Some Drivel On...61*

As MLB commissioner Ford Frick (Donald Moffat) holds council with several sportswriters over the emerging crisis, from their point of view, that Roger Maris (Barry Pepper) or Mickey Mantle (Thomas Janes) might usurp the hallowed home run record of their fellow New York Yankee Babe Ruth, a framed portrait of The Babe hangs on the wall just over the shoulder of Frick. This puts into perspective how much history looms in director Billy Crystal’s 2001 made for TV chronicling of the summer of 1961’s famed home run chase. Much of the hoopla was fulminated and guided by the press, which Crystal takes great care to evince through his considerable media Greek chorus even as he too frequently uses that press corps as a crutch, expositing information, explaining emotion that should just be explained by the scene itself, the clear budgetary constraints no excuse for limits in aesthetic imagination. Thankfully, Pepper and Jane transcend the sometimes on-the-nose writing of their Odd Couple friendship to produce something real and as surprisingly easy as it is eventually complicated. “61*,” though, never really gets into the head of Roger Maris as he approaches #61, though that is partially a symptom of Maris himself, a character not unlike the Neil Armstrong of Damien Chazelle’s “First Man”: still waters may or may not run deep. Through this lens, he emerges as indifferent pawn and ultimate victim of the harsh light of sports history, which Crystal both seems to realize and not realize at all, turning that victimization into the very dramatic sports movie obstacle that this Roger Maris must hurdle and does, the stately culmination essentially and unironically fitting for Maris for his very own framed portrait on the MLB commissioner’s wall.

Vibes and Stuff

I am no art historian, mind you, nor an armchair art historian even, just a guy who went to the Cézanne exhibit at Chicago’s Art Institute this past summer and read all the placards, most of which were intent on explaining the French painter’s intense relationship with vibrations. For him, these helpful signboards would essentially explain, it wasn’t enough to capture the thing in the painting – the fruit, the sky, the person – but the essence, nay, the feeling, the sensation, the vibration of the thing. When Cézanne said he wanted to astonish Paris with an apple, it meant, it seemed to me, that he did not merely want people to see a recreation of a Golden or a Granny or a Reine de Reinette, but to evince through a painting the sensation an apple would arouse in your presence by not just heightening your sense here in looking at his painting but to the way it would otherwise imperceptibly heighten your sense in the presence of an actual Golden or Granny or Reine de Renette. When I saw Still Life Bread And Leg Of Lamb, reader, without even realizing I was doing it, I licked my lips.

The word vibration has over the years been shortened into vibe, generally described as an ambiance or a feeling, like what Jackie DeShannon is singing about in “When You Walk in the Room.” That pop classic was released in 1964, a couple years before The Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations” which helped confer a hippie association on vibes. But vibes as we understand them now in terms of art, a kind of intrinsic emotional resonance, were around in 60s cinema too. Jean-Luc Godard (RIP) distributed vibes like party favors; Monica Vitti (RIP) rode the vibes of Antonioni like waves. Honestly, cinematic vibes go back even further to Howard Hawks taking Chandler and Hemingway novels, breaking them down, and then building them back up entirely in the vibes of Bogey and Bacall. Even Jean Harlow transcended the convoluted, contrived plot of something like “China Seas” by virtue of her platinum blonde vibes.

The answer, my friend, is blowing in the vibes.

As narrative cinema and narrative TV, however, grew ever more alike, with cliffhangers leading to new movies like new seasons, where knowledge is required of other plot lines in previous movies or similar movie universes, movie viewers became less enamored with vibes. Consider “Top Gun: Maverick,” frequently being described as better than “Top Gun” because it has a better, clearer narrative than the original which was just a sensory explosion of vibes. At the same time, however, it seems as if people began noticing the absence of vibes and started pushing back. Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times professed that “Tenet” should be understood as all vibes (though I grasp the larger point, I disagree with this take nevertheless, because Christopher Nolan is too taken with his own plots to think strictly in terms of vibes) and the invaluable culture writer Molly Lambert has frequently asked for less plot, more vibes. Kyle Chayka of The New Yorker has noted how Tik-Tok has become a vessel for a modern vibes revival, though what he’s writing about there, “the collection of real-world observations, strung together in a filmic montage,” evokes what something like Aaron Katz’s “Quiet City” was already doing back in 2007. The vibes revival of which Chayka writes might explain the long overdue reappraisal of Michael Mann’s “Miami Vice” (2006) as a masterpiece given how in so many ways it ditched story to harvest transcendence from the essence of a mojito, the sensation of the sky, the vibration of a speedboat seatbelt being buckled. The vibes have always been there.

Vibes have staged such a comeback that in a Through the Looking Glass situation they have even begun invading TV, like Hulu’s tale of a Chicago Italian Beef joint “The Bear,” leaving some people and critics raised on the age of Golden TV baffled. “(T)hat’s all there is,” Soraya Roberts semi-infamously lamented for Defector, “no thoughts, only vibes. Shows like these have no real point, only the aura of a point, one expressed through music, cinematography, set design, direction and acting, without a solid enough story or developed characters to ground it all.” Indeed, “The Bear” is not television as we have come to understand it. Even if television is sometimes framed as being like a movie, that’s generally because a series is a closed loop, a one-off season and that is not what “The Bear” program creator and executive producer Christopher Storer is up to. In fact, the worst part of the first season is precisely how it bridges to the inevitable second season by virtue of a plot twist that feels like an oddly earnest and inadvertent manifestation of the comic “Arrested Development” adage “There’s always money in the banana stand.”

No, “The Bear” is best understood not as an eight episode first season but as a sort of vibes suite, eight pieces of mood in which Storer and his team deploy all the devices Roberts is criticizing – music, cinematography, set design, direction and acting – to create that mood. The emergent recap culture of the last decade in which plot details are described and then contextualized in some attempt to fit them on the fly into a theory of a broader overarching theme is frankly useless in the face of something like “The Bear,” which is less surface than depth, to borrow a phrase from one of the Cézanne placards, a series of aesthetic choices meant to elicit a series of sensations and vibrations of a pressure-cooked kitchen, pockets of emotional release from all that pressure (the show might not get Chicago, as it were, in toto but every one of the smoke breaks in a back alley between people in white aprons looks like the ones I’ve been seeing in alleys behind restaurants from the train going to and from work for the last 17 years) and fleeting moments of beauty like the treats conjured up by an aspiring pastry chef.

