Concessionist: a Personal History

When asked to describe what inspired her Pulitzer Prize winning play “The Flick,” Annie Baker cited the “cleaning dance” of theater employees during the closing credits, riffing as they swept up spilled popcorn. “(I)t felt like a little piece of live theater after (the movie) ended,” Baker explained. I wish anything so dreamy had inspired my going to work at the Cobblestone 9 Cinemas in Urbandale, Iowa in the fall of 1996. Yes, I loved movies and knew that such a job would give me free access to new releases all over town, but really, as a recent high school graduate taking a year off for no other reason than I didn’t want to be at school for a while after 12 years in a row of going, I just needed a job and landing one at the biggest, busiest multiplex in central Iowa was a cinch. I was issued a maroon vest and black pre-tied bowtie with nary an interview question other than “when can you start?” My first shift coincided with a sneak preview of “The First Wives Club,” a nominally casual weekday evening giving way to concession stand chaos. I seem to remember nacho cheese splattered everywhere. The girl who trained me lamented that had this been her first night, she would have quit. As it happened, in a couple years I would see Tori Amos with that same girl. That’s not to say we dated (her boyfriend went with us to the show) but to illustrate how I not only didn’t quit but unwittingly found a community, forging friendships that have stood the test of time, the only job, at least for a while there, I can honestly say I loved without reservations.

The Cobblestone 9 opened on December 15, 1994 into a strange interregnum. Though it was a few years after the single screen Capri had closed elsewhere in the Des Moines area, underlining the industry’s ongoing transition to cineplex sprawl, the Cobblestone was also constructed with flat floor seating about five minutes before the business begin transitioning to stadium seats, meaning it was destined to become a white elephant when the curiously named Wynnsong 16 opened just down the road but four years later. Still, for that small window in the mid-90s, the Cobblestone was the biggest game in town, as likely to be showing the newest blockbuster as wedging the latest David Lynch or Neil Jordan joint into one of the smaller theaters that were more like “rooms,” to quote Elaine Benes bemoaning the Paradise Twin, “where they bring in POWs to show them propaganda films.” The theater itself was designed in familiar economical hotel atrium would-be chic with light burgundy carpet that already seemed to be fading when it was installed, faux plush couches alongside cardboard standees and poster cases of coming attractions that hearkened the changing movie seasons while also dividing the two concession stands on either side of the foyer that led to a five-step staircase beckoning customers toward the rudimentary maze of theaters in back. A cheesy neon sign that simply said The Movies affixed above this ascending passageway rendered moviegoing goofily glorious long before Nicole Kidman’s AMC ad became a meme.

Me, at a movie at the Cobblestone 9 circa 1997.

Because I was on a gap year, I frequently worked weekday afternoon shifts, when the theater was minimally staffed. The ornery retiree cum usher referred to the rope stanchions he put up once all the shows commenced as his “fences,” meant to enclose any rowdy kids. The box office cashier liked Black Flag and after a few months gave me the skinny on how to skim a few bucks here and there by reusing torn tickets. Annie Baker called this scheme “dinner money” in “The Flick” and after we saw it, My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife wondered if the Cobblestone had dinner money too. I confirmed we did but that my rule-abiding Midwestern nature (and this is true, even with the statute of limitations since passed) refused to let me partake. Like dinner money comes back to bite the characters in “The Flick,” I’m pretty sure I remember dinner money getting that guy too. Is that considered punk?

If weekday Cobblestone’s air was akin to a drowsy townie bar then evening and weekend Cobblestone came alive, especially in the summer when so many of the college kids who worked there the year before returned and a whole new class of workers signed up. Each night was a virtual carnival of antics and inside jokes, none of which subsided when the lines stretched out the door but gave us strength to work even faster. I tend to romanticize things, yes, and it’s illogical to suggest such a low wage job is in and of itself fun, true, but that summer, the summer of 1997, we made it fun, dancing to Will Smith’s “Men in Black” as we cleaned the theater after each one of its seemingly endless shows, making Baker’s “cleaning dance,” I realize all these years later, come literally true. Some evening I wandered out of the backroom of the concession stand with the just-cleaned buttery bowl on my head at the precise moment the head manager was seeking me out. He cleared his throat, though that was a recurring tic more than non-verbal admonishment, and smiled a knowing smile, no doubt noticing that I blushed while immediately removing my improvised helmet. He then just told me what he was going to tell me, admirably willing to let me and everyone else have a good time so long as the job got done. 

In essence my job entailed violating the Lloyd Dobler rule of employment; I was selling something for (an approximation of) a living. It wasn’t that I believed in these products, the popcorn and soda and candy, but that these products went hand in hand with that product – the movies – and those I believed in. Not the movies themselves, per se, though a lot of them I did, but the physical act of going to them. Maybe you were seeing “Michael” starring John Travolta, but patron, when I said, “Enjoy your show,” I swear on Lauren Bacall’s beret in “The Big Sleep,” I meant it every time.

Best of all were employee-only sneaks when a gaggle of us would stay after our shift and watch a late-night screening of some new release not yet available to the public. These screenings, they were not for the faint of the heart. If normal society dictates silence during a movie, employee sneak society dictates group chatter, mob rule running commentaries, get used to it or get out. At the “Event Horizon” sneak, after the horrifying reveal, when Laurence Fishburne deadpans “We’re leaving,” the roar that went up was like a college football game, and even now, in the distant twilight of 2022, I can see the girl every idiot male had a crush on flashing the devil’s horns down front. I’m pretty sure that was the last sneak I saw that summer. It was mid-August and my date with destiny at the University of Iowa was looming. Somewhere in that last week or two, a bunch of us with the night off took part in some hastily imagined scavenger hunt across Des Moines. I remember nothing about it. What I remember was sitting outside the Cobblestone later, along the slight embankment that in true West Des Moines fashion led from one shopping center to another, everybody talking, gazing into the concrete parking lot as if it were a lake. That’s when it hit me; I’d never gone to camp, but Cobblestone 9 in the summer of 1997 had become mine, my Eagle River.

