My Favorite Movie Dance Sequence

Recently the official Twitter handle of the Toronto International Film Festival asked people for their favorite dance sequence in a film, getting the ball to their query rolling with a GIF of Greta Gerwig as Frances Halladay in “Frances Ha” (2012) dancing down the monochrome NYC sidewalk to David Bowie’s “Modern Love.” Of course, that scene is an homage to Denis Lavant doing the exact same thing to the exact same song in Leos Carax’s “Mauvais Song” (1986) which is not in any way meant to rule Greta’s cover version out of order but to suggest how so often in cinema what we love right now is, in essence, something that has probably already happened. That’s why when it comes to the best dance sequences in movies it’s hard to look much further than, like, you know, Gene Kelly in “Singing in the Rain” (1952), or Gregory Hines and Mikhail Baryshnikov going Beast Mode for a few minutes in “White Nights” (1985). The latter, though, just fostered some flimsy narrative excuses to get those two dudes to dance and is why, if push came to shove, I’d cite Ginger and Fred’s “Isn’t This a Lovely Day (To Be Caught in the Rain)” from “Top Hat” (1935) where Rogers and Astaire seem to walk on air even more than that time Fred literally danced on a ceiling while simultaneously advancing the character and the plot. Plus, it cuts straight to the heart of what makes a rainy day so magical. Sigh. Let’s watch it, whaddaya say? 

 

But. TIFF’s prompt was not for the Best Dance Sequence in a movie. No, it asked for Favorite, and that’s a whole different ballgame, and a more interesting one to me. After all, I’m a guy who likes to dance but can’t dance. I’m Alec Baldwin in “It’s Complicated” (2009) who in his dance sequence with Meryl Streep doesn’t really dance at all but just sort of effects dancing by bobbing up and down. I’m Kevin James in “Hitch” (2005) except it’s really as bad as Will Smith thinks it is. I’m the dufus dancing during the woeful Bob Marley dorm room singalong in “Kicking and Screaming” (1995). Mostly, though, I’m Ed Harris in last year’s “The Lost Daughter” – last year’s recipient of the “Isn’t It a Lovely Day (To Be Caught in the Rain)” Award – when his character gives up trying to dance to “Livin’ on a Prayer” and just starts enthusiastically jumping up and down; I excel at enthusiastically jumping up and down. And this is why despite the euphoria of climactic movie dance scenes like “Flashdance” (1983) or “Strictly Ballroom” (1992), I am more drawn to the culminating dance number in “Silver Linings Playbook” (2012) in which choreographer Mandy Moore (not that one) did a bang-up job devising a routine that would seem wholly credible for two amateur dancers (in the movie and in real life) and uplifting in its own way nonetheless, an exultation of being average. A la médiocrité ! 

This is also why people who know Cinema Romantico best (too well) will not be surprised that Frank Drebin (Leslie Nielsen) and Jane Spencer’s (Priscilla Presley) Dance of the God-Knows-What in “The Naked Gun 2 ½” (1991), as if Steve Martin and Gilda Radner had choreographed “Shall We Dance” (1937), holds a special place in my heart. When the dance really ramps up, however, it goes to a long shot, out of necessity more than trying in any real way to disguise its dance doubles. That Nielsen and Presley needed doubles is no great flaw – nay, no flaw at all – but it’s also why I love the dance in Yorgo Lanthimos’s “The Favourite” (2018) just a little bit more, the one that improbably filters the spirit of “The Naked Gun 2 ½” Dance of the God-Knows-What through a Baroque sensibility. Because Rachel Weisz and Joe Alwyn as Lady Sarah and Baron Masham perform their absolute nuttery with straight faces all on their own. I’m not making a Top 5 here, but this would be on it.

I do not, however, want people to think I merely respond to the substandard or the ridiculous when evaluating and/or enjoying cinematic cuttings of the rug. Far from it. (Perhaps this is also where I should confess my knowledge of Bollywood dance numbers is virtually non-existent.) My high school girlfriend and I showed the German foreign exchange student “Saturday Night Fever” (1977) because...John Travolta and Karen Lee Gorney dancing to “More Than a Woman” was an American cultural touchstone? It also showed their characters losing it so much in the music that they just stop dancing and kiss, the scintillating red neon of most of the scene giving way to a blue that’s less icy than cool, as if all they can think, to quote Alabama Worley, is “you’re so cool.” It’s a personification of how so often dancing in the movies isn’t dancing. The kidz today are always talking about vibes and, buddy, lemme tell ya, Michael Mann rendered the key relationship of “Miami Vice” (2006) between Colin Farrell and Gong Li as nothing but vibes, “Sexy,” as the five-time Pulitzer finalist Manohla Dargis concisely put it for the most recent episode of the Miami Nice podcast, “as fuck,” so sexy dancing to Emilio Estefan’s Latin pop cover of Mandy Moore’s (that one) “In My Pocket” that we the audience momentarily become like Naomie Harris and John Ortiz – voyeurs. Nothing is sexier, though, than Elvis and Ann-Margret call and response mating dances to “C’mon Everybody” in “Viva Las Vegas” (1964). She shakes and rattles and rolls like she’s been moonstruck and he receives her overtures by swaying his hips as only Elvis can before they take the stage together and she falls into his arms with some none-too-subtle shrieks emphasized on the soundtrack and then they collapse side-by-side on the stage looking for all the world like two people who just took a roll in the hay. If you tried to include this scene in a major motion picture now the prudes in charge would shut the production down and hose off the soundstage.

But while people dancing together is great, there is something just as spellbinding in people, to quote her Swedish highness Robyn, dancing on their own. Madonna might have gotten tired of dancing there in her room all by herself, but her acolyte Little Boots knows that even if you go to the club to dance, it’s best to wear your headphones, to dance to beat that’s in your head. I don’t know, some Atlantic writer would probably huffily chalk this up to our navel-gazing AirPods culture, but as far back as 1983 in northern Italy, as “Call Me By Your Name” goes to show, people were dancing by themselves. Yes, technically Oliver was dancing to “Love My Way” by The Psychedelic Furs with a woman…but not really. He’s in an emotional, mental, and physical space all by himself. I’d tell you to watch it again and provide the link, but Oliver was played by Armie Hammer, of course, and per the recent Treaty of Burbank I am legally unable to link to any videos of the Armie Hammer. But that’s no biggie! Who needs Oliver in Crema when you’ve got Chris Parker in the suburbs of Chicago?! Grandmaster Marty employed “Then He Kissed Me” by The Crystals to “Goodfellas” (1990) to demonstrate a burgeoning romantic harmony, but “Adventures in Babystting” (1987) deployed it as a solo, the ultimate manifestation of a teenager turning her room into a concert stage at Madison Square Garden in her mind, and, reader, Elisabeth Shue knocked it out of the park, leading to the rare forthright Cinema Romantico Shueroll. 

 

Four years earlier, as it happens, in the insane, forgotten “Exposed” (1983), Natassja Kinski transformed the hardwood floor of her apartment into a dancefloor, shaking it out to Merry Clayton’s “It’s In His Kiss.” Unlike Shue’s dance, however, which is all teenage innocence, Kinski’s concludes with her sprawled on the floor. Sometimes even when you shake it off, you just end up with nothing left, spiritually as much as physically. No solo movie dance, though, compares to Rosie Perez’s in “Do the Right Thing” (1989). Because rather than placing her dance at the climax, or even in the middle, Spike Lee puts it right up front and in your face, mirroring the camera work, mirroring the accompanying Public Enemy anthem “Fight the Power,” mirroring Perez’s moves with improbably manage to harness P.E.’s potent, unsurpassable militancy, evoking dance as something more than sweaty release – that is, protest.