Storer astonished dumb old TV with a cake; if you think that cake is no substitute for story, shit, I can’t help you.

Small Town Wisconsin

“Small Town Wisconsin” is only the second feature film of director Niels Mueller, nearly 20 years after “The Assassination of Richard Nixon” in 2004. Those titles, the former deliberately plain and the latter as spectacular as the spectacularly boneheaded faux event it’s about, would at first glance appear to have nothing in common. Drill down just a couple feet, though, and they are quite similar, both the story of a dum-dum dad struggling to get it (to keep it) together. It’s just that in “Small Town Wisconsin” this manifests itself in alcoholism and anger and in “The Assassination of Richard Nixon” this manifests itself as, well, obviously. Mueller’s first film is more impressive if mainly because it’s a much more difficult story to pull off, mining for and finding empathy where there would appear to be none at all, highlighted by Sean Penn’s fidgety, sweaty performance. But that is to take nothing away from David Sullivan’s lead performance in “Small Town Wisconsin,” loud in all the right ways, touching without becoming cloying, highlighting a movie that admittedly is better at observation than insight. 

The beginning scenes in which Wayne cracks a cold one and berates the Milwaukee Brewers while listening to them on the radio followed by oversleeping and showing up late to pick up his son Tyler (Cooper J. Friedman) from his ex-wife Deidra’s (Tanya Fischer) initially emit worries of something rote. Once Wayne and Tyler settle in for a weekend together, though, the movie finds its soul, brought home in the performance of Sullivan who does not play Wayne as a cruel or mean father, just a bad one, transforming the way his character calls his son “Champ” into a reflexive tic of heartbreaking desperation. And the moment where he inadvertently lets popcorn on the stove catch fire while he’s goofing around with Tyler becomes a manifestation of the knife’s edge on which the character and the performance rest, the best element of the whole movie, the way in which Sullivan effects the sensation of Wayne as a kind of human house of cards. When he takes his kid to a baseball game and implores him to hold his hand so they don’t get separated, you feel the anxiety. 

Wayne’s whiplash provides the moment-to-moment tension, but the overarching drama is Deidra seeking and winning custody of their son. Fischer does a good job letting us see Deidra’s alternating patience and frustration, and that Wayne’s frustration with her is entirely misplaced. She wants Wayne to tell Tyler he is moving with her to Arizona, and he plans to do it on a father and son camping trip that turns into a secret father and son foray to Milwaukee instead with his pal Chuck (Bill Heck, deftly eliding a potential caricature) in tow. That secrecy could have taken this plot twist in a different direction, but Mueller keeps the drama in a lower register. For one thing, as a Wisconsin native, he has a good handle on big city fear, evoked in their journey of simply finding a hotel, which also underlines how the support of a person like Chuck is what keeps Wayne afloat even as Wayne sleeps (literally) on that fact.

But if Tyler sees his father’s alcoholism clearly, matter-of-factly referencing it in a late scene where Sullivan’s reaction painfully suggests he thinks he’s been hiding it all along, “Small Town Wisconsin” does not. There’s a fascinating scene that could have been borrowed from the ferocious indie “Stinking Heaven.” in which Wayne sneaks into his dilapidated, vacant family home with Tyler and playacts his drunken father with his son playing himself. But Mueller never pulls on that thread when the vacationing trio in Milwaukee is forced to stay with Wayne’s sister Alicia (Kristen Johnston), opting for cozy domesticity that innately puts blinders on the lingering trauma, meaning that even if “Small Town Wisconsin” is smart enough to know one montage cannot remedy a drinking problem, this missing piece makes it feel incomplete. 

Fall Movie Preview By Necessity

The saying is life comes at you fast, but sometimes life comes at you slow. Or, maybe it’s like, life comes at you slow but you realize life has come at you slow all of a sudden, so it feels fast. Or something. I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore. To wit, all the people at the recent Toronto International Film Festival were passing judgement on something called “The Fablemans” and I was all like, “What the hell is ‘The Fablemans?’” Turns out, it’s the new Steven Spielberg movie. Now I would like to claim I haven’t the foggiest how I, we, Cinema Romantico, at the vanguard of the movie blogging industry, missed the news of a new Spielberg joint, but then I know exactly how this happened. 

If it’s true my radar is no longer attuned to movie release news the way once it was because I’ve lost interest in much of the product coming off the Hollywood mainstream assembly line, it’s also true that in the social media age, where movie trailers are essentially beamed directly into my eyes, that I am both flooded with more and more information and yet retaining less and less. The last thing you need is me waxing nostalgic about the Entertainment Weekly Fall Movie Preview for the eleventy billionth time but, hey, there are actual studies that you retain less information scrolling your phone than reading print. And once I could memorize key dates in those EW movie previews like the Nebraska Football schedule. (“The House of Yes” opens October 10th and Nebraska plays Kansas October 25th.) So, I thought a fall movie preview was in order, for me, quite honestly, to rummage through the upcoming releases and figure out what they were, and for you too, the similarly confused or unknowing ones who were also ignorant of Guillermo del Toro’s stop-motion “Pinocchio” (I don’t know), or the live action/animated “Lyle, Lyle Crocodile” (I really don’t know).  

A movie preview for those without a clue!

---------------

Before we get to the preview proper, let’s get all the jokes about remakes and sequels out of the way first.

Halloween Ends. Sure it does! Puss in Boots: The Last Wish. It better be! Disenchanted. You’re telling me! Hellraiser. Hell is film franchise eternity. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. Speaking of which. House Party. Every time I leave the house, every time you two. Hocus Pocus 2. Double, double, toil, and trouble. Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery. “The Fugitive” >>> “U.S. Marshals”

Now on with the preview.

---------------

Blonde. Already opened. Like “Joker,” the discourse around Andrew Dominik’s Marilyn Monroe (Ana de Armas) epic is already so fraught and wearying that I will probably see this at some point much later on and work out my thoughts in a review that I’ll never publish.

