Ticket to Paradise

A movie ending with outtakes is generally a red flag. It is a tactic often deployed in comedies that weren’t funny to begin with, and are trying here, now, after the end to send you home in a good enough mood to not tell your friends who ask how the movie was to stay home. In the case of “Ticket to Paradise,” on the other hand, while its post-concluding outtakes do, indeed, innately cop to the lack of preceding humor and spark, they are even more unintentionally revealing, putting a finishing dot on how director Ol Parker’s movie in question relies almost exclusively on the star power of Julia Roberts and George Clooney to carry it. True, this reviewer has spent years clamoring for a romantic comedy fueled by the star power of Jules & George. But fuel requires an engine, a surrounding framework, and that is where Parker and his co-writer Daniel Pipski fail, creating a feature film that feels more like an outline; [Rest of Movie Goes Here].

“Ticket to Paradise” opens by cross-cutting between Georgia (Roberts) and David (Clooney) Cotton, ex-wife and husband, explaining to us the audience as much as the otherwise irrelevant supporting characters resentments of their marital estrangement. We see them at work, her in an art gallery and him on tall buildings in a hard hat, but this is all mere filler, as unimaginative as the opening shot of a city skyline. Their occupations hardly matter, either for the plot or Georgia and David themselves, evocative of an overriding lack of crucial dimension. The story turns on their daughter Lily (Kaitlyn Dever) who has just graduated college with a law firm job waiting, flying with her friend and fellow graduate Wren (Billie Lourd) to Bali for the summer. There she meets a seaweed farmer named Gede (Maxime Bouttier) and they decide to get hitched. Fearful that Lily will make the same mistake they did so many years ago in marrying too quickly at too young an age, Georgia and David hurry to Bali to put the kibosh on these impending nuptials.  

We do not see Lily and Gede’s whirlwind romance, just its inception when he rescues her and Wren after a tourist boat inadvertently leaves them alone in the water far from shore, a scene so zanily earnest it inadvertently becomes self-parody and, worse, informs the straight faces with which Dever and Bouttier play their parts. Immediately accepting Lily and Gede’s romance at face value betrays the inherent lack of complications in their emergent relationship. There is a moment, in fact, near the end, when Gede makes a significant declaration absent having advised Lily of this declaration beforehand. When