 

Perez’s dance was out on the street, not in the club, evoking the mise-en-scène of “Do the Right Thing,” that Bed-Stuy block her home as much as Kinski’s hardwood floor or Shue’s kitchen. And that’s how I tend to think of dancing, I suppose. The best dance parties tend to be at home. Not just the dance parties for one, mind you, but group dance parties too. The dance party scene of “House Party” (1990) was made up on the spot, according to star A.J. Johnson, and feels like it in the best way, capturing the joyful spontaneity of such moments. But then, I’m me, and me is basically Diedrich Bader in that episode of “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” where he sticks to the couch while the whole Banks family dance arounds him; he knows full well they’ve got more way rhythm than him and I’ve got no rhythm at all. I love that scene in “House Party” but as a white hipster dufus, I’m just a teensy bit more drawn to dance party scene in Aaron Katz’s momentous “Quiet City” (2007), the one where four twentysomethings drink a few beers and dance in someone’s Park Slope living room. Katz forgoes diegetic music, however, meaning we cannot hear the song to which the characters are dancing, opting to highlight the scene instead with Keegan DeWitt’s score, a splendid choice that heightens the effect, a lyrical commentary on how the at-home dance party makes you feel.

 

Again, though, like Little Boots wearing her headphones at the club, you can, if you so choose, carve that space out for yourself anywhere. And that finally brings us full circle. Because just as Brooklynite France Halladay dancing down the sidewalk homage a French movie, so, too, was the dance party in Brooklyn-set “Quiet City” something of a French movie homage, just as Mia Wallace and Vincent Vega twisting in Jack Rabbit’s Slims was something of a French movie homage, just as so many dance movie scenes are something of a French movie homage. That French movie I’m talking about is Jean-Luc Godard’s “Band of Outsiders” (1964). That band was portrayed by Anna Karina, Sami Frey, and Claude Brasseur, whom, sitting at a Parisian café, suddenly get up and dance. And keep dancing. And keep dancing. Unlike Katz, Godard prefers a diegetic approach, ensuring we can hear the noise of the café around them, putting into perspective how they lose it in the music. Yet even as they lose it, Godard eventually interrupts, in a manner of speaking, with a voiceover providing a quick overview of each character’s thoughts. In that way, “Band of Outsiders” presages Lady Gaga’s very first single where the verses are the thoughts in her head and the chorus – “Just Dance” – fumigates them.

Bullet Train

Brad Pitt wore a kilt to the premiere of his new movie “Bullet Train.” When asked why, the actor told Variety’s Marc Malkin, “We’re all going to die, so let’s mess it up.” Beginning a movie review with a movie’s premiere is strange if not prohibited, but that quote spiritually ties into the performance Pitt gives in the same movie. The director is David Leitch who co-directed “John Wick” along with Chad Stahelski, even if recondite DGA rules prevented him from garnering an official co-credit, an arthouse action epic that was also a sort of stone-faced parody of the revenge drama genre it inhabited. “Bullet Train” is not quite either, more in the vein of the goofy “Mystery Men” even if you could not necessarily deem it a comedy, maybe because it’s violent, so violent that its frequent comedy frequently descends into a kind of comic nihilism. Its occasional attempts at levity, in fact, like the prologue with a kid in the hospital, only further highlight the overriding meaningless. Pitt, however, impressively manages to walk between the raindrops, not necessarily saving it from itself but injecting it with just enough blithe amusement to make it enjoyable. 

Pitt plays a professional assassin codenamed Ladybug boarding the bullet train from Tokyo to Kyoto to retrieve a briefcase chock full of ransom money being carried by a pair of a different assassins, Tangerine (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Lemon (Brian Tyree Henry), transporting it along with the formerly kidnapped son of a menacing figure known only as The White Death. And that’s to say nothing of the myriad other bad actors aboard the train, from a British teenager (Joey King) to a Mexican executioner (Bad Bunny), all circling one another, in a manner of speaking, with their various motives. A lot of these motives are broadcast right up front. Indeed, if the title immediately puts one in the mind of mystery, a la “Murder on the Orient Express” and “The Lady Vanishes,” “Bullet Train” reads like an open book. The biggest mystery is the poisonous slithery, disgusting creature that has no business living amongst us slithering all over the train, forcing us (me) to wait to see when it will strike. The payoff, as it turns out, is more comic ellipsis, keeping in the film’s spirit. The briefcase, meanwhile, proves less MacGuffin than Deus Ex Machina, used to deflect bullets and, at a key point, as a distraction. There is no greater idea lingering in the air here. Like the eponymous vehicle itself, “Bullet Train” is just barreling straight ahead toward a rather obvious conclusion.

This is an action movie that, like most action movies these days, is a mixed bag. Best is a close quarter brawl between Ladybug and Lemon seated across from one another in the quiet car where their hand-to-hand combat is constantly interrupted by increasingly outraged “Shhhhhhs” from another passenger. It’s one of the few moments where “Bullet Train” seems aware of the surroundings, of the passengers, of what such hostilities might be like aboard a crowded train. Mostly, though, Leitch eschews the sense of the interiors, never mind the exteriors, going so far as to fashion a narrative excuse for all the passengers to be off the train as the movie nears its conclusion, unintentionally underlining how the train really is nothing more than a soundstage as opposed to a true physical space. And that is not even to cite is incuriosity with the Japanese environs. About the closest it gets is Ladybug fiddling with an opulent toilet, though even that is emblematic of how story seeds here generally fail to sprout with any vigor. 

The give and take between quality and inconsequence extends to the characters and subsequently the actors playing them. I’m not sure if I’m forbidden by the arcane rules of criticism from spoiling who plays The White Death since he doesn’t show up until the end, but whatever…it’s Michael Shannon, ok? And “Bullet Train” never harnesses his unique energy in an interesting way, dialing it back if anything, his simple appearance in the first place the best part and sort of inadvertently illustrating how “They Came Together” (2014) understood best how to evince a cameo by Shannon, his presence too big for anything but ushering him stage right and then instantly right back off stage left. Zazie Beetz is deployed virtually like Keri Russell in “The Rise of Skywalker” – that is, hardly at all. Beetz is concealed, revealed, and gone. Tyree Henry and Taylor-Johnson fare better, cultivating a real chemistry even if Leitch virtually mocks their bromance through needle drops though the Tarantino-ish flashbacks to counting kills fail to emit the kind of cool that Taylor-Johnson does all on his own. Though his character gradually gets in too deep, Taylor-Johnson maintains an even temper even as his hair grows more unruly scene to scene, and his swagger…Lord, his literal swagger down the compact aisles of the train is so magnetic that another character literally comments on it.

Taylor-Johnson is more in traditional Movie Star mode than Pitt, evoked in the latter’s bucket hat and black frame glasses. Pitt has generally excelled better in character actor mode than Movie Star mode and here he sort of smuggles a character actor performance into the leading man’s part. His character is written in the vein of Martin Blank in “Grosse Point Blank,” a hitman trying to work on himself, as they say, calling a therapist who’s not really his therapist before and after hits. Ladybug has a therapist though he just talks about him, mostly to the woman (Sandra Bullock, marking the second movie of 2022 after “The Lost City“ in which we are essentially teased a Pitt/Bullock vehicle that never really comes to pass) on the other end of his phone line who becomes the sounding board for the various nuggets of therapy session wisdom he has accumulated. Pitt plays this in the register of an undergrad student who’s taken a couple philosophy courses and now thinks he’s got the keys to the universe. Dispensing this insight, often just to himself, while fighting and killing people, though, gives the sense that he really has emotionally moved beyond all the fighting and killing, and might be ready to literally move it beyond it to, levitating above the movie’s nihilism and improbably making this mostly hollow vehicle count for something. 