Don’t Worry Darling. 9/23. This might be a psychological thriller about a utopian community experiment gone wrong, but I had to look that up on IMDb because all I knew about it was gossip about in-fighting among its stars. Whatever. “The Misfits” was a troubled production, too, and hey, that only turned into one of those rare flawed masterpieces. 

The Greatest Beer Run Ever. 9/30. Seemingly less “Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle” than Peter Farrelly’s continuing descent from slapstick to Mrs. Butterworth schmaltz, I can’t shake the feeling this movie should have been something else entirely and made in 1976 with Burt Reynolds and Adrienne Barbeau. 

Amsterdam. 10/7. David O. Russell filtering himself through a Wes Anderson soundboard, it would appear, though I’m less interested in discussing the movie itself right now than the trailer and wondering who wins it. Because even though it’s always nice to see Christian Bale activating his awards show raconteur for a movie, and though I’m intrigued by Mike Myers playing General Ed Fenech in the full-on key of comedy, this blog doesn’t hide its biases and nothing is funnier than a menacing Michael Shannon giggle.

All Quiet on the Western Front. 10/7. Billed as A Netflix Original this is, of course, based on the book that produced the 3rd Oscar Best Picture winner back in 1930. If that hardly suggests something Original, I find hope here, that perhaps Hulu can remake “The Broadway Melody” (1929 Best Picture) and Disney Plus can remake “Wings” (1928 Best Picture) and then the loop of remakes will close.

Triangle of Sadness. 10/4. An at-sea black comedy with some eat the rich undertones, I know how this one ends, given it won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, and I won’t give it away here except to say that I had I completed my terrible “Raiders of the Lost Ark” spoof on VHS camcorder 25 years ago in which the plate at The Last Supper tagged in for the Ark of Covenant and instead of melting everyone’s faces at the end would have caused them all to…well, maybe it’s good that movie was never finished.

Tár. 10/7. To a certain brand of moviegoer, the return of director Todd Field is like…is like……is like………

The Return of Tanya Tucker – Featuring Brandi Carlile. 10/21. ………the return of Tanya Tucker for a certain brand of music listener. (Doesn’t the inclusion of Brandi Carlile in the title sort of flout the whole spiritual point?)

The Banshees of Inisherin. 10/21. Listen—stop talking. I don’t need to hear the rest. The first half of the sentence was genius! ‘Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell drink pints and…’ And? What ‘and’? No ‘and’ necessary! Are you kidding me? I’m sold. Sold!

Descendent. 10/21. Margaret Brown’s “The Great Invisible” was one of the great documentaries of the last decade and I am stoked for her first feature documentary since. 

Ticket to Paradise. 10/21. I have yammered to the frustration of so many for years about wanting a full-fledged Julia Roberts/George Clooney romantic comedy and, finally, bless us every one, it is here. If our Fall Movie Preview By Necessity was a non-existent issue of our non-existent magazine, Cinema Romantico Weekly, this, of course, would get the cover, with a photo of Julia & George and a cover line that goes “Ticket to Paradise: We’ve waited so long.” (When I go with My, Beautiful Perspicacious Wife I might try out a variation of that bad joke on the poor cashier. “Two tickets to ‘Ticket to Paradise.’ [Beat.] We’ve waited so long.”)  

Armageddon Time. 10/28. This reminds me not of James Gray’s upcoming film – MUST SEE – but that in one of those Twitter prompts the otherwise esteemed Charlie Piece, who’s Esquire blog I happily pay for but whose movie opinions tend toward the highly suspect, said one of the five films he’d seen more than ten times was “Armageddon.” “Armageddon!!!!!!!!” Talk about self-own slash ruling all your movie opinions ever out of order. 

Causeway. 11/4. I don’t know, Jennifer Lawrence’s coming home drama “Causeway” might be good. But maybe just stay home and rent “Return.” 

Weird: the Al Yankovic Story. 11/4. There’s a legion of “Walk Hard: the Dewey Cox Story” acolytes who tell you that Judd Apatow spoof destroyed the music biopic forever. But that take is tired. Wired: “Weird: the Al Yankovic Story” rejuvenating the music biopic. (“I Wanna Dance With Somebody” also comes out this Christmas. Dammit.) 

Falling for Christmas. 11/10. Lindsay Lohan stars as “A young, newly engaged heiress has a skiing accident in the days before Christmas. After she is diagnosed with amnesia, she finds herself in the care of the handsome cabin owner and his daughter.” This sounds oddly similar to the plot of Hallmark’s “A Christmas to Remember” (2016) starring Oscar-winner Mira Sorvino who has not received any really good roles since getting an invitation to the 2018 Academy Awards with legend Ashley Judd in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal as if that was all just public relations. 

The Fablemans. 11/11. Entertainment Tonight (ET) is already projecting it as Best Picture winner. 

“White Noise.” 11/25. I would not have predicted Noah Baumbach as the director to tackle Don DeLillo’s extolled 1985 novel because it’s one of the books frequently deemed unfilmable and Baumbach, as much as I love him, is not the most visually inventive director out there. But the book’s tone...that feels like Baumbach to a tee. I’m excited to see it! Cougars!

“Avatar: The Way of Water.” 12/16. I know it’s the most successful movie of all time but at this point, thirteen years after the first one, I can’t help but think that James Cameron is essentially just filming his ship in a bottle hobby for the big screen. And though I probably won’t see it, I find that kind of endearing. 

Babylon. 12/25. If “The Artist” had turned its camera back around and suddenly realized you were on the set of “Blow.” Perfect for a festive holiday season. 

On Her Majesty's Greatest Impersonator

Britain’s longest serving Monarch Queen Elizabeth II (Elizabeth Alexandra Mary) died last Thursday at the age of 96 and was laid to rest yesterday in Windsor Castle. The state funeral at Westminster Abbey was as ornate as a title like Elizabeth II, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith would lead you to expect, right down to Lord Chamberlain’s wand. Indeed, while I’m sure there was a real person in there, somewhere, behind Heading up the Commonwealth and Defending the Faith, Her Majesty The Queen was a symbol, first and foremost. “The institution of hereditary kingship is irrational and impractical,” Rebecca Mead made clear in The New Yorker, “sustained in the present era only through a willful combination of public pageantry and concealed mystery.” It’s why even if Claire Foy and Olivia Colman both won Emmys for playing the Queen and even if Helen Mirren won an Oscar for playing “The Queen” too, the most indelible portrayal of Her Majesty remains, of course, as everyone knows, Jeannette Charles in “The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!” 