For a lot of people, that summer was their last at Cobblestone. At some point, I bumped into one of my fellow concessionists in my U of I dormitory. We exchanged information but never hung out. I don’t think he was avoiding me, but I also don’t think he was going out of his way to find me. I remember being terribly sad about it, though I also think he was away at college and remaking his life, and sometimes that means leaving any remnants of your vest and bowtie behind. I never saw him again. When I eventually dropped out of school, I went back to work at the theater and advanced from concessionist to usher to cashier to projectionist to manager, going from the Cobblestone to the Wynnsong along the way. My original joyful spirit eroded a little more with each promotion, the completely contradictory but totally natural false progression of gainful employment. I’ve always tended to maintain occupations a little too long, whether from fear of the rigmarole in finding another one or my innate Gen X attitude that all jobs quite frankly suck so what does it really matter. 

My last summer, the summer of 1999, on at last three occasions a reporter from the local NBC affiliate showed up in the wake of a sneak preview for some to-be-released big tentpole, called, he had said, by angry customers claiming we weren’t honoring tickets. Each time I explained tickets to sneak previews did not get guarantee admission – it said so, right there on the ticket. Each time that reporter looked at me almost apologetically, clearly knowing as well as I did he was being assigned to a wild goose chase. The last time we both just kind of stood there for a moment, silently commiserating over the ridiculousness of our respective occupations. A few weeks later I gave notice, not the traditional two weeks but a whole four, as if even then I was straining not to go, or maybe just giving myself enough time to finally say goodbye. 

One night not long after I went down to check out the concession stand and found an employee wearing the buttery bowl on his head, the circle of life. I didn’t reprimand him. How could I? I knew that expression on his face. He looked like he was having the greatest summer of his life.

The $290 Million Question

Over the weekend the trailer for the loquaciously titled “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One”, the 2023 sequel to the twin peaks of twenty-tens pop moviemaking (“Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation” and “Mission: Impossible – Fallout”), was leaked to Twitter, resulting in nothing less than social media rapture. Depending on the source, this trailer would make you believe in God, was better than sex, or deserved the Palme d’Or. I missed the leak, alas, but saw the preview on Monday after its official release and yeah, it’s good. I recommend having smelling salts on hand for the Christopher McQuarrie M:I devotee in your life. The trailer, it’s gut-busting globe-trotting rapid-fire spectacle where Rebecca Ferguson wears an eyepatch and wields a freaking sword, McQuarrie appears to dial up a variation of Buster Keaton’s biggest trick play, Shea Whigham (!) shows up for half a second, and Tom Cruise runs, cocks his head like he’s getting off the ring stool before the 7th round when he has decided it’s time to finally just go ahead and knock the other guy out, and hurtles off the edge of the earth into the abyss aboard a motorcycle as if it’s the end of “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.” [Sucks down a whole bottle of water.] 

However. The question before us today is not whether the “Dead Reckoning” trailer has opened your eyes to God, is better than sex, or worthy of a Palme d’Or. No, the question, as it is with any superb trailer, is this: is it better than “The Bling Ring” teaser? You know, the one in which Sofia, her majesty, virtually invented TikTok by remixing her own movie into a minute-long series of impeccable memes that concluded with its own version of a motorcycle descending into the mist with a convertible burning rubber into the heart of Californication.

Answer: No. No, it is not better than “The Bling Ring” teaser. Next.

What You Need to Know Before Seeing Top Gun: Maverick

In the run-up to “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness,” there were not only myriad articles explaining the litany of references and easter eggs In “Doctor Strange 2” like the one proffered by The AV Club’s husk, but plenty of primers for what a viewer, perhaps a viewer who has not yet screened all 222 movies of the Marvel Multiverse, needed to know before seeing “Doctor Strange 2” lest having failed to see all previous 222 movies of the Marvel Multiverse left them in the dark about certain characters and plot points, as if movies are now just history tests rather than a set of moving images. But I’m not here to whine (again) about Marvel. No, all these pieces got me to thinking about the forthcoming “Top Gun: Maverick” and how so many youths all set to see it (or testily see it against their will, noisily condemning its Reagan-era politics which they, of course, are the first ones to have ever noticed), might need a preparatory post on specific characters and terms from the original “Top Gun” lest they be left their scratching their heads. Fear not, the blog’s got your back. Here’s a handy pre-viewing reference guide. 

What You Need to Know Before Seeing Top Gun: Maverick

Call Sign: a unique military identifier.

Maverick: call sign of our main character to symbolically denote his Naval nonconformity. 

Mailman: father of Maverick, tragically killed in a case of hunting mistaken identity.

Slider: a very small hamburger. 

Goose: Maverick’s best friend who exists to tragically die to help Maverick summit the emotional mountain. 

Carol Bradshaw: Goose’s wife, played by Meg Ryan in the original, who will not be in “Top Gun: Maverick” because she’s 60 years old and as such past the Hollywood Blockbuster Age Cutoff Line.

Penny Benjamin: the woman in the white dress with the white parasol of the original who now needs to exist as an actual character on the screen because present-day society is firmly incapable of letting the mystery be. 

Flying a Cargo Plane Full of Rubber Dog Shit Outta Hong Kong: a synonym for Worst.

I’m Not Leaving My Wingman: John 3:16 of the BroBible. 