The Gray Man

“The Gray Man” is Six (Ryan Gosling), so called because he is the sixth agent in a CIA black ops program deemed Sierra, sort of A Very Special Operation Treadstone of The Bourne film franchise in so much as Six was imprisoned as a minor for killing his abusive father and sprung by the CIA to become a super-duper secret assassin with something looming far more nefarious than a retirement plan. Indeed, as the movie opens, he is on a mission in Bangkok along with the evocatively named Dani Miranda (Ana de Armas, utterly wasted) to kill someone selling state secrets. But at the point of dying that someone tells Six that he is, in fact, Four, that Sierra is not what it appears, and that Six is next, handing him an encrypted drive proving that the Sierra program’s boss Denny Carmichael (Regé-Jean Page) is corrupt. This sends Six on the run and causes Carmichael to enlist private contractor Lloyd Hanson (Chris Evans) to find and kill Six, stopping at nothing, including the kidnapping the a young girl named Claire (Julia Butters) the Sierra assassin was once enlisted to protect. 

If nothing else, directors Anthony and Joe Russo display a gift for engaging distraction, the kind exemplifying the small screen experience epitomizing Netflix distributions like this one. “The Gray Man,” like last year’s “Red Notice,” hopscotches locations, ensuring we are always seeing somewhere new, hits us with another big setpiece right as we might be starting to note the lack of one, and then pauses for several exposition dumps to make certain anyone who might have missed crucial information while checking their email, perhaps, or folding their laundry, maybe, can understand what is going on. Those exposition dumps are telling, however. If they provide context for the viewer momentarily distracted from wrangling their kids while “The Gray Man” plays in the background, even when delivered by such capable actors as Alfre Woodard these long-winded explanations fail to match or even come near the gold standard of modern-day exposition dumps – Paul Giamatti in “San Andreas.” Informational, yes; electrifying, no, and evocative of an overall inability to elevate the material.

I know loyal frustrated followers have likely tired of me pointing out how most present-day action sequences pale in comparison to “Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation” and “Mission: Impossible – Fallout” so allow me to spare you going over all that again and say the CGI-heavy mid-air escape pales in comparison to the mid-air escape of “Eraser,” Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 1996 thriller I enjoyed just fine then but think about all the time now. Yet is not just CGI that dooms these sequences; it is creative imagination too. A shootout in Prague that segues to a speeding tram benefits from location work, true, but suffers from a lack of imagination. Six begins this scene handcuffed to a bench yet manages to fight off a swarm off would-be assassins with one gun while chained up. It’s ridiculous and the movie knows it, enlisting an off-site Lloyd to lament “How hard is to shoot somebody?” The Brothers Russo, betraying their sitcom roots, are too content to let this one-liner summarize the moment’s inherent comedy rather than bringing out the comedy in how they stage the scene, oddly rote for a moment that in theory should be so improvisational. 

It’s so strange. “The Gray Man” wants to be funny, sometimes, and sometimes it is. We here at Cinema Romantico are not shy about saying we prefer the glib comic stylings of Ryan Gosling to those of Ryan Reynolds. But “The Gray Man” frequently turns grave too, not least in Six’s backstory, disrespectfully squandering preeminent That Guy! Shea Whigham as the character’s abusive father. Though the showdown between Six and Lloyd is teased throughout like the run-up to a heavyweight championship fight, the battle itself, recounted in fading light, is less gleefully entertaining than tediously somber. And in these moments, just like in the more emotional ones with Claire, Gosling does not quite seem sure what to play to and as such downplays so severely that he becomes more of an automaton here than in “Blade Runner: 2049.” Evans, meanwhile, is singing in the over-the-top key of his moustache, playing a guy who thinks highly of himself and giddily deploys every resource at his disposal. The CIA agent sent to monitor him, Suzanne Brewer (Jessica Renwick), is also hapless to stop him. Renwick’s performance, in tandem with how the Russo Bros. present it, is singing in a far more earnest key than Evans, sucking all the air out of what could have been a rollicking send-up of the military industrial complex, “The Gray Man” in capsule. Who needs something so serious and sincere when you’re folding the laundry? 

Maybe It's Time to Raze the Field of Dreams

If you are not from Chicago or don’t follow the NFL, you might not know that the city’s professional football franchise is threatening to move from its longtime quarters at Soldier Field on the shore of Lake Michigan to Arlington Heights, a suburb of the Windy City 25 miles northwest of downtown. If this is not a new threat, it is perhaps the first time it sounds legitimate, not least because the organization has agreed to purchase the 326 acres housing the Arlington International Racecourse, seemingly with the intention of ditching Soldier Field to construct a brand new stadium. (Whether they would become the Arlington Heights Bears, I don’t know, but it still wouldn’t sound as stupid as the Irwindale Raiders.) Though spending $197 million suggests this isn’t just a shakedown of the city of Chicago for new or improved digs, that hasn’t stopped Mayor Lori Lightfoot from proposing Soldier Field renovations, including a possible dome atop the nearly 100-year old stadium. That this is stupid isn’t because of how dumb a dome would look – driving past Soldier Field recently I was reminded of how the 2002 interior renovations resulting in the infamous spaceship-looking structure has boxed out the Romanesque columns to the point that they look like cheap knockoff knick-knacks in some overcrowded gift shop – but because the Mayor said without saying that the public would foot much of the taxpaying bill. I’m very much pro-tax, but public funds should be used wisely and this isn’t wise. The return investment scam on publicly funded sports stadiums has been exposed incessantly and irrefutably and still they try to pull it. Arlington Heights itself might be sniffing out this scam too. It’s why I think the Chicago Bears should build a stadium themselves in an aqua dome at the bottom of Lake Michigan and leave the rest of us alone.

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My favorite part of Phil Alden Robinson’s “Field of Dreams” (1989) has always been the beginning when farmer Ray Kinsella (Kevin Costner) first hears the voice in his Iowa cornfield. The establishing shots of the landscape are inherently breathtaking even as the eerie soundtrack notes unsettle you just a bit, drawing out the sense that something is out there in that cornfield in Ray, brought home in how the camera rushes up to Ray from behind, putting you in the cosmic clogs of this ghostly presence as it whispers over Ray’s shoulder, “If you build it, he will come.” This is the genesis of the entire movie, a man guided by voices to construct a baseball diamond in his cornfield so that the disgraced, deceased Shoeless Joe Jackson might return to play there, “chisel(ing) away a piece of livelihood to use as dream currency.” That’s a line from W.P. Kinsella’s book on which the movie is based. The book also spent considerable time simply on the field’s creation, including whole paragraphs on the grass, and though that might have required Terrence Malick more than Phil Alden Robinson, I still wish that was more present in the movie, this sense of a man caring for and lingering over something nominally absurd that mattered to him. Still, a lot of that is there in these early scenes in Costner’s almost giggly performance, swept along by something he does and does not understand. If Ray is a suspect farmer, he’s an even worse finance manager, his whole business plan tantamount to a pie in the sky.