Her role, really, is to be the butt of the joke, over and over, laying siege to her indispensable courtliness, but I don’t mean this as an insult to the Britons. Why the scene in which she winds up, uh, under Lt. Frank Drebin (Leslie Nielsen) on the banquet table just goes to show why Elizabeth wanted to not televise her 1953 coronation in the first place...who knew what could go wrong?! More than that, though, by not really having a role beyond The Queen Becomes Victim Of Hijinks, she remains a mystery while being shuffled through an array of ridiculous Yank-styled pageantry, all of which Charles, who made a career out of her resemblance to Elizabeth II, plays with a proper Buster Keaton-ish stone face. I mean, the scene in the Abbey in Season 1 of “The Crown” when Foy and Matt Smith as Philip spar over Phil’s having to kneel is all well and good when it comes to demonstrating the weight of the Royal image, but nothing cuts to the heart of the all-important and endless Royal ceremoniousness tedium than Charles in “The Naked Gun” being handed a hot dog at Angel Stadium in the ballpark frank version of a bucket brigade, matter-of-factly regarding it as the Queen might have some commemorative Fountain of Youth dish towels bestowed upon her by the Mayor of St. Augustine, Florida, and just sending the damn thing on down the line. 

Bob's Burgers the Movie

Of all the arts and entertainment comfort food I consumed during the lockdown portions of the COVID-19 Pandemic, few were as comforting as Loren Bouchard’s long-running animated Fox sitcom “Bob’s Burgers” about a family of five, The Belchers, running a hamburger restaurant in a shabby seaside town. It was funny in that deadpan way I prefer, but what I liked best was how Bouchard neatly balanced the flights of imaginative fancy with 2D animated mundanity. The three kids – Tina (Dan Mintz), Gene (Eugene Mirman), and Louise (Kristen Schaal) – hashed out their dreams and fears and weird obsessions while wiping down menus and refilling ketchup bottles. Linda (John Roberts) was the enthusiastic yin to Bob’s (H. Jon Benjamin) anxious yang, though even Bob tended to voice his own beef creations, a man in love with the place causing all his stress, true comic duality. And even if Bouchard proves he can sustain enough quality jokes and plot machinations for an-hour-and-forty minutes rather than twenty-two in bringing his TV show to the big screen, he does not significantly change the recipe. Such familiarity might prompt the question “Why make it then?” But that’s a Bob kind of concern and in spirit this is a Linda movie, like its makeshift, unlicensed hamburger cart crafted by loyal customer Teddy (Larry Murphy) to peddle burgers on the pier, spreading the cheer to a wider audience, honoring the Burger of the Day of Season 2, Episode 9: “Poutine on the Ritz.”

Its intentions are stated right away in an opening song number called “Sunny Side Up Summer.” If it holds true to the show’s fondness for musical theatre, dancing from the “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids” choreography school rather than Gene Kelly, it’s also a nifty introduction to the characters for audience newbies just as it establishes the movie’s drama. That includes Louise seeking to certify her bravery in spite of the omnipresent rabbit ears atop her head and Bob and Linda needing to pay the bank all they owe in a single week after being denied a loan extension, the moment when their aspirant Sunny Side Up Summer becomes a burnt omelette. The latter becomes further complicated when a sinkhole suddenly opens up directly outside the restaurant, leaving customers with no way inside except through the ostensible scenic alley. That’s what Linda call it, of course, trying to keep a little optimism, even as Bob stands at the window looking for customers that will never come, his wide animated eyes like the Irish Setter from the old Far Side cartoon where depressed looks like pensive which looks like suicidal. There are certain faces that never fail to leave me in stitches: Larry David looking quizzical, Michael Shannon looking vexed, Bob Belcher looking depressed looking pensive looking suicidal. But then, the sinkhole is the conduit to murder mystery in which a body found at the bottom is fingered at the victim of the Belchers’ landlord Mr. Fischoeder (Kevin Kline, his quizzical snobbishness once again brilliantly embodying the thoughtlessness of the rich). There might be a dead body but despite the frequent shadows Bouchard adds to his animation, the ensuing movie in which the mystery and loan extension converge suggests something more like action-adventure spectacle.

“Bob’s Burgers” episodes often homage movies, from “A River Runs Through Bob” to “Paraders of the Lost Float,” and watching its own movie I kept thinking of Season 3’s “The Deepening” in which a mechanical shark terrorizes the town. A hole briefly opens up in the street outside Bob’s restaurant there too, demonstrating the movie’s penchant for recycling bits from past episodes, giving the entire production the whiff of Robert Rodriguez’s “Desperado” to his “El Mariachi,” the former a much more glossy facsimile of the latter. “Bob’s Burgers the Movie” is not that slick, and has great set pieces to recommend it, from a (clam) car chase to a treehouse escape that balance the edge of surprisingly suspenseful and very funny. But there was a weirdness to “The Deepening,” embodied best in Tina’s affection for the shark, that “Bob’s Burgers the Movie” unfortunately sidelines for a straighter edge. It’s a family-friendly affair, which isn’t all bad since Bouchard excels at evincing family-friendly, brought home in the amazing sequence where The Belchers are on the verge of being buried alive, at once amusing and honestly affecting, served with the most endearing fart joke you’ll hear ever hear.

Godard

I have long since chucked my myriad back issues of Creative Screenwriting Magazine but I swear there was one from the summer of 1997 in which Ed Solomon said that in an early draft of “Men in Black” he conceived an alien as being the post office. The alien wasn’t in the post office, mind you, no, the alien simply was the post office. The filmmakers, Solomon said, thought this was too unconventional and confusing for an audience, that people needed to see aliens as they had come to understand them, both in movies and the broader culture, and so the alien as the post office idea was jettisoned. The revolutionary, rule-breaking French-Swiss filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard never would have allowed such hand-holding; his movies, they were the post office.