Ray-Bans®: that shining city on a hill was so bright you had to wear shades. 

Budweiser: King of Beers.

The Edge: where you need to be. 

Danger Zone: where Kenny Loggins lives.

Kenny Loggins: a “harmless case study in contemporary pop” to quote the Dean of Rock Critics Robert Christgau.

Jukebox: a coin-operated automated-music playing device.

Buzz the Tower: Ickey Shuffle of Naval Fighter Weapons School.

The Bird: international greeting custom. 

Target Rich Environment: social safety net. 

Music Video: videotaped performance of a song, a staple of 80s MTV, and principal aesthetic of Top Gun. 

Beach Volleyball: now an Olympic sport, then a form of male ritual bonding.

Quentin Tarantino’s Top Gun Theory: early example of the Klosterman-ization of pop culture.

Hard Deck: a metaphysical plane suggesting none of us are really grounded to anything at all. 

Deep Water

Having its theatrical release delayed from 2020 to 2021 to early 2022 means that “Deep Water,” billed as an erotic thriller, conveniently opened into a world suddenly lamenting the lack of sex in modern movies. The current season of Karina Longworth’s beloved You Must Remember This podcast goes long on that topic with “Erotic 80s” and the pop culture website Vulture spent an entire week demanding to Make Hollywood Horny Again. And that Disney, which came into possession of “Deep Water” after its merger with Fox, seemed almost embarrassed by it, scratching it from the theater and digitally releasing it on Hulu instead, gives the movie an unexpected veneer of, like, a magazine in a paper bag at the convenience store. And though it’s based on a Patricia Highsmith novel set in 1954, there’s something shrewd in director Adrian Lyne setting it now rather than then so than then, allowing the estranged, sexless marriage of the main characters to reflect this modern world. How “Deep Water” holds up beyond the moment, I don’t know, though the psychological weirdness and richness it teases in the beginning might have helped more than the conclusion going off the deep end. Still, a movie called “Deep Water” going off the deep end feels right too, and even the parts it gets wrong kind of wind up cosmically right.

Ben Affleck plays Vic Van Allen, even though he looks nothing like a Vic Van Allen, maybe more like a John Ashforth, but that’s not the point, a wealthy but young retiree married to Melinda (Ana de Armas) with whom he has an adolescent daughter Trixie (Grace Jenkins). Vic is taking a long bike ride as the movie opens and when he returns home, he and Melinda look at each other, distantly, like they’re both wanting something they know the other is not willing or able to give. If it’s sort of an inadvertent joke that exercise is no substitute for sex, it also establishes the dynamic of their relationship, further illustrated in a later scene at a party at a friend’s house where Melinda immediately ditches her spouse on arrival to cavort with some young himbo while Vic watches through an upstairs window looking...well, what? 

Affleck utilizes his mid-career (current career) penchant for gloomily downplaying to full poker face effect, ensuring you’re not quite sure if he’s happy, sad, indifferent to, or even turned on by this peculiar marital situation. You might think he’s just dim if not for his collecting and sniffing snails, less a plot point than an emblematic window into his unlikely weirdness, and makes you wonder if he’s capable of murder when his wife’s boy turns up dead. Vic jokes, in fact, that he killed him, which in Affleck’s tone of voice really does sound like it could be mere morbid humor, or something else, an open-ended question from which “Deep Water” derives much of its slow-burning suspense.

The early scenes in which Lyne frames Vic and Melinda beneath archways of separate bedrooms initially suggests a movie of dual perspectives. Yet, when we see Vic looking down at his wife from above at the ensuing cocktail party, Lyne never reverses the shot, underlining how the point-of-view remains yoked to Vic. That doesn’t give de Armas much to play to and rather than meeting Affleck on his level, she ricochets right off, turning her performance up to 11 by reducing her character to primal urges. Then again, in essentially walling Melinda off from us, Lyne is also underscoring how Melinda is walled off not just from her husband but her daughter too. Indeed, the most fascinating relationship in “Deep Water” unexpectedly proves to be dad and daughter, as Trixie both openly taunts her mother and is consciously portrayed as being quietly cognizant of her father’s murderous transgressions. It’s a virtual sort of “We Need to Talk About Kevin” origin story just hanging out on the periphery.   

Vic is such an obvious suspect in these deaths that you might wonder how his friends seem oblivious to it. That he is drawn as a robotics engineer, however, who made his fortune installing the chip that made drones more effective does not come across like mere topicality but an evocation of such shrugging indifference. The only person who comments on his profession and on his possible role in the disappearance is a family friend(ish) mystery writer, Lionel (Tracy Letts). This subplot feels trucked in from a different movie entirely, and that’s how Letts plays it, not folded into the rest of “Deep Water” but standing outside it, like he can’t believe he’s part of this world in the first place. And that’s why even though the overcooked nature of the conclusion doesn’t seem to work on the surface, I also felt like it did, utter madness to an outside observer that merely proves part and parcel to this swanky life of endless parties hosted by an assembly line of beautiful, rich people.

Friday's Old Fashioned: No Way Out (1987)

There is an incredible moment near the end of Roger Donaldson’s very 80s (those totally tubular opening titles) 1987 thriller “No Way Out” when Naval Lt. Cdr. Tom Farrell (Kevin Costner) is being pursued for various thriller reasons through the halls of the Pentagon by a pair of villainous CIA agents. To buy time, Tom grabs a CID officer and orders him to arrest him the pursuant agent. “Arrest him!” Tom shouts. “Do it!” It’s not so much what he says as the way Costner says it, his voice noticeably cracking on “Do it!”, a shout becoming a shriek. There must have been more takes of this scene on the cutting room and those takes must have been more flattering. Yet this is the one that remained in the final cut, evoking the looseness of Costner’s performance. If over the years his acting has grown more reserved, and not in a bad way, conveying so much with minimal effort, rewatching his turn as Mike Farrell put into perspective how just a couple years later he would have made “Bull Durham”, cultivating a star power that was rendered by his own brand of easy charisma. 