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The Field of Dreams movie site in Dyersville, Iowa has become famous in the decades since the movie’s release, augmented by the Major League Baseball game that has taken place there the last two years. Less famous is the All Iowa Lawn Tennis Club, a single court replica of Wimbledon’s All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club, built by Mark and Denise Kuhn on their family farm near Charles City, Iowa, just about two hours northwest of Dyersville, east of Mason City, set down along the Cedar River. In speaking with Stanley Kay of Sports Illustrated last year, Mark Kuhn cited the court as boyhood inspiration from listening to The Championships on shortwave radio with his grandfather in the early 60s, compelled to finally erect the court just after the turn of the century when a farmer friend died and put the fleeting nature of time in perspective. “Never did he expect it to become a destination,” Kay writes. “He just wanted to build it.” Rembert Browne traveled there for Grantland back in 2013 and wrote a moving essay about the experience, noting there was no charge to play. “Just sign the guestbook,” Kuhn told him.

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As a native Iowan, when I visited the Field of Dreams site sometime in the early 90s, it wasn’t quite as intimate as the All Iowa Lawn Tennis Club sounds but intimate nonetheless. And though I would have not intellectually grasped this back then, well, I was a child of the 80s, of the Bud Bowl and product placement, and innately I knew when somebody was trying too hard to sell me something. Aside from some standard-issue souvenirs, the Field of Dreams wasn’t trying to sell you anything. There were people dressed up as old-time baseball players, inviting kids to step up to the plate and then run the bases (as the former worst Iowa little leaguer of all time, I declined to participate) but that was in keeping with the place’s prevailing air of a county carnival rather than a theme park spectacle or sprawling megaplex. The two families that each owned a portion of the field – the Lansings and the Ameskamps – dueled over the amount of commercialization, but all in all it was next-to-none, content to let the experience of being there be the point. 

Eventually, though, the Ameskamps sold their share of the place to the Lansings, and eventually the Lansings sold it all to a terrifying entity called Go the Distance Baseball LLC, transmogrifying the phrase encouraging Ray’s going for broke with limited liability. Go the Distance, which was originally headed up by a suburban Chicago couple, intended to turn the field into a World’s Largest Truck Stop-ish destination called All-Star Ballpark Heaven. It wasn’t so simple. The initially estimated cost ballooned, zoning became a problem and the community objected, fighting the development in court. The community ultimately lost, however, and last year the first MLB game was held at a new stadium constructed not far from the old one. Now Go the Distance Baseball LLC is planning to finally construct its northeast Iowa haven, though not without public funding as the Des Moines Register recently chronicled. Indeed, many of the predicted economic advantages for this will-be complex call to mind the false promises of taxpayer-funded professional in big cities, suggesting the Field of freaking Dreams is on its way to becoming just one more Truist Park. If that ain’t that some shit.

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Internet entrepreneurs, it turns out, are big into employing “Field of Dreams” as an example of How Not To Succeed in Business. (Seriously, Google Field of Dreams approach.) Never mind the humor of the humorless MBA class, it’s hard to argue they’re wrong. You can’t just build a lemonade stand at the end of a cul-de-sac in an affluent community and hope people will come. That, however, puts into humorous perspective how “Field of Dreams” and the Field of Dreams were destined to become incompatible the grander the vision grew. And watching the telecast of this year’s Field of Dreams game, which was presented by Geico, with T-Mobile sponsored drone shots, and a Corona billboard behind home plate made me think how if the field in the film was nothing if not a salvation for the duplicitous Black Sox, in real life the money-changers had essentially been allowed into the temple. The Timothy Busfield character of “Field of Dreams” probably would have conceived a similar scenario post-end credits. “Ray, you can’t just pass around a donation plate!” 

It’s true I might be showing too much reverence toward nothing but a filming location. W.P. Kinsella didn’t seem to mind the Ameskamps and Lansings selling souvenirs and tickets, telling The New York Times in 1999 that “this is America.” Phil Alden Robinson told USA Today in 2014 of the field, “I have no feeling about it that (the field) needs to be preserved as a shrine at all. Movies are ephemeral.” And maybe the movie’s idea of there being something bigger in this world than a profit & loss statement is fleeting too. Maybe it’s just time to bulldoze the Field of Dreams into oblivion.

Alien Superstars

Currently on display at the Norton Simon Museum

Michael Mann recently released a sequel to his second of four magnum opuses “Heat” (1995) in novel form. Among other storylines, “Heat 2” apparently details what transpired after Chris Shiherlis’s initial escape from authorities in the wake of his gang’s big bank robbery gone wrong as well as what led to his and Charlene’s marriage in the first place. And, I don’t know, reader, I just don’t know. The image of Charlene (Ashley Judd) from her balcony waving Chris (Val Kilmer) away, and that breath Judd breathlessly takes in the moment, like she’s taking in their whole existence one last time, isn’t that a perfect final image? Why do we need to expand on it? Never mind that they are Mann’s characters and he can do what he wants with them, I’m the “Before Sunrise” fan, one of the originals with his “Before Sunrise” VHS tape bought at Suncoast Motion Picture Company, who thought the 2004 “Before Sunset” sequel showing what Jesse and Celine were up to 9 years later was an atrocious idea, an insult, how dare they. Then I saw the movie in the theater and swooned so hard I went back to the theater a week later and saw it again. So, really, what do I know? I will probably read “Heat 2” and I will probably love it.

But I’m not here to talk about “Heat 2.” No, I’m here to talk about a Tweet from Michael Mann himself about “Heat 2” including an image from “Heat.” This Tweet.

That Tweet stopped me short. I was going through Twitter like the Joker of Tim Burton’s “Batman” going through Vicki Vale’s portfolio – “Crap, crap, crap, crap, crap” – until he gets to the good stuff. I saw that photo of Judd and Kilmer as Charlene and Chris and I just looked at it like the time I looked at Monet’s Regatta at Argenteuil at the Musée d’Orsay and tried for, like, 15 minutes to walk away and just…couldn’t. I mean, look at it! I know part of this stems from the youth and beauty of Ashley and Val given the former’s severe injuries from falling in the Congo and the latter’s health issues, including losing his voice, so severe they seem to suggest his recent nigh wordless appearance in the “Top Gun” sequel was his movie swan song.

Let’s set aside youth, however, and just focus on beauty. I don’t mean to be shallow here but…they’re beautiful. They are the mystical Beautiful People. They’re the kind of couple you ogle as a couple yourself from across the way, saying things like, “Now that is a beautiful couple.” They’re like Beyoncé and Jay-Z that time at the NBA Finals where the second half had already started but America’s Royals got shepherded to their courtside seats anyway and for a minute there you couldn’t even pay attention to the best athletes in the world because these Beautiful People had just wandered on to your screen. They’re like the chorus of Beyoncé’s “Alien Superstar”...“too classy for this world.”  “Heat” deserves an NPA rating because of this image. No Puritans Allowed. Mann dresses them both in black, emphasizing their features which in the scene’s 35mm lighting seems to coat them in the patina of their beauty. Some people glow and Charlene and Chris glow.

But. But! Chris’s lips are ever so slightly apart, suggesting he is speaking, yet looking slightly past her, as if uninterested in her reaction to whatever he’s saying. But her reaction makes the frame. Her face is quizzical, her eyes in a squint that might be confusion or might be disbelief, giving the frame an unexpected tension. Her posture is relaxed, rhyming with the spaghetti strap of her era-appropriate dress tumbling off her shoulder, but the relaxation taken in tandem with the expression transforms it into something more akin to boredom, a bored dissatisfaction, whatever he’s saying an unwitting metaphor for everything that even their beauty cannot cover up. 

Wait, What Did He Just Say?