Jean-Luc Godard died on Monday at the age of 91. Honoring his commitment to temporal displacement and his most famous quote, the one about every movie needing beginnings, middles, and ends but not necessarily in that order, The Onion published a headline that said “Jean-Luc Godard Dies At End Of Life In Uncharacteristically Linear Narrative Choice.” It was funny, of course, though as Godard’s legal council declared, the filmmaker died by assisted suicide in Rolle, Switzerland. If Godard’s death was linear, he still left the earth by putting a thumb in the eye of convention and polite culture. He was described as not being sick, “simply exhausted,” a brute honesty refreshingly free of the usual blinders we wear to prevent ourselves from looking death straight in the eye. “It is clear, astringent, unsentimental, abrupt,” Roger Ebert wrote of Godard’s “Vivre sa vie” (1962). “Then it is over.” It was Godard’s life to live...and to end. 

The business of writing about Godard should be left to film historians and scholars, frankly, not idiot bloggers like me, but I still wanted to sit down and contextualize Godard in my own mind. When I was a kid first watching movies, I remember – I honestly remember – thinking about when the people onscreen went to the bathroom. I thought this because movies, even as they changed scenes and locations, sought an illusory feeling of continuation. But Godard broke that illusion by deploying the verboten jump cut with a purpose and taking his camera where no camera had gone before. Brigitte Bardot didn’t go to the bathroom in “Contempt” (1963), per se, but she was still sitting on the toilet. To paraphrase Morty Seinfeld: they’ve got a movie camera in the john here!

If Godard’s run of influential films in the 60s raided the past they also pointed toward the future by concocting a radical new cinematic language that would have come across extra-terrestrial and alienating, deliberately alienating, to so many modern audiences. But if we are now in that future he pointed toward, where essentially every motion picture – every moving image – owes him a debt, his films have not calcified. No, they remain alive and invigorating, and to these modern audiences raised on narrative TV masquerading as movies his work is likely just as extra-terrestrial and alienating, deliberately alienating, as it was then. It’s like if Marty McFly had gotten up in front of the Enchantment Under the Sea sock-hoppers and eschewed “Johnny B. Goode” for “Bitches Brew”; I reckon some of us are still not ready for this. 

He pushed things so fast so far that by the end of 1967’s “Weekend,” that conclusion seeming to foreshadow humanity’s fate to revert back to the beginning of “2001” one year before “2001” was even released, he literally declared his own movie as the end of cinema. Oh, it effused Godard’s ego to the extreme, but it also demonstrated what he perceived as the inevitable limitations of the movie language he invented, then forsaking it for something else entirely, epitomized in the only one of his post-67 films I can say I’ve seen: “Goodbye to Language” (2014).

David Thomson didn’t feel so differently than Godard, writing that “Breathless” (1960) wasn’t so much a sign of what was to come as “a warning. It said...Watch out, this game, this entertainment is over. Movie is all used up, and if we repeat it it will turn camp—and I’ll prove it to you.” I think plenty of work in the years since have shown that movie is not all used up, yet Godard’s warning remains eternal. If “Weekend” was the end of cinema, it was only because so many films – then, now – failed to understand its opening title card better. 

Novels are on the page; plays are on the stage; music comes out of your speakers; Teevee’s on the TV; film, Godard understood and said as “Weekend” began, is adrift in the cosmos.

Petite Maman

It’s always been a profound regret that I didn’t get to say goodbye to my grandfather, or perhaps that I didn’t properly get to say goodbye to my grandfather, or perhaps that I just don’t remember saying goodbye to my grandfather. He died near the end of 1989, when Cher’s “If I Could Turn Back Time” was all over the radio, and though that song was obviously about something else, every time I heard it, I would refashion it in my mind as a song about getting to turn back time to say goodbye to my grandfather. And in its way Celine Sciama’s “Petite Maman,” while just as much a movie about a daughter bonding with her mother (a child bonding with an adult), makes that same fanciful wish for one of its characters come true. On paper, this French film is as fantastical as “Back to the Future.” But a movie isn’t what it’s about, to borrow a phrase, but how it’s about it, and aside from the emotional crescendo when Sciama suddenly but purposely goes big on aesthetic, “Petite Maman” is drained of every last sensational ounce for a neorealist vibe instead. The emotions in play are big, but their rendering is muted, so much so that the full weight of what transpires in this seemingly slight 72 minutes might not take hold until after it’s over, which feels true to childhood, how so many events only make sense to us later.

“Petite Maman” is told through the eyes of a child. This is made clear in the opening handheld image of an older woman in a retirement home before the camera drifts back to reveal eight-year-old Nelly (Joséphine Sanz) is standing beside her, saying goodbye the way you would ritually bid goodbye to someone at the end of a day. Indeed, the camera proceeds to follow Nelly as she then walks down a hallway, going from room to room, bidding goodbye to other retirees, before winding up in another room with her mother Marion (Nina Meurisse).There Nelly has no one to say goodbye to and she verbally expresses regret at not getting to say goodbye to the room’s resident – or, former resident, we glean – properly. Sciama is judicious here, not straightforwardly disclosing the missing person was Nelly’s now deceased grandmother, preferring to let us glean it from the unspoken details. Later, in driving to her grandmother’s house in the countryside to begin the process of clearing it out, Nelly shares a sweet scene with her mother by indulging in a backseat apero hour, though a later scene at home before bed suggests a small rift between the two. The next morning when Nelly wakes up, she discovers her mother has left with just her father (Stéphane Varupenne) there instead, not coincidentally keying into that same establishing feeling of all-of-the-sudden departures. And then Nelly goes into the backyard and, well, this is perhaps where we will advise the more spoiler-phobic among us to please exit the review. 