Mike winds up in a relationship with Washington socialite Susan Atwell (Sean Young) who is also the mistress of Secretary of Defense David Brice (Gene Hackman). Tom does not know this, but knows she is someone’s mistress, and Brice doesn’t know she is seeing Mike, though he knows she is seeing someone which is why, in a jealous rage, he inadvertently kills her. Mike is then brought in by the Secretary of Defense’s right-hand man Scott Pritchard (Will Patton) to unwittingly engage in a cover-up, investigating the murder of Susan that is ostensibly being pinned on a Russian mole that gradually leads straight back to him. This also means the Susan is not so much a character as a pawn of the plot, brought in solely to get killed off. Even so, Young makes a mark, especially in her scenes with Costner. It has become commonplace among some cinephiles to deplore the lack of sex in modern movies but here, despite the secretive nature of their relationship, sex is out in the open, evoked in the famous scene in the back of the limousine. In each other’s company Costner and Young come across at ease and not just in love but in lust. It backs up the big twist at movie’s end.

Working with screenwriter Robert Garland, who is working from the screenplay for the 1946 film “The Big Clock”, Donaldson drums up suspense in all sorts of nifty ways. Pritchard’s early confession that he believes in Brice so much he would anything to help him undergirds every cockamamie move he makes while a blurry photo of Mike that shows up at Susan’s house, enhanced bit by bit by expert Pentagon programmer Sam Hesselman (George Dzundza), is a gratifying narrative bomb waiting to go off, keeping Mike on a clock like Marty McFly’s own vexing Polaroid in “Back to the Future.” And amid all the spy games there is even some statecraft, an unctuous Senator (Howard Duff) using Brice’s troubles against him to push through a submarine project the Defense Secretary doesn’t want, political horse trading rendered in deliberately vague verbiage so as to incriminate no one. In this moment, Hackman does a good job of looking like has heartburn.

Though Pritchard’s fervent loyalty winds up taking villainous center stage, Hackman still scores in a role that feels like it informed his later turn as the President in “Absolute Power.” Arrogant in the early-going, when things go wrong, Hackman has his character virtually revert to little boy behavior, talking about turning himself in but all too willing to let Pritchard try to get him out of it. And when Mike uncovers the truth and push comes to shove, the way Hackman strips every single histrionic ounce out of pleading “I’ll give you anything you want” only makes it sound that much more cringingly desperate. It’s testament to the characterization all the actors give their roles, Costner to Hackman and even further down the line with Dzundza. In most movies, he would have just been a throwaway. But playing a character marooned in a wheelchair, Dzundza evinces a kind of quiet joy in his work and camaraderie with Costner’s character. And when Sam’s reckoning arrives, one he doesn’t see coming, it doesn’t just feel like one more dead body in a thriller but a death that lingers, someone who really, really did not deserve this.

Gene Hackman's Imaginary Last Role

After hosting “an evening with Ana Gasteyer” at the Lensic Center for Performing Arts in Santa Fe, Seth Rudetsky shared a photo to social media of he and Gasteyer with one of the New Mexico capital’s more renowned residents – Gene Hackman. The two-time Oscar winner and star of the still reigning Middling Thriller champion “Runaway Jury” stepped away from acting in 2004. That meant his last movie was “Welcome to Mooseport.” And so even if he has admirably shunned the public eye ever since, there was something dispiriting in how he went out, like if Bob Dylan had called it quits after “Saved.” Still, intentional or not, Hackman left us wanting more, and each time he suddenly pops up in a photo, like the one with Rudetsky and Gasteyer or the one at a Santa Fe bike shop in 2018, it is hard not to dream of the 92-year old returning just one more time to the silver screen. Indeed, in interviewing Hackman for GQ eleven years ago, Michael Hainey did not so ask the retired actor if he would consider making another movie, but just flat-out said, desperate, practically begging, “You’ve got to make one more movie.” 

But what movie would it be? I imagine Marvel knocking on Hackman’s door and the redoubtable actor opening it, quizzically squinting at Kevin Feige’s sweaty pitch, and then shutting the door right back in Feige’s face without saying a word. Clint Eastwood, one year younger than Hackman and having just made a movie last year, could possibly be the only person in present-day Hollywood to coax Hackman back in front of the camera. After all, he convinced Hackman to do “Unforgiven” when the actor was reluctant and helped him get his second Oscar. It wouldn’t even have to be a true supporting turn. It could just be like Joe Pesci’s one scene walk-off in “The Good Shepherd.”

The key, though, I think to unlocking the possible next role of Hackman was proffered by Hackman himself in that same GQ interview. When Hainey begged him for another movie, Hackman replied “I don’t know. If I could it in my own house, maybe, without them disturbing anything and just one or two people.” Hmmmmmm. In his own house? With just one or two people? I recalled Jeremy Strong’s December profile in The New Yorker, the one where the “Succession” actor became the butt of all that day’s social media jokes, revealing his intense method (not The Method!) and feverish adoration of Daniel Day-Lewis. Apparently Strong worked as Day-Lewis’s assistant on “The Ballad of Jack and Rose” which he took as an opportunity to be “the sorcerer’s apprentice.” “He got so engrossed in his menial tasks,” Michael Schulman wrote of Strong, “that some of the crew cruelly nicknamed him Cletus, after the redneck character on ‘The Simpsons.’ ‘His whole brain was focused on Daniel Day-Lewis,’ one person recalled. ‘I never really saw him unless he was standing outside Daniel’s trailer.’” Hold the phone.   