One of the best recurring bits of of Hulu’s Steve Martin and John Hoffman-created true crime podcast send-up “Only Murders in the Building” that My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife and I have been enjoying is the obsession nascent podcast host Oliver (Martin Short) has with dips. “Dips can be a meal,” he explains in a line sure to be dutifully recited by fans of the show around veggie platters for years to come. Oliver’s love of dips is on full display in a recent episode set during an NYC blackout. He happens to be at a diner with his two fellow tenants, amateur sleuths and podcast cohosts (Martin and Selena Gomez) when the power goes out and their server, knowing Oliver’s devotion to immersive sauces, gives him all their dips lest they go to waste in a powerless fridge. Oliver accepts, of course, but given his overly dramatic fragility (and bad knees) he abandons them in a stairwell of their apartment building a few floors up when he decides they are too heavy to carry any further. But before he presses on, he suddenly whips back around to face his beloved condiments mini-meals. (All terrible screenshots taken with my phone pointed at the TV.)

“Stay alive!” Oliver lovingly councils the dips, beginning an homage to the famous scene in this blog’s all-time favorite movie “Last of the Mohicans.” “No matter what occurs! I will find you!” 

At which point we cut to a point-of-view shot, the camera drifting toward the bag, not really to suggest the inanimate dips are impossibly in the throes of Madeleine Stowe-ish passion or even might suddenly spring to life but to put a comical point on Oliver’s absurd longing for them. 

“No matter how long it takes,” Oliver finishes, where Short’s expression takes on a true twinge of melancholy. “I will find you.”

It’s been 25 years since I gave a speech to my rhetoric class at the University of Iowa featuring a clip of that scene, though why I included a clip of that scene I cannot for the life of me recall. (Probably I just built the speech around the clip to have an excuse to show it which probably explains why I was not one of Iowa’s most celebrated students.) That means it’s been 30 years since “Last of the Mohicans” has been released. Dropping a “Last of the Mohicans” reference, then, in a 2022 show about a podcast, which wasn’t even a gleam in the eye of early 90s Nick, who would have been so confused to learn about podcasts while listening to Bob Edwards on NPR Morning Edition on his dad’s car radio on the way to basketball practice, would potentially make it seem...dated.

But if the part of “Only Murders in the Building” is about boomers and millennials sort of coming together, it’s notable that the millennial in this case – Gomez’s Mabel – does not ask Oliver what he’s talking about, as if she knows what he’s talking about, as if all these years later “Last of the Mohicans” is what I have long suspected it to be deep down in places I too frequently talk about at parties: timeless. 

In Memoriam: Anne Heche

Earlier this year my friend Jaime inaugurated an in-order Nicole Holofcener retrospective. That meant it began with 1996’s “Walking and Talking,” a vintage 90s experience, where the video store was the nexus of culture, where all jobs were pointless, where characters truly walked and talked. It starred Catherine Keener and Anne Heche as best friends, the latter character about to walk down the aisle but feeling hesitation, suddenly seeing all the flaws, real or imagined, in her husband-to-be (Todd Field). Holofcener movies are frequently great because she allows her characters to be erratic and eccentric and though hers essentially felt trapped, you could still sense in Heche the joy stemming from the freedom of being given the space to explore all that mess. It foreshadowed Heche’s best movie roles, where the air around her seemed to crackle from her own unique energy. It’s fascinating to imagine a career trajectory similar to her co-star Keener as an indie queen. Instead, the following year, 1997, functioned as Heche’s entrance to Hollywood, beginning with “Donnie Brasco,” a good movie if less interested in its female characters, where her forlorn expression at the end could have belonged to Heche the actor as much as the character she was playing.  

She followed “Donnie Brasco” with two traditional would-be blockbusters, “Volcano” and “Six Days, Seven Nights,” paired off with two of Hollywood’s gruffest leading men - Tommy Lee Jones and Harrison Ford, respectively. The latter was too pedestrian a rom com and too conventionally imagined by its director to properly utilize an actor as off-kilter as Heche. In the former, at least, playing the stock role of Blonde Scientist, to quote the late Roger Ebert, she cut through all the clichés with a believable zeal. Best, though, was “Wag the Dog,” in which a movie producer (Dustin Hoffman), political operative (Robert DeNiro), and Presidential Advisor (Anne Heche) devise a fake war to distract from the American President’s scandal. Only Hoffman and DeNiro got to be on the poster, but this was a Three Musketeers situation through and through and Heche was one of them, her aggressive, razor-edged wit put to premium use. It is one of my all-time favorite comedies, on par with just about anything from the Golden Age. (Watch clip below, but be warned it is Not Safe For Work.)

Heche, though, who was declared legally dead last Friday after an awful, destructive, disturbing, sad, tragic car crash, never had it easy. She did not have it easy as a person born to an abusive father as she detailed in her memoir, and whose mental health struggles were less empathized with than mocked. She did not have it easy as an actress in Hollywood, claiming she was blacklisted for her famous relationship with Ellen DeGeneres in the late 90s (if not also for those struggles with mental health). Consult her IMDb profile post-1997 and it’s virtually impossible not to believe her. But when afforded the chance, she proved her talent, like in 2011’s “Cedar Rapids,” set at an insurance convention in the eponymous Iowa city. That movie did not see her magnificently named Joan Ostrowski-Fox quite as clear as its male characters, no surprise, but Heche did, sort of playing the Vera Farmiga part of “Up in the Air” in the key of comic tragedy, a performance brave enough to admit career and family are not necessarily a saving grace. 

In “Birth” (2004), Heche was phenomenal. There the equally phenomenal Nicole Kidman plays a woman convinced her dead husband has been reincarnated as an 10-year-old boy. That’s a weird concept, and Heche tapped right into that wavelength, leaving an indelible mark despite only being in a few scenes by giving a performance that is all witch-ay woman; she has the moon in her eyes. Her character might be harboring a secret but Heche is not playing Woman With a Secret, not exactly, more like Woman With Truth You Are Not Ready to Hear, which, come to think of it, pretty much summarized her relationship to Hollywood.

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Tall T (1957)

In early scenes of Budd Boetticher’s “The Tall T” (1957) Randolph Scott bears a smile of impressive misdirection. As retired ramrod, aspirant rancher Pat Brennan, Scott virtually beams as he agrees to buy a station manager’s apple-cheeked kid some candy and drop it off on his way back through. Yet in the ensuing scene, when he foolishly bets his horse to try and win a bull by riding it, only to be thrown, his smile takes on some form of relished malevolence when he punches one of the guys laughing it up at his expense. Brennan’s wayward bet is precisely what yields all his trouble, wandering down the trail without a horse and picked up by a stagecoach carrying a couple newlyweds, Willard (John Hubbard) and Doretta (Maureen O’Sullivan) Mims, all winding up as hostages to a trio of robbers cum kidnappers who take them to a remote hideout in the mountainous desert where the vast, empty skies of the striking location work portend a psychological turning of the screws, every man and woman for themselves.

The return to the way station is an early example of the film’s provocative cruelty. Though Brennan’s vow to bring the manager’s kid candy certainly comes on like the planting of a narrative seed, it dies out right quick when he learn the kid and his father have both been killed and thrown down a well by the would-be robbers Frank (Richard Boone), Chink (Henry Silva), and Billy Jack (Skip Homeier). Willard’s tucking tail into cowardice, on other hand, feels more inevitable, the self-regarding irritability with which Hubbard plays his introductory scenes giving no allusions that he’s anything else. Even so, the swiftness with which he flips, insisting to Frank that he can cut them a better deal than sticking up an approaching stagecoach by getting his wife’s wealthy husband to cough up a massive ransom for his daughter’s safe turn, is revealingly spineless. And his end, riding ahead and away from his wife without so much as a goodbye, gunned down by Chink at Frank’s order in cold blood, feels like Boetticher daring you to cheer at this lily-liver’s comeuppance.