That is not to suggest “Petite Maman” has anything like a “Sixth Sense”-twist. No, there is a twist, but the A Ha is more gradually evinced. The woods, both in their very idea as woods and the way Sciama shoots them with great color and little sunlight, puts one in the mind of a fairytale. And soon, Nelly has met a young girl, Marion (Gabrielle Sanz), cough cough, who looks an awful lot like her. When Marion invites Nelly over to her house, Nelly notices the house looks eerily similar to her grandmother’s, and the way she moves through the halls and rooms, picking out exactly what is similar, gives the scene an unspoken energy that we the audience are picking up on too, and at virtually the same rate. If this was another movie, the mood might have been more in the vein of horror, or mystery, or suspense, deliberately withholding to eventually shock us. But Sciama’s shunning of aesthetic embellishment means the tone skews more toward quiet, matter of fact discovery, a whole movie made in the space of that story Jesse tells in “Before Sunrise” about seeing his dead grandmother in the mist of a garden hose, becoming a kind of innate expression of how children are always more in tune with what’s going on in the world around them than adults might think, and enhanced by how the child actors are never asked to do too much, the natural straight forwardness of these performances movingly bringing home the kind of implicit clarity only a child can provide. 

Nope

“Cinema,” Grandmaster Marty Scorsese once said, “is a matter of what it’s in the frame and what’s out.” Most movies just live out this truth, but Jordan Peele’s “Nope” explores it. The opening images, a low-angled shot of a blood-covered chimpanzee in a birthday hat on an empty soundstage followed by a death when something falls mysteriously from the sky are as much demonstrations of the camera’s limited viewpoint as they are narrative puzzle pieces. And in mish-mashing sci-fi and western, cowboys and aliens, when a mysterious disc appears in the sky above a California horse farm outside Hollywood, Peele essentially transforms “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” into “Burden of Dreams,” its characters trying to capture footage of this disc with the same intensity Werner Herzog tried to drag a steamship over a hill. It’s an evocation of the moviemaking process, in other words, even as it also becomes an equally evocative commentary on the movie industry, who the eye of Hollywood tends to see and who it doesn’t.

The horse farm belongs to the Haywoods, O.J. (Daniel Kaluuya) and Em (Keke Palmer), passed down from their father (Keith David) who made a living providing horses for Hollywood productions. Business isn’t what it once was, glimpsed in a scene where O.J. stands with one of the family equines before a green screen on some film set while Em gives the artists and crew the standard Haywood Hollywood Horse Farm lecture about how their great-great-great grandfather was the cowboy astride a horse in the very first moving image, Eadweard Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion from 1878. Even if Peele is exaggerating parts of the real history for his own purposes, this becomes nothing less than a kind of Hollywood critical race theory lesson. Indeed, the people listening to it barely listen at all. They decide to digitize the horse instead.

The Haywoods mostly make money by selling parts of their stock to Ricky Park (Steven Yeun) who runs a western themed tourist trap not far from their farm. Ricky’s backstory connects to that opening image, one revealed as his own adolescent point-of-view of the bloody chimp. Yet rather than instill a lifelong sense of fear, it seems only to have produced a belief of infallibility, because where everyone else sees something uncertain or terrifying or both when they see this disc in the sky, he sees opportunity. It is something to sell, a la Art Land in “Mars Attacks!,” even as this subplot also ingeniously, insidiously equates such art with an unquenchable consumerist appetite that will, ahem, eat you alive. Ricky is juxtaposed with Antlers Holst (Michael Wincott), a cinematographer on the prowl not so much for a deeper artistic truth as, simply, one perfect shot.

Antlers becomes part of O.J. and Em’s skeleton filmmaking crew along with Angel Torres (Brandon Perea), the tech salesman who helps them install a comprehensive set of cameras on their farm to try and record this mysterious disc in the sky and joins their crew of his own volition. Angel is not written with much dimension, a brief moment with his nosy co-worker (Barbie Ferreira) merely proven a comic tease rather than anything substantial, and given the performance of Wincott in tune with the lines he’s made to say, Antlers never rises above caricature, the latter partially negating the otherwise awesome rush of his fate.

Palmer and especially Kaluuya, on the other hand, are magnificent. Though consciously written and played as emotional opposites, the two actors also deftly demonstrate the bond between all that and where emotionally they line up in spite of it. Palmer’s energy is infectious and plays perfectly off Kaluuya’s quiet surliness (see: above image). His performance is emotional, brilliantly internalizing the pressure of carrying his father’s legacy, but is also technical in a kind of emotional way. If Peele is effusing the camera’s limits then Kaluuya effuses its immense, limitless power, how physical stillness responds so powerfully to its gaze and emphasizes his searching eyes in each scene that much more. The single best scene in the movie is when O.J. has picked out the disc’s hiding spot in the sky, the camera tilted up at him positioned in a doorway, Kaluuya stationary and looking to the sky with this magnetically beatific smile, illustrating the bliss of when you really see something for the first time, which Peele underlines with the reverse shot cut over his shoulder pointed toward the clouds. 

It's true that “Nope” can sometimes border on allegorical inside baseball. Like his previous films, however, Peele remains conscious of genre, and even as the nighttime images of O.J. first fleeing the extra-terrestrial pursuit underscore the camera’s sometimes restrictive view in frantic close-ups, they also ably evince standalone suspense, just as the narrative seeds Peele ingeniously plants, like an apparent prop on Ricky Park’s old west set, delightfully sprout as the movie culminates. You don’t even need to know Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion to connect images of O.J. astride a thoroughbred as black movie cowboys across the centuries to thrill to the concluding chase across the desert. But it’s also true that by informing you of it, the meaning of the chase fully blooms, Peele is asking us to be conscious of our history, of Hollywood’s history, and once you are, “Nope,” like one of those 3D paintings, comes all the way into focus. 

Friday's Old Fashioned: Blue Collar (1978)

“Blue Collar” (1978) is about three Michigan auto workers – Zeke (Richard Pryor), Jerry (Harvey Keitel), and Smokey (Yaphet Kotto) – who decide to rob a safe at their American Auto Workers Union headquarters. That might make it sound like a heist movie, but Paul Schrader’s directorial debut is not a heist movie, not really. No, in most heist movies the planning and execution of the caper is elaborate, dramatic; in “Blue Collar,” on the other hand, the heist is almost casual, rendered with no suspenseful music, just the three men finding the safe door open, and when a security guard shows up, the disguises the three men don, a propeller hat, googly eye glasses, and a hat with an arrow through the head, underline the absurdity of both the heist itself and the fallout. All they find is $600, if also a ledger that exposing the union’s illegal loan operation and ties to the mob, providing Zeke, Jerry, and Smokey an opportunity to get rich through blackmail. That their blackmail scheme backfires probably goes without saying, though this proves more profound than pure fatalism, a dramatic unmasking of the working life myth as something more sinister, less Alabama’s “Forty Hour Week (For a Livin’)” or a Bob Seger Chevy commercial than the Captain Beefheart kick in the teeth that plays over the opening credits. 