Standing outside Daniel Day-Lewis’s trailer? What if we cast, say, Ryan Gosling, since he is equally adept at playing comedy and drama, and cast him as burgeoning, overly serious actor who worships Gene Hackman and starts standing outside Gene Hackman’s house? (Gosling has also always struck me as a gentleman, meaning he wouldn’t disturb anything at Hackman’s home). Take it wherever you want to go, boys.

But I don’t know. The further I get into this post, the more I realize my heart isn’t it. If there is something disappointing and a little strange in Gene Hackman’s final role being “Welcome to Mooseport,” there is something inspiring, even beautiful in it too, like the late Marvelous Marvin Hagler, my favorite boxer, who famously lost his last match to Sugar Ray Leonard (even though Hagler always claimed he won), retired, and then contrary to just about every boxer since the beginning of time eschewed a rematch with Leonard or even a comeback at all and simply, magnificently stayed retired, newly and joyfully indifferent to and done with boxing. If there is nobility in sports, I always thought it resided right there, in Hagler not consumed by fine-tuning his legacy but having the self assurance that his legacy was already secure. And if any actor would have emotional and mental brawn to know their legacy was already secure, regardless of any “Welcome to Mooseport” blotch, it’s Hackman. 

In Memoriam: Fred Ward

Fred Ward was born on December 30, 1942, in San Diego, California as Freddie Joe Ward, a name that sounds like a pugilist. As it happens, Ward was an amateur boxer for a time, leading to three or four broken noses depending on which source you consult, and evocative of a future actor who in no way took a conventional route to Hollywood. It’s apropos, really, that in Robert Altman’s Hollywood satire “The Player” (1992) Ward played not some Tinseltown studio bigwig but a studio security chief, more befitting of a man who despite briefly taking acting lessons in New York got his true start in the pictures working in the 20th Century-Fox mail room in 1965, just as it was appropriate that he would portray author Henry Miller in 1990’s “Henry & June” given his self-described restlessness yielding a real-life sojourn from the Air Force to New Orleans to California to Alaska to Europe, working in construction and as a logger and in TV movies with Roberto Rossellini. That restlessness is why Ward’s movie career essentially did not start until his late 30s, early 40s, in movies like “Escape from Alcatraz,” “Silkwood,” and as Gus Grissom in “The Right Stuff,” having already “aged into a persona,” to quote Steven Hyden writing about Gene Hackman in 2015, Ward’s been around twice countenance innately readymade for such roles.

Ward could simply walk onscreen and project authority, as he did in “Chain Reaction,” and summon a backstory just in his air, as he did in “Tremors.” It was the work of a character actor, I suppose, rather than a star. Even when Ward optioned the rights to the book that became George Armitage’s gnarly 1990 cult classic “Miami Blues,” installing himself as executive producer and putting himself on the inside track to the tantalizing lead role of sociopath Frederick J. Frenger, Ward knew he had to acquiesce when the studio indicated they wanted younger blood for the part. That paved the way for Ward to play second banana to an admittedly excellent Alec Baldwin. Still, as a paunchy detective with dentures, Ward was his more youthful co-star’s equal. “How many Hollywood leading men are sufficiently divested of vanity that they would not only play a character who gets his dentures stolen,” Glenn Kenny asked on Decider of Ward’s work, “but then subsequently spend a good portion of their screen time gumming it up trying to retrieve them?” And though Baldwin’s character is technically from California, the scene in which the two men have pork chops and quite a few beers is like a Florida Man Algonquin Roundtable, with Ward not playing so stupid that he doesn’t know what’s going on but so stupid that he doesn’t much care. 

Ward’s one real shot at a starmaking role was in 1985’s “Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins,” the title of Guy Hamilton’s adaptation of The Destroyer novel series by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir, betraying its intent to make more of them. But the movie flopped, and though Ward still earned some leading parts, in the aforementioned “Henry & June” and the H.P. Lovecraft-inspired “Cast a Deadly Spell,” his oeuvre was predominantly the in support kind. Not that this was something to be grieved. Supporting turns can sometimes make or break a movie and no movie Ward was in ever splintered apart because he failed to deliver. It’s why when I read that Ward died last week at the age of 79...well, first I thought of him losing his dentures in “Miami Blues.” But then I thought of “Corky Romano.” That Chris Kattan-led 2001 comedy was terrible, so terrible I don’t remember a thing about it other than Ward’s requisite bad guy getting into a lawn light fixture duel with Kattan’s eponymous character at movie’s end. What you’re watching, though, is less the movie’s hero vanquishing the villain than the actor playing the villain heroically holding up his end of the bargain. 

Some Drivel On...So I Married an Axe Murderer

Mike Myers followed up his ultra-successful “Wayne’s World” (1992) with “So I Married an Axe Murderer” (1993), which proved less profitable, raking in a relatively scant 11.5 million at the box office and finishing nine spots behind “Body of Evidence” and five spots behind “Weekend at Bernie’s II.” On home video, though, it found an audience and became something of a cult classic, not unlike the two movies it was wedged between in those box office dregs – “True Romance” and “Army of Darkness.” Maggie Serota recounted this rags-to-riches-ish story for the movie’s 25th anniversary in Spin where she noted its lack of critical acclaim too, parenthetically citing Roger Ebert’s two-and-a-half star review. I wouldn’t necessarily deem “So I Married an Axe Murderer” mediocre, as Ebert did, but nor would I necessarily deem it “fantastic,” as Serota does. As I often do anymore, I land somewhere in-between, drawn less to Ebert’s opening review line than his closing one – that Myers likes roles of “Eccentrics trapped in worlds that are seemingly normal, yet secretly more bizarre even than their fantasies.” Myers’s next movie, “Austin Powers,” was in a sense sort of an inverse of this observation, its time-traveling 60s English spy normal for his time and place but rendered an eccentric in the normal modern world. And that might be why I’ve always preferred “So I Married an Axe Murderer” a little more, the way the real world feels just off-kilter, which ostensibly is what the emergent axe murderer subplot is supposed to tie into. Yet, for all the delightful comic eccentricities and eccentrics that Myers surrounds himself with, the primary problem is, well, him. 