For a good chunk of “The Tall T,”, in fact, Doretta hardly says a word, as much a passenger in her own life as she is in that held-up stagecoach. Adapted from a short story by Elmore Leonard, however, “The Tall T” is not succumbing to the invisible woman archetype but exploring it. Indeed, sadistically eyeing her, Chink notes that he “knew a quiet woman once. Outside, calm as Sunday. Inside, wild as mountain scenery.” Frank and his crew force her into her expected role, cooking for them and making her coffee, though when she burns her hand on the coffeepot, you know full well it’s a role she’s not cut out to play, trapped not just here, in the middle of nowhere, but in the world itself. 

Though the situation would seem to suggest Brennan as the White Hat and Frank as the Black Hat, the result is far more complicated, the two characters emerging not so much as reflections of one another as unexpected opposites. Frank is the one who dreams of buying himself a ranch and settling down, even if to do so means making a big score by illegal means, which Boetticher is refreshingly happy to let speak for itself as a condition of a murky world. And though Boone has a heinous laugh when something strikes his fancy, the character emits gentlemanly touches too, taking a meal to Doretta and leaving it for her with nary a word or motion of harassment. Brennan, on the other hand, might scheme for ways to get free, like turning Frank’s two henchmen against one another, but one involves essentially talking Billy Jack into physically assaulting Doretta, providing Brennan an opening. 

He might save her but it’s a nasty inversion of the hero archetype, setting a predator loose to play hero to save his own skin. He also lets Frank go when he has a chance to shoot him down in cold blood, honoring the debt Frank insinuates is owed. And that Frank could well make a clean getaway only to turn back around and get himself shot dead feels like the conclusion of “Once Upon a Time in the West” stripped of all its operatic grandeur, laid bare as being nothing more than dumb as a skunk. 

Shout-Out to the Extra: Grease Version

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

As I recollect, my parents had taped the 1978 movie version of the stage musical “Grease” to our Betamax at some point in the 80s, but I don’t ever remember watching it nor listening to the “Grease” soundtrack until high school, right around the point where my circle of friends and I were devouring music, I mean any and all music, anything we could get our ears around, far beyond the basics of the mid-90s Billboard charts. We’re talking Drifters and Three Dog Night deep cuts and jazz fusion and Uriah Heep and Yanni: Live at the Acropolis and yes, the “Grease” soundtrack entered the mix there, too, at some point. I remember my friend David telling me that he listened to the “Grease” soundtrack every night went he went to bed, but that he didn’t go to sleep until he got in all his favorites. One of those favorites, it probably goes without saying, was “Summer Nights,” the cross-cutting duet in which Olivia Newton-John’s Sandy and John Travolta’s Danny recount their summer romance, unaware that they are now both enrolled in the same high school.

At some point during the lockdown portion of the Pandemic My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife and I happened upon “Grease” showing on some TV channel and watched part of it, including “Summer Nights” where we noticed something new. It’s an extra, one who pops up on Sandy’s side of the story in the school cafeteria. Right at the song’s turn, when it briefly downshifts and Sandy laments “It turned colder, that’s where it ends,” hugging herself as if she feels the chills from her memory and walks heavily left to right. As she does, the camera tracks with her and picks up an extra in the background, sitting on top of a lunch table, his feet on the bench, his chin in his hand, staring off into the distance.

Rather than merely going through the background motions, our heroic extra has channeled the spirit of the scene, of Sandy, of Olivia Newton-John (RIP), like if Rodin’s Thinker had been plunked down on the edge of a 35mm Metrocolor version of a Renaissance painting, compelled it would seem to remember his own teenage dream, to wonder what she’s doin’ now. Those summer nights, man.

Top 5 Nicolas Cage Performances

I did not necessarily mean for this week to turn into Nic Cage week, but here we are. Because I really wanted to write about Cage’s purportedly transitory (but not really) “The Trust” on the heels of writing about Cage’s “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent” and, hey, one thing led to another, I scribbled my five favorite Cage turns on a Post-it and decided to post. I mean, why not? When on blogger… A couple notes: 1.) “Pig” is not included. It’s a great performance, perhaps Top 5 worthy, but just barely a year old and as such, in need of more time for reflection. 2.) I still adore “Leaving Las Vegas,” it’s fantastic, and Cage in it, don’t misunderstand, but I’ve always considered Shue the true MVP there, and anyway, let’s talk some Cage turns that aren’t the ones that won the Oscar.

Note: these are not ranked, and in something like spiritual order as opposed to alphabetical order.

Moonstruck. The key Cage performative text, I’ve come to realize, in so much as he is going over the top, just like the opera you see his character attend, and which has frequently informed his turns to varying degrees and in different ways ever since, leading boring people who demand believability in all mythical flickering images to not grasp that Cage is the most prominent modern-day tenor of the movies.

The Weather Man. In his air, the Long Beach-born Cage finds the key of a Chicago winter, moving and wearing the weary expressions of a Windy City denizen in late April where there is still a goddam chance of snow.  

Raising Arizona. Some movie performances are in and of themselves special effects, like Vincent D’Onofrio in “Men in Black,” like Anne Baxter in “The Ten Commandments,” and like Nic Cage in “Raising Arizona.” Indeed, in rewatching the whole Coen Bros. oeuvre during the lockdown part of the Pandemic, Friend of the Blog Willie noted that in “Raising Arizona” Cage turned himself into a Looney Tone, which is a more evocative description of Cage’s astonishing physical expressiveness in the second Coen brothers movie than I could ever hope to devise and meaning that Cage homages Wiley E. Coyote by defying gravity in his own way, effecting gestures and mannerisms and movements that couldn’t possibly be effected by a real person until you remind yourself that what you’re watching isn’t animated.

Kick-Ass. As the superhero father to a superhero daughter, Cage strikes a resonant, profound balance between nobility and hubris, between genuine paternal protection and being blind to his own  fatherly heedlessness. 

Red Rock West. In John Dahl’s 1993 neo-noir, Cage is reading his character’s swaggering, cigarette-smoking Cool not as charismatic indifference but a total bluff of desperation.

Mandy. “Wait,” you’re saying, “this is a top five and isn’t this number six?” Yes, astute reader, it is, and what of it? You think Nic Cage would concoct a Top 5 bound by its own specified limits? 2 is 1, 11 is 7, 6 is 5, and in “Mandy” Cage translated the Italian opera of “Moonstruck” into Italian horror, avenging his wife with a soulful anguish that skillfully builds to a concluding scene where his sears-into-your-brain unhinged facial expression sends the notion of cosmic law and order up in flames.

Leaving Las Vegas. You know what, I changed my mind. I can’t leave this out. 7 is 5, and 7 +5 is 12, and 12 is the number of divine authority, or so Google tells me. 

Some Drivel On...The Trust

There is a moment late in “The Trust” (2016) when a complicated heist being pulled by a pair of renegade cops including Lt. Jim Stone (Nicolas Cage) hits a snag. What will they do? “I have an idea,” offers Stone, “it’s kind of wacky.” Because this is Nicolas Cage, you might be able to imagine how he says the line, especially if you have encountered a Nicolas Cage meme. He tilts his head back just a little, his eyes bug ever so slightly, and even though “WACKY” deserves to be capitalized because Cage emphasizes it so much, his emphasis is more of an emphatic whisper, Randy of “Valley Girl” filtered through the police academy. Of course, because you can imagine exactly how Cage says this line is also why it’s so predictable, the movie’s most unfortunately defining moment, the one where Cage falls back on the tics his adoring social media-specific public expects only because he is not sure what else to do. Indeed, Alex and Benjamin Brewer’s thriller winds up in a kind of reverse “Alice in Wonderland” situation where the more formulaic it is, the more fresh it feels, and the more perplexing it strives to be, the more perfunctory it becomes. 