Despite such darkness, Schrader takes care in conveying a sense of camaraderie. The production stories, in fact, that a frustrated Keitel threw an ashtray at camera over Pryor’s improvisational acting style, that Pryor pointed a gun at Schrader, that Schrader almost had a nervous breakdown, in no way make it to the screen. No, on the screen the three auto workers bond and get along, illustrated in how Schrader likes to place them together in the same frame, on couches and in the front seat of cars, letting us revel in them as a real trio. There’s a tenderness to the performances of Keitel and Pryor too. The former struggles to provide for his family yet the character is neither written nor played as someone who has become belligerent on account of the financial pressure. A tiny subplot in which Jerry’s daughter tries to place makeshift braces on her teeth because her family can’t afford them is not just a catalyst for pushing Jerry to break the law but a heartbreaking evocation of economic desperation. Pryor, meanwhile, in scenes where his character tries to fool the IRS by pretending another family’s kids are his own and explains to his wife they watch so much TV because they need to get their money’s worth considering how much it cost, lets his natural penchant for comedy quietly shade into comic tragedy. 

If Zeke and Jerry are family men, Smokey is their opposite, a single man, which Schrader consciously portrays as giving him the kind of rebellious leeway the other two don’t have, railing against the power imbalance between them and their duplicitous union. He’s also in debt to a loan shark, the one detail that does not feel baked enough into the script, too obviously standing out as the necessary means for unwittingly exposing and bringing down the three men and their woebegone plan. Their gradual demise, though, is no less effective. The call Smokey places to Jerry’s wife when he realizes she’s in danger, telling her to get out of the house without telling her to get out of the house, is rendered by Kotto as almost as agonizing as his character’s fate at the hands of the union itself, a slow-moving death sequence in which, trapped, he gradually drowns in paint sprayed from nozzles, the “Star Wars” trash compactor scene of one year earlier evinced in the language of cold blooded murder. 

Zeke, on the other hand, stays alive by cooperating, earning a desired promotion to keep quiet, though the real power here comes from the way Pryor plays it, letting all the air of his heretofore vibrant performance seep out, shining on a stark light on the inevitable inhumanity of being made to play ball. The union tries to get Jerry to go along too, though he refuses, his and Zeke’s friendship wilting and then turning rotten. Indeed, if “Blue Collar” is aware of the power disparity, so too is it cognizant of the racial disparities, and when Jerry deploys the N word, it is not cluelessly crude but startlingly revealing. This racial resentment is stoked less by an inherent attitude than the surrounding system that fosters and then unleashes that attitude, which is just the way it’s designed, a moment speaking so clearly for itself that you wish Schrader hadn’t over-emphasized it with that punctuating voiceover. Still. 

10 Not-at-TIFF Movies to Watch

The 47th annual Toronto International Film Festival kicks off today, meaning that even though it is still 14 days until fall, and even though it is still 104 days until winter, and even though the 2023 Oscars take place all of eight days before the first day of next spring, it is the beginning of awards season. Don’t like it? Hey, neither do I, what can I tell ya, pal? Write your local Oscar blogger. Anyway, with every movie that really wants to be somebody over the course of the next four, five, six, seven months slated to screen, lists abound, of the buzziest and most highly anticipated and most critically acclaimed films to go see. If you’re in Toronto, that is. That’s why Cinema Romantico has once again curated an alternative stay-at-home film fest, a movie to watch each day of TIFF if you are not at TIFF, or if you were planning on going to TIFF and couldn’t get tickets, or if you were planning on flying to Toronto and Air Canada said nuh-uh. After all, in the future all film festivals will take place on our phones. 

10 Not-at-TIFF Movies to Watch

Night Shift. Henry Winkler’s stockbroker turned morgue attendant is nothing if not the original Quiet Quitter, until things get noisy again, perfect for an opening night 40th anniversary retrospective screening. 

The Alamo. It has come to Cinema Romantico’s attention that some readers were frustrated with our previous two Not-at-TIFF film festivals, curated during the height of the COVID-19 Pandemic and honoring the prevailing global mood of anger, anxiety, and depression. They want Not-at-TIFF to be a happier affair! They’re just movies, man! So, after opening with the fun-loving “Night Shift,” we will screen John Wayne’s “The Alamo” (1960), a heartwarming and historically accurate portrayal of the way the pivotal event in the Texas Revolution really was. 

Groundswell. Don’t let that photoshop fool you! Lacey Chabert really did walk in the sands of the Waikiki because this Hallmark Channel romance really was filmed in Hawaii! Yay! Nothing says happy affair like a Hallmark Channel synopsis! “On the heels of a personal and professional setback, Chef Emma travels to Hawaii where she meets Ben, a handsome, reclusive surf instructor whose lessons help her to regain her footing.”

The Rosebud Beach Hotel. The most recent season of Karina Longworth’s indispensable film podcast You Must Remember This focused on what she deemed the Erotic 80s, including Mickey Rourke’s “Wild Orchid,” one of those movies I never saw but knew about because it screened late at night on Cinemax, the forbidden time zone on a channel we did not have. Somehow, though, what sticks in my mind from the forbidden time zone of that era is not “Wild Orchid” but “The Rosebud Beach Hotel,” which I only just learned at this very moment starred Fran Drescher and Christopher Lee. This will be screened on a vintage 1980s RCA wood paneled television set. Get your seats early!

Outbreak. Wolfgang Petersen, master of the (often more than) middling thriller, died in August at the age of 81. “Outbreak” was not his best movie, not even close, but it is the one I watched in my Roman COVID hotel last December. And if that sounds insane, like why would I watch a movie about a Pandemic when I’m trapped in a 10x13 room because of a real Pandemic, the professional middling pizzazz of it all soothed me like no other. When I rediscovered Dustin Hoffman and Rene Russo played a bickering divorced couple hashing out their relationship while trying to save the world...ooooh, it felt so good. 