Myers is Charlie MacKenzie, a San Franciscan commitment-phobe who, in a nod to his Scottish roots, buys some Haggis for a family gathering from a comely butcher named Harriet (Nancy Travis) with whom he becomes so smitten he seems like maybe, just maybe, he’ll remain committed for the first time in his life. Alas, he begins to fear she’s an axe murderer and there goes that. It’s neat idea, a comical amplification of his fear of intimacy that feels true to anyone greatest’s anxiety. It’s not so much this plotline trending toward an obvious payoff, because a little filmmaking knowhow can polish that up, as how the plotline becomes a victim of tonal imbalance. The more absurd, the better, because the real attempts at this relationship’s sincerity, conveyed predominantly through lovey-dovey montages and a few earnest attempts by Myers at earnestness, fall flat. The character’s commitment-phobia, in the end, simply does not feel baked into the performance, no matter how much Travis gamely tries in these moments to reel it out of him, and so Myers’s attempts at a Billy Crystal kind of turn come up short, perhaps suggesting why he never really tried it again and instead leaned into the excess of “Austin Powers.”

He is more successful in the coffeehouse scenes where he performs spoken word poems set to music about recent break-ups. That Charlie seems to have no job feels less like some narrative oversight than spot-on, a 90s version of a 50s Beat poet, just hanging out at the coffeehouse and whining about women, milking his mastery of vocal exaggeration (“Wo-MAN”) to fine effect. His vocal exaggeration is even better in his dual role playing Charlie’s much more loutish father Stuart, turning simple boisterous declarations like “Shut it!” into bellicose poetry. The character is also a proud Scottish immigrant, evoked in his Scottish Wall of Fame a la Sal’s Pizzeria Italian-American Wall of Fame in “Do the Right Thing,” and the way he and Brenda Fricker, playing Stuart’s wife and Charlie’s mom Mary, fall into a little arm in arm dance to the Bay City Rollers’ (pride of Edinburgh) “Saturday Night” demonstrates the kind of amusing, romantic warmth that Myers cannot evince as Charlie. Stuart’s best friend Tony Giardino (Anthony LaPaglia), meanwhile, is nothing less than a whole detective movie send-up packaged into a subplot. 

The conclusion, in which Tony journeys through northern California by any means necessary to warn Stuart, is a virtual promenade of cameos, from Steven Wright as a frighteningly casual plane pilot to national treasure Charles Grodin as a bad Samaritan. These cameos epitomize the bizarre world Ebert was noting, but also illustrate just how committed “So I Married an Axe Murderer” is to a comic bit above all else. A scene set on Alcatraz seems to exist to haul the camera out to Alcatraz and show it off since you’re shooting a movie in San Francisco, yes, but also to give space for Phil Hartman, playing a tour guide, to do this Phil Hartman thing. He’s so deep into character he hardly acknowledges Myers and LaPaglia at all. He really comes across like a guy who’s been on Alcatraz all his life. Maybe that’s why I found myself thinking not about Mike Myers’s new Netflix series “The Pentaverate,” based off a few lines of dialogue in “So I Married an Axe Murderer,” but a multiverse movie in which it turns out Brigadier General Francis X. Hummel (Ed Harris) took “The Rock” hostage when Hartman’s Ranger John Johnson (everyone here calls me Vicki) was leading the tour rather than Ranger Bob (Raymond O’Connor) and leading to a rescue attempt not by Stanley Goodspeed (Nicolas Cage) and John Mason (Sean Connery) but Vickie, Tony Giardino, and a very reluctant Charlie MacKenzie. That would have been something else. 

All the Old Knives

As “All the Old Knives” opens, CIA agent Henry Pelham (Chris Pine) is tasked with interviewing his old colleague Celia Harrison (Thandiwe Newton), suspected of being the mole in a years-old operation involving a Turkish flight hijacked in Vienna. She lives in California now somewhere around Carmel, allowing director Janus Metz to revel in second unit footage of Henry’s rental car cruising scenic Highway 1, including Big Sur’s Bixby Bridge. No less an authority than Visit California describes this concrete span as “seen-it-in-a-million-car-commercials,” aptly putting into perspective the inherent handsomeness and predictability of the image. Maybe that’s a strange place to start, but it really stuck in my mind as “All the Old Knives” unfurled its tale of espionage and romance. Based on a novel by Olen Steinhauer (who also wrote the screenplay), this might be a mishmash of “Spy Game” and “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold,” but it yearns to be “My Dinner with Andre” as told by John LeCarre, a conversational spy thriller albeit one culminating in a would-be explosion of (misplaced) passion. As that Bixby Bridge shot foretells, however, “All the Old Knives” comes across almost too elegantly mounted, a twist that I can’t reveal exposing the movie in a way it doesn’t intend, its oft-deliberately reserved performances struggling to open up in the necessary way. 

