his domain being nullified by an issue of Glamour. Thankfully we do not see this scene, we only hear about it, Harris tasked with describing it from a hospital bed. “I find my son,” she recounts, “treating his body like it was an amusement park.” This is proof that with Harris it was not just the amplitude of her voice but the elocution, the way she drew out the second syllable in amusement, like the whole terrible episode was this nightmare she could not rid herself of projected before her. You heard that elocution in other places too, like when she declared her son a bum, emphasizing the b so much it burst. 

In other scenes, Harris didn’t need to speak at all. When George is forced to move home at the beginning of Season 5, you needed one quick moment, one quick shot, to clarify in considerable comic detail just what depths George had sunk to. And that moment was Estelle munching on a bologna sandwich, which Harris plays by mindlessly looking up, an expression devoid of all thought, a manifestation of someone being one (bologna) sandwich short of a picnic. When George turns away in horror, you feel his pain because Harris has made you feel it. 

Still, the yelling. It was never on better display than the episode in which Frank and Estelle announce their intention to get divorced, than renege after some advice from fabled Donna Chang (Angela Dohrmann), then renege on the renege when they discover Donna Chang is merely from Long Island (it’s complicated). In the brief moment of reprieve, when George asks about a mysterious figure in a cape who turns out to be his dad’s lawyer, husband and wife duel over who does and does not have an eye for fashion.

Listen to her; look at her! She truly becomes unhinged. And yet what makes this scene just as funny, is the way how Harris keeps her eyes glued to the TV throughout most of it. Here she is, amid so much marital strife, on the verge of separation, and it hardly seems to register, evoking George’s line in a different episode about the need for television in their relationship. Harris made choices.

She made another choice in the unforgettable episode when Frank and Estelle are made to meet their future in-laws, Mr. and Mrs. Ross (Warren Frost and Grace Zabriskie). The Rosses serve Cornish game hen, causing Frank to expound on the nature of, uh, poultry copulation. The Rosses are disgusted, of course, as are George and his fiancée Susan (Heidi Swedberg), but Harris has Estelle just keep cutting into her hen and nodding along, like she, and she alone, gets what Frank is driving that.

Later, after they are driving home, Estelle expounds herself on the Rosses’ failure to put out cake after dinner. I love this moment. It always reminded me of my grandmother on my mom’s side, who had very specific rules about how mealtimes should proceed. “We’re sitting there,” Estelle declares, “like idiots,” and Harris absolutely rocket launches “idiots” into the air, “drinking coffee,” and then she pauses, like she can’t imagine a worse sin, “without a piece of cake!” And then she turns away, not so much literally from Frank as figuratively from the whole concept of ignoramuses who would shun serving cake with coffee. 

In that moment, that split-second as George discovers the infamous marble rye has been taken back, the way Frank and Estelle sit there, not looking at one another but wholly content in their shared aggravation, you can see how they really were meant for one another.

Estelle Harris died on Saturday April 2, 2022. She was 93.

The Novice

After the latest Olympic cheating scandal, in which it sure looks like a bunch of adults made a 15-year-old Russian girl dope, Patrick Hruby noted on Twitter how this was a reminder that “Whiplash” remains the best sports movie. “Whiplash”, of course, was not a sports movie, not really, about a brutish drum teacher (J.K. Simmons) who psychologically abuses his protégé (Miles Teller) to the top. But the bones of that relationship very much mirrored so many of those between coach and athlete. Take “Miracle”, twist it just a couple degrees and that becomes the Nightmare on Ice. So, perhaps it’s no surprise that “Whiplash’s” sound editor Lauren Hadaway makes her directorial debut with “The Novice” about freshman Alex Dall (Isabelle Fuhrman) at a prestigious east coast university who joins the rowing team. It’s an inspirational sports drama turned inside-out, essentially taking the blink-and-you-miss-it moment in “The Social Network” when one of the Winklevoss Twins describes his day as three hours of rowing, a full academic course load, and another three hours of rowing and renders not as a droll observation but a full-fledged hell. But rather than a coach extracting greatness from an athlete by any means necessary, “The Novice” is about an athlete cultivating the obsession herself. 

As “The Novice” opens, Alex shows up at her first rowing course out of breath and stressed. That’s because she’s just sprinted across campus from her physics class, staying late to take a test twice to ensure the best possible grade, though Fuhrman plays the part at this maximally stressed level all the time anyway, stabbing vegetables in the cafeteria with a fork in the same exacting manner she fills in a blank on a test or pulls her oars on the water, all augmented in the movie’s piercing sound design, augmenting the sense of someone who can’t do anything halfway. It’s Fuhrman and Hadaway rewriting that old maxim 110% as way too much, a muddy line between inner drive and compulsion. For the most part “The Novice” is content to eschew traditional motivation for Alex’s weird rowing desire or compulsions in general, as if she is just carried along by some breakneck force she can’t quite understand. The closest it comes is a mid-movie monologue to the teaching assistant Dani (Dilone) with whom she develops a romantic relationship, explaining how in high school she tried and tried to academically usurp the aspirant valedictorian. “And then you beat him,” the TA keeps declaring as if sensing the story is about to end, because that’s how these stories always end, with victory, though not here, no, because there’s always one more part to Alex’s story, a pretty funny skewering of the motivational speech drifting into the range of obsession.

It is not just sound design at which “The Novice” excels; its soundtrack is excellent too. Hadaway likes vintage doo wop and pop, like Brenda Lee’s “I’m Sorry”, which is layered over various training montages of enormous physical exertion and gruesome bodily harm, evoking the sense of Alex’s rowing crow as a kind of love affair gone wrong. For the first rowing competition sequence, Hadaway cues up Andrea Litkei and Ervin Litkei’s “Too Late For Tears”, cutting between shots of Alex beaming at the idyllic scene, autumn leaves and sunshine reflecting off the water through which the oars slice, nothing less than a mockery of the setting’s ostensible romance.

There are some devices on which Hadaway becomes too dependent, like the overcooked metaphor of a crab in boiling water, and more than a few cases of on the nose dialogue, like Alex’s foremost crewmate excoriating her lack of teamwork. Such sentiment is better construed visually, as in how Hadaway mostly forgoes wide shots of beatific rivers with racing boats for jittery close-ups that make it seem as if Alex is alone in the boat, rowing for no one but herself. Her single-minded obsession, of course, brings her to the brink, a predictable ending in theory that “The Novice” elevates by having her row through a thunderstorm. Her teammates express the madness of such an endeavor and whether it’s realistic or not, it puts into focus the tempest of her mind, fully brought to bear in a conclusion that on the surface evinces release….but emblematically evokes nothing less than The End.