Night Falls on Manhattan. These are the good days for those of us who have always ridden for Andy Garcia as a charismatic A-list leading man. So, let’s screen a 25-year old Andy Garcia movie as an excuse to invite him to appear at Not-at-TIFF. (All Not-at-TIFF appearances will take place on a red carpet from Carpet Warehouse Outlet rolled out in the alley behind my house.)

Tape. Uma Thurman was enlisted along with her “Pulp Fiction” co-stars John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson to present at the most recent Oscars. This excited me if only because Uma has been made to wander in the movie-making wilderness for the last 20 years because of the sexist dipshits in charge of everything after Travolta has been afforded, like, 17 career comebacks and I wondered if maybe, just maybe, this appearance would make one of the producer morons in the audience decide to stop being a moron and cast her in a real role. Alas, as it turned out she was presenting, ahem, the award for Best Actor, meaning she presented to Will Smith after he slapped Chris Rock. Nobody will ever remember she was even there. JFC almighty. So, let’s screen Richard Linklater’s digital slice of sweaty three-hander intimacy to show all these fools what Uma can do. 

 

Kate McKinnon as Ann Romney. And on the 8th day of Not-at-TIFF, as always, we rest, eschewing a movie for something shorter and stupider instead. Kate McKinnon, guiding light of latter day Saturday Night Live, finally stepped away after 11 seasons. And while her Olya Povlatsky might honestly be my favorite SNL character ever, when McKinnon left the show, for some reason I found myself thinking most about her Ann Romney. (“Everybody’s a Beyoncé fan, Seth.”) 

The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh. In addition to shelving “Batgirl,” the corporate buzzkills at Warner Bros. have also put their finished remake of “The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh” starring the G.O.A.T., Candace Parker of the Chicago Sky on ice. Luckily, Cinema Romantico’s elite squad of film print retrieval artists extricated a cut of the film from the Warner Bros. vault in a daring nighttime raid and we will screen it on Day 9 at an undisclosed location. 

Krush Groove. You know, fellow Gen Xers, when you see the kidz walking around in those Nirvana t-shirts from Target or Old Navy and how much it freaks you out? Well, I was in an Old Navy this summer and noticed they are now selling Run-D.M.C t-shirts too. And while you might think this would freak me out like the Kurt Cobain-inspired wearables, I found myself smiling instead, thinking that perhaps the true kings of rock have become cool again in circles where I am not closing to running, that kidz are listening to the Run-D.M.C. Spotify channel and discovering EPMD too, and Eric B. and Rakim and Kool Moe Dee. So, let’s close Not-at-TIFF 2022 with the Run-D.M.C. starring “Krush Groove” (1985). Cuz sucker Marvel Big Cheese don’t make no movies like these. 

The Batman

It’s not that Matt Reeves’s “The Batman” isn’t good in many ways, its dark color palette in service of the eponymous character’s nocturnal habits as opposed to mere crutch, the deaths of Bruce and Martha Wayne kept offscreen because their fallout is all in there in Robert Pattison’s ghostly husk as Bruce. (Jeffrey Wright plays his Lt. Gordon in a less comic if strangely similar key as his medical practitioner in “Only Lovers Left Alive.”) But if the movie is sort of remixing David Fincher’s “Seven,” Reeves eschews a showdown between hero and villain (Paul Dano’s Riddler, evocatively portrayed through voyeuristic, mouth-breathing shots underlining that this Batman variation is not for kids) for a grand finale at odds with the gloomy intimacy, the ending itself becoming less an encapsulation of the overriding (agreeable) neo-noir fatalism than how it is fatalistically mere set up for Season 2 – er, another movie.

Hustle

Adam Sandler’s “Hustle,” it seems to me, takes place in the same universe as Adam Sandler’s “Uncut Gems,” not because the former is about Sandler’s NBA talent scout finding a Spanish diamond in the rough and the latter is about Sandler’s jeweler pawning Kevin Garnett’s NBA Championship ring to place a spectacularly ill-advised bet, but because each film is about Sandler’s character hustling. And in “Hustle,” Sandler himself is essentially hustling us, the audience, which I say with love, putting the salesman shine on a movie that when you drill down is almost nothing but sports montages and sports clichés, even finding a way to essentially take the woeful Did Anyone Come To His Birthday Party? Subplot of “Draft Day” and sell it, yielding an improbable movie that is like “My Giant” born again as Darcy Frey’s “The Last Shot.” (All quiet charisma, Anthony Edwards is Stephon Marbury.)

Florence Pugh's Labor Day Message

Olivia Wilde’s “Don’t Worry Darling” premiered at the 79th Venice International Film Festival today (almost yesterday) and received a 5-minute standing ovation. As film festival standing ovations go, this one was a pretty tame exercise in blowing smoke, one minute less than the standing ovation for “The Whale,” three-and-a-half minutes less than the standing ovation for “Bones and All,” and eight minutes less than the standing ovation for “The Banshees of Inisherin.” But the relatively meager standing ovation was hardly the seeming scandal where “Don’t Worry Darling” was concerned. No, that came after when co-star Florence Pugh skipped out on the post-screening press conference, seen walking and drinking an Aperol Spritz on the Venetian streets instead.

Happy Labor Day!

Though tabloid columnists immediately speculated Pugh’s no-show aperitif stemmed from the rumored ongoing feud between Pugh and director Olivia Wilde, experts at the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment in Berkeley theorized this was something else. “The Venice Film Festival might be held in Italy but it’s a global event,” associate director Alexandra Almendares told Cinema Romantico. “And though today is merely September 5th in Venice, it’s Labor Day in America. Skipping a work obligation for a spritz sends a powerful message.” 

The Aperol Spritz is nothing if not a symbol of aperitivo, those couple hours when Italians relax after work and eschew racing to get ahead in the world to just let the world go by. “The struggle will only end,” Almendares told us, “when every hour is aperitivo hour.”