Much of “All the Old Knives” is simply the dinner conversation between Henry and Celia, old lovers as well as old co-operatives, meaning the dialogue shifts between teasing out how they still feel about one another and more pointed questions and answers about what transpired during the hijacking op. There are other moments sprinkled in too, like Henry offering of the newly pescatarian Celia a bite of his free-range bacon, a not-quite-as-potent-as-it-needs-to-be metaphor for temptation. That romantic dilemma suffers in part from Celia’s hardly sketched marriage and family, blunting the would-be will they/won’t they tension. The flashbacks, meanwhile, to Henry’s other interrogation of their co-worker and Celia’s mentor Bill Compton (Jonathan Pryce) suffers because of Pryce’s performance, leaning too eagerly into jittery tells, like he’s too excited about playing the murderer in some murder mystery role-playing game. True, his character is a red herring in more ways than one, but he is nevertheless too obviously a feint, and subsequently plays against the notion that Celia ever considered him a mentor in the first place or “like a father.” This guy?

Though Metz conveys the scenes aboard the airplane with more of a handheld approach, and even incorporates Celia’s recurring nightmare about being aboard the hijacked aircraft, the terror of these scenes and the terrorists’ motivations tend to feel distant. That’s not a bad thing. When Henry’s supervisor (Laurence Fishburne) orders he and his other colleagues to contact their sources in the wake of the flight being taken hostage, Henry reaches out to an old Chechen informant (Orli Shuka) the CIA forced him to sell out to Russia. There’s convenience in the plotting here, perhaps, an international incident coming down to a pair of old friends, but it also speaks to how Americans and American intelligence spur radicalization that comes back to haunt them while simultaneously seeking to wipe their hands of it. In this light, the coldness of the hijacking scenes feels true, less real life than a geopolitical problem to solve. 

That lack of feeling trickles down to the all-important romantic relationship. In the present-day scenes, Pine and Newton’s chemistry is more icy than titillating, the two actors consciously playing, like, you know, CIA agents, cautious of their every move, sending up looks and seemingly banal observations as feelers, trying not to betray too much, especially since they both know why Henry is here even if he is not explicitly saying it. In the past scenes, however, where their passion is supposed to be both paramount and genuine, the two actors still seem stuck in their present-day gear, the romantic passion oddly muted. Even if the placement of a mid-movie sex scene is spot-on, staged in the wake of the hijacking going wrong, this being their reaction to it, the whole thing is played and shot in such an artful way that it ironically undercuts any sense of the ostensible urgent release. Their love and their lust, in other words, feels like a put-on when it’s the single element of the movie that is not supposed to be a put-on at all, meaning the movie’s biggest twist, not to be revealed, which could have been scorching, pitting desire and duty square against each other in the center ring, fatally falls flat. 

Friday's Old Fashioned: Red Heat (1988)

“Red Heat” is a movie of its time, which is to say 1988, which is to say when the Cold War was at its tail-end but still in vogue and, even more, when comedies could not only be combined with action but with R ratings allowing for as much violence and nudity as yuks. Indeed, “Red Heat” was directed by Walter Hill, who made perhaps the seminal 80s-styled R-rated buddy comedy in “48 Hours” (1982). There the opposing buddies were Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte, black and white, outrageous and gruff, and (several) years later “Red Heat” adjusted that formula with Arnold Schwarzenegger and James Belushi, a Russian (Soviet) and an American (Chicagoan), terse and boisterous, like if Ivan Drago buddied up with Carmine Lorenzo from “Die Hard 2.” That means Belushi is playing more of the straight man, even though he’s supposed to be funny, and Schwarzenegger is playing more of the funny guy, even though he’s got the air of a straight man, a unique role reversal resulting in more of an lol movie than the LOL of “48 Hours.”

The movie opens with Schwarzenegger’s Ivan Danko (which sounds suspiciously like Ivan Drago now that I think about it) going undercover in a Soviet foundry’s sauna to bring down a Georgian drug kingpin, Viktor Rostavili (Ed O’Ross). It’s a nifty setpiece, not least because I can’t think of another way to have a character played by a former Mr. Universe convincingly go undercover than in a foundry sauna. Schwarzenegger’s barely clad rear end hardly looks out of place amid all the impressively chiseled physiques – at least, until one of the characters notices his hands don’t quite befit a foundry worker’s, exposing his ruse and leading to a scrap that crashes through a window and continues outside. I’m not sure the hand-to-hand combat supersedes the memorable bathhouse brawl in “A History of Violence,” but the bathhouse brawl in “A History of Violence” didn’t spill out into the snow, an evocation translation of the sauna’s cool-down phase.

Alas, Rostavili still gets away, fleeing to America, only to be brought up on some minor violation in Chicago. Danko is dispatched to retrieve him. The drug kingpin escapes the CPD’s clutches too, of course, meaning Danko must stay in America to get his man with Windy City Sgt. Art Ridzik (James Belushi) as his minder. Ridzik is both combative and indolent, an archetypal American, refusing to obey his boss’s orders and put out with his Danko babysitting gig if only because it means more work. He seems to take the mantra of the poster on the wall at the flophouse where Danko stays – Killing Time is Not Murder – to heart. When they are forced into an all-night stakeout, Ridzik seems genuinely happy, as Belushi has his character recite the four food groups of “hamburgers, French fries, coffee and doughnuts” with an eager gleam in his eye.