Notes of “The Trust’s” occasional rudimentary recipe can be detected straight away in the opening shot of Detective David Waters (Elijah Wood) lying comatose in a bed as a woman pleasures him, the juxtaposition very obviously meant to underline the character’s emptiness within. There is something more fascinating in cross-cutting to Jim as he gets ready for work, Cage’s air denoting a joy in his occupation despite the inherent contradictions on display when a superior requests that Jim, who works in evidence management, sets aside some of that more extravagant evidence for a family member. Listen to and look at the way in which Cage has his character observe an ash tray at the crime scene, deeming it “unique,” a line reading and moment suggestive of someone who finds unexpected pleasure in his job while remaining open to unlikely details, illuminating why the character might notice a low-level drug dealer being bailed out with a significant amount of cash.

That is what prompts Jim to enlist the passive David in their own surveillance of this dealer after his release and discovering he and his underworld associates move merchandise to a building but never move it back out, prompting plans for a heist to grab all that is there. Throughout the planning stages, the Brothers Brewer maintain a jovial tone, in comic scenes of Jim posing as a hotel worker and deploying a bad German accent (this is not my judgement; the movie itself is saying the accent is bad) to buy a special drill from Deutschland. That tone stays in step with Cage’s truly deft performance that improbably suggests Denzel Washington’s Detective Alonzo Harris of “Training Day” remixed as John C. Reilly’s Officer Jim Kurring of “Magnolia.” And while Wood manages a nice comic chemistry with Cage, his own character’s semi-awakening never feels convincing or interesting, paling in comparison to Cage’s blend of nice guy and outlaw.

This blend, it’s so evocative, so unexpected, that “The Trust” never knows what to do with it – nay, probably had no idea what it was getting in the first place, indebted to follow its screenplay and finally, eventually, as the duo’s heist through a ceiling from above where the loot is stashed in some not-quite-impenetrable safe runs into various complications, essentially loses sight of the character and winds up merely moving him out of the way. The Brothers Brewer ultimately dangles several questions that never get resolved, straining for profundity through empty enigmas. The real enigma here is Lt. Jim Stone, too peculiar for this world, too peculiar for this movie. When David criticizes Jim for dressing like a cop, the latter incredulously replies “I am a cop,” Cage paradoxically evoking his character as an unsolvable riddle by playing him as an open book. 

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent

The massive talent of the title of Tom Gormican’s film belongs to Nicolas Cage the Oscar-winning actor who is playing himself, or a variation of himself at least, his familiar Nic Cage nickname rechristened here as Nick Cage. Even if last year’s “Pig” only reconfirmed what many of us already knew, that Nic Cage remains a preeminent actor of his generation, he is frequently contextualized in terms of parody. Consult the gif keyboard on your phone and you will find all sorts of images of bug-eyed Cage, crazy-eyed Cage, screaming Cage. That’s how he wound up on that aspirant provocative Actors Who Are Bad at Acting listicle from Jezebel (not linking) where in response to having included Nicholas Cage (sic, which suggests it was just a massive troll job or the writer doesn’t have much authority), listmaker Clover Hope piffled “i love him he’s great at screaming.” Such predictable pablum fails to take into account how even in ostensible trash, be it “Trespass,” be it “The Trust,” Cage is still giving thoughtful performances in so much as he is still thinking about his character in any given situation and acting accordingly. That is all to say, despite the seeming absurdity, Cage generally takes each of his roles seriously, and so even as he embraces self-parody in “The Massive Weight of Unbearable Talent,” Cage takes the role seriously, which is to say he takes the role of an absentee father standing up for his fractured family seriously, meaning a seeming parody morphs into something unexpectedly heartfelt.

“The Massive Weight of Unbearable Talent” opens with Cage bombing a meeting with David Gordon Green (as himself) by choosing to audition right there on the sidewalk. He follows this up by ruining his daughter’s birthday party in drunkenly serenading her. This is not just Nick Cage dramatically bottoming out but “The Massive Weight of Unbearable Talent” slyly sending up the overriding cultural belief that Nic Cage always takes things too far, urged on by a vision of his younger self as his character from “Wild at Heart,” like if the vision of Bogey in “Play it Again, Sam” had been Fred C. Dobbs instead of Rick Blaine, or something. Disillusioned and depressed, Nick Cage decides to retire from acting, but not before agreeing to $1 million to attend the birthday party of millionaire playboy and super Nicolas Cage fan Javi Gutierrez (Pedro Pascal) in Majora. Once there, Javi ropes Nick into writing a screenplay and the CIA (Tiffany Haddish and Ike Barinholtz) enlists him a raggedy op to expose Javi as international drug dealer, giving Cage a chance to play two roles of a lifetime at once.

The CIA subplot in which Javi turns out to be under the thumb of his cousin (Paco León) is mostly straight-faced and in all the worst ways, evinced as mere plot filler and evoked in how Tiffany Haddish, one of the most explosive performers in modern-day movies, is almost entirely muted. You could have cast anyone in this role and it would have been virtually the same. Why enlist Haddish when you will not provide the freedom for her to express herself, an oversight spiritually at odds with the Zen of Cage. On the other hand, Pascal finds just the right notes as Javi, an almost apologetic fanboy who would rather watch movies than oversee the family business, suggesting Randall Park’s turn as Kim Jong-un in “The Interview” but in more heroically assertive terms than egotistical tragedy. 

Eventually, of course, Nick Cage’s ex-wife and daughter (Sharon Horgan and Lily Sheen, respectively) are caught up in this mess, meaning Nick will have to stand up and save the day. In one scene, he literally comes face-to-face with himself, or a shadow of himself, a wax figure of his character from “Face/Off,” clutching replicas of those famous golden guns. There is a fascinating idea buried in there which someone like Charlie Kaufman might have been able to extract and make hay with, a mixture  of Methodology and the necessity of Method actors leaving their characters on the screen, or something, that “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent” never quite knows how to tap into, content with too many deep cut Cage references that stand for nothing but themselves. Cage, though, finds his own wavelength, as you might expect, giving a surprising emotional heft to otherwise routine action scenes that come across like mere scaffolding for a character epiphany than electrifying on their own. In “Bowfinger,” Eddie Murphy’s Kit Ramsey thought he was saving the world, even if he wasn’t, though we saw this from Bowfinger’s point-of-view rather than Kit’s. In a sense, “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent” is showing us Kit Ramsey’s unlikely hero’s journey from Kit’s point-of-view but with Nick Cage subbed in for Kit, patching his family back together and preserving his self-worth rather than rescuing the globe.

Gormican renders the climactic moment of Nick embracing his daughter and wife in a low-angled, spinning, slow-motion shot (deliberately) straight out of the Michael Bay playbook, the lines not blurring between Nick Cage and Stanley Goodspeed of “The Rock,” but falling away entirely, revealing Cage as one of the few actors around who could send up his own action movie persona by embracing it whole-heartedly.