The flophouse is not just a humorous place to stay but a key to cracking “Red Heat’s” code. This was but two years after “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” a Chicago travelogue demonstrating the gleaming utopia of the go-go Reagan capitalist era. Ridzik’s Chicago, on the other hand, is the seedy underbelly of that dream, comically if blatantly brought home in Danko’s realization that the TV in his room is coin-operated. “Capitalism,” Schwarzenegger demurs. Hill is inviting us to laugh with Danko much more than at him, a key delineation, just as he is summoning us to cheer when Danko tramples all over America’s Miranda Rights after Ridzik makes a half-hearted case for them, blurring the lines between ostensibly black and white American and Soviet values in a commercial movie released at a time when those lines were theoretically drawn rigidly in the sand. Not that “Red Heat” muddies U.S.A.! principles entirely. Hill suitably amplifies the climactic car chase by staging it with buses instead. Any return to 1980s values understandably spooks many of my fellow Americans, but this sort of bigger is better action movie spirit is the one value I would like to see us reembrace. 

(Not) Ranking All The Dude's White Russians

2022 is not the Silver anniversary of The Coen Brothers cult classic “The Big Lebowski.” No, that will be next year. But then, doesn’t the stoned out vibe of “The Big Lebowski” suggest a 25th anniversary might unintentionally take place on the 24th instead? Perplexed Jeff Bridges Voice: “What year is this?” Not that the approaching anniversary is what inspired this post. No, that stemmed from the cabin where I was recently vacationing on the north shore of Minnesota where along with all the usual rustic decoration the owners had also propped up a framed ode to the White Russian, referencing both Halle Berry’s Catwoman (I haven’t seen it but I picture more a dark rum drink there) and The Dude of Los Angeles, California. This ode noted, in fact, that The Dude imbibes a total of nine white Russians during “The Big Lebowski.” “Is that right?” I thought. “Nine?” I counted them off and then realized I had the makings of a post, one in which I could rank all nine of those White Russians. But ranking The Dude’s White Russians...I don’t know, that seems very un-Dude. So, what about honoring one of the original authors of the Port Huron Statement with a semi-philosophical appraisal of all nine White Russians? After all, the White Russian recipe is essentially universal, yet each White Russian in “The Big Lebowski” is not necessarily alike. 

(Not) Ranking All The Dude's White Russians

The most famous White Russian imbibed by The Dude is undoubtedly the one when he is transferred by force from one limousine to another because even with his left arm twisted behind his back he never relinquishes that cocktail in his right hand, memorably imploring “Careful, man, there’s a beverage here!” and epitomizing the imperishable preeminence of vodka, Kahlua, and milk. 

The least White Russian-y White Russian are indisputably the two served to him by adult film impresario Jackie Treehorn (Ben Gazzara). “A White Russian,” Gazzara says as his character mixes the drink for The Dude in a voice that makes it sound like Jackie Treehorn has a long, complicated history with the beverage himself. But these drinks, of course, are laced with narcotics, knocking The Dude out, fashioning the White Russian as a weapon, the spiritual antithesis of it as a relaxant, a mixologist’s most severe transgression.

The Dude’s last White Russian is quietly a perfect embodiment of a boozy post-coital breather (with Maude) even if it chiefly exists as the conduit to a sight gag.

The two White Russians drunk by The Dude at Maude’s – one in their first meeting, one in their second encounter – function as a kind of party favor.

The two White Russians he downs at the bar bowling alley – the first with Walter and Donny, the second with The Stranger – are nothing less than a barfly therapeutic.

In the end, though, it is The Dude’s first White Russian that seems to say it all. We first see him mixing it in a wide shot, framing him beneath his framed picture of a bowling President Nixon, essentially uniting The Dude’s two most fervent beliefs (White Russians and bowling, that is, not Nixon’s version of the war on drugs). And when his eccentric landlord subsequently knocks on the door, apologetically and indirectly asking for the rent, that same White Russian becomes a medicinal in the face of this economic burden, while in the ensuing moment it becomes something even more than medicine, the nexus, sipping at it even as he performs some vague variation of on Tai-Chi, his treasured mixed drink the ultimate source and limit of reality, the shot that ties the movie together like the rug he’s standing on binds the room. 

A Very Serious Review of Lady Gaga's Top Gun: Maverick Anthem

I couldn’t tell you the first time I dreamed of flying a plane and what prompted it. It might have been touring the SAC Museum in Omaha or the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs as a kid, but more likely it was Luke Skywalker making his target run, or Maverick putting on the brakes so they could fly right by, or perhaps most realistically Snoopy envisioning himself as the WWI Flying Ace. That beagle had an active imagination and so did I. All I know is that any dreams I might have once harbored about flight pretty much died the day during an adolescent game of backyard football when I removed my glasses during a rainstorm and fired a pass to what I thought was my best friend running something approximating a crossing route only to hear the pigskin thwack off a tree. If you’re throwing passes to trees, you probably shouldn’t be strapped into a cockpit. That all came to back me last week as I waited to board my flight at the Duluth International Airport back to Chicago. After all, the Duluth Air National Guard is housed on the airport’s grounds, and as I sat twiddling my thumbs (looking at my phone), a couple F-16s thundered down the runway and into the sky, the takeoff so loud the windows I was watching them through rattled. “What,” I wondered, “would that feel like.” Mentally, I sighed for, surely, I’d never know.



After I settled into my seat aboard the tiny regional airliner and we taxied out to the runway, I suddenly remembered that earlier that morning I had downloaded the just-dropped Lady Gaga track – “Hold My Hand” – off the forthcoming “Top Gun: Maverick” soundtrack. What better way to christen my ears with it than during takeoff? I put on my headphones, taking that moment that I do before listening to any new Gaga track to appreciate the fact that I’m about to listen to a new Gaga track, and cued it up. And as our elbow room-less little aircraft lifted into The Gopher State air and Gaga pulled the throttle forward to that first rendition of the chorus, I could have sworn, for four bars there, our Air Wisconsin Canadair Regional Jet eclipsed the sound barrier.