Petit tour des cabines téléphoniques au cinéma

Alfred Hitchcock knew the dramatic value of a good phone booth, trapping Tippi Hedren in one when “The Birds” attack, a more terrifying precursor to The Beatles deftly employing phone booths as a hiding spot one year later in “A Hard Day’s Night.” Indeed, it was around this time that producer Larry Cohen pitched the Master of Suspense the idea of a movie set entirely within a phone booth. Yet, if Hitchcock had managed to wrangle an entire movie of people in a “Lifeboat,” he and Cohen could not devise a whole film around an enclosed pay phone, and it was not until the late 90s, near the peak of public pay phones in the United States in 1995, that Cohen figured out his idea and began selling the script. And then Hollywood rigmarole, with directors and actors coming and going, meant that by the time “Phone Booth” at long last reached the big screen for a proper release in the spring of 2003, public pay phones were ironically on their way out. This looming extinction is baked into the script, with the phone booth where Colin Farrell’s character is trapped courtesy of a sniper’s rifle cited as being the last one in New York and scheduled for removal. It functioned as a spiritual goodbye, of sorts, as the very next year, 2004, Chris Evans starred in the appropriately titled thriller “Cellular,” where his unsuspecting character fields a mobile call from a woman (Kim Basinger) who desperately needs his help. 

In retrospect, these two movies signaled a demarcation in movie land between analog and digital that mirrored the evolving nature of real life where the omnipresence of cellular phones inexorably squeezed out pay phones, leading to one portion of the plot of “Phone Booth” finally coming true as New York’s last street payphone was removed in May. If the pervasiveness of cellular technology has yielded convenience, and all the standard bullet point benefits, it has caused us to lose something too. In appraising for The New York Times how pay phones and phone booths cordoned off “telecommunications…to discrete spaces, separate from the rest of your life,” Melissa Kirsch referenced Richard Dreyfuss’s call to Marsha Mason from a phone booth in a thunderstorm in “The Goodbye Girl.” Twenty-eight years later when Drew Baylor called Claire Colburn in “Elizabethtown,” they could drive to a physical meet up while still chatting via their 2005-appropriate block phones, evoking how that wall of separation had crumbled. As a character, Claire has taken all sorts of flack over the years, and fair enough, but when she dryly laments “we peaked on the phone,” woah nelly, was she was foreshadowing our present. 

But if that means “Phone Booth” was in many ways a culmination of phone booths and pay phones at the cinema, it has never quite felt to me as their emblematic movie apex, too much of a gimmick to truly capture the essence of Alexander Graham’s Bell invention in a public space. That’s why Dirty Harry (Clint Eastwood) running around to answer calls from pay phones doesn’t move the needle for me just as John McClane (Bruce Willis) doing it however many years later in “Die Hard With a Vengeance” feels the same. No, the ultimate “Die Hard” pay phone moment for me will always be from the second “Die Hard,” “Die Harder,” when John McClane is waiting for his wife at Dulles and she calls his beeper (!) from her airphone (!!) and to call her back he has to wait for a pay phone (!!!) to open up in a crowded airport on Christmas Eve. It’s this mini-little moment of drama that Bruce Willis plays to the subtle hilt, diving for a pay phone that suddenly opens up like a running back hitting the hole, the camera catching sight of the disappointed patron who missed his shot to make his own call, as Willis indulges in this little moment of victorious pleasure while dialing, his body language reveling in having this pay phone all to himself, a tiny private space carved out of the mass of Dulles.

Essentially, of course, that’s what a phone booth could provide, contrary to what “Phone Booth” would have you believe, a sense of privacy, an intimate space, where Ritchie Valens serenaded the Donna in “La Bamba” and Clarence and Alabama, indifferent to the whoosh of semi-trucks flying by, get it on in “True Romance.” Of course, that intimacy can swing both ways, entrapping you, whether it’s Lloyd Dobler on the phone in the rain or Jimmy Conway in “Goodfellas.” “Anchorman” Ron Burgundy might have memorably bellowed that he was “trapped in glass case of emotion!” but no one was ever more trapped in an emotional glass case with greater intensity than Jimmy Conway in “Goodfellas.” You remember the moment, I’m sure, him learning via pay phone that Tommy has been whacked the very day he was set to become a made man and then Jimmy taking out all his frustration on the phone booth, battering it and kicking it with such ferocity that the street corner edifice tumbles. Once I saw Anne Heche on the Late Show with David Letterman to promote “Wag the Dog” and the clip they played was one on the plane when Heche is talking with a sleep mask-wearing DeNiro. Letterman jokingly said something to the effect of, That guy is such a good actor, he can act blindfolded. Well, DeNiro was such a good actor, he could turn a phone booth into a scene partner. 

True, phone booths became a symbol of blight, the word served up by The New York Times in going over the last pay phones in NYC, one frequently coded with racial prejudice. 1980s movie like “The Secret of My Success” pseudo-comically demonstrated the terrors of the Big City by trapping Michael J. Fox in a phone booth as a shootout erupted around him, while Penelope Ann Miller being trapped in a phone booth in a Chicago bus station in “Adventures in Babysitting” was less a haven than emblem of scary downtown Chicago to a cowering suburbanite. Even so, movies of the same era were just as likely to treat the phone booth with reverence. They are where Clark Kent changed clothes, after all, and one served as a time machine for “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.” As great as the last one was, though, no phone booth ever served as more of a portal than the red telephone box in “Local Hero” (1983). That’s where oil and gas exec Mac (Peter Riegert) gets dispatched to Scotland to see about acquiring a Highlands village for a refinery. The company’s owner, though, Felix Happer (Burt Lancaster), in a twist more fanciful than any ancient fairytale, is a CEO less interested in profit than stargazing. In one scene he listens on the other end of the phone from Houston as Mac stands in that phone box and describes the sky. The pay phone becomes a kind of portal, the sequence improbably rendering Reach Out and Touch Someone as something more than mere marketing verbiage, nearly peak payphone at the movies but not quite.

In a sense, Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Punch-Drunk Love” is a movie all about phones. It begins with novelty plunger salesman Barry Egan (Adam Sandler) taking the name and extension of the customer service rep on the other end of his phone line and that scene gives way to Barry trying to give his home phone number to one of his own clients on a different call. Both of these telephone-based conversations evoke Barry’s loneliness as much as the wide angles in which PTA frames him, and that loneliness becomes only more acute when at home he dials a phone sex hotline, the meekness in Sandler’s turning Reach Out and Touch Someone into something else altogether. Of course, this hotline reveals itself as a blackmail scheme, a personalized kind of robocall, betraying the phone as a familiar and ongoing tool of cruddy capitalism, while Barry’s profane over-the-phone face/off with the company’s owner (Philip Seymour Hoffman) demonstrates the phone as a weapon, a source of intimidation, as much as Christopher Plummer gazing up from that phone booth and into Elliot Gould’s apartment in “The Silent Partner.”

“Punch-Drunk Love’s” most critical scene doubles as the most important phone call Barry makes, after deciding on a whim to fly to Hawaii to see the woman he loves, Lena (Emily Watson), only calling her once he has arrived on Oahu. The scene, it’s pure romance, the pay phone noticeably lighting up when Lena answers. But once he’s told her he’s there and she tells him to come meet her, he starts asking her questions, the kind you might on first date, comically ignoring her pleas to hang up by just posing another getting-to-know-you query instead. In Kirsch’s piece for The New York Times, she notes that even if her beloved phone call in “The Goodbye Girl” is sentimental, it can be a useful metaphor for delineating boundaries between virtual and real life, and that is essentially what Anderson is evoking here even as he takes it one step further.

Barry just wants to stay on the phone, where things seem a little easier; Lena is telling him to hang up and come join her in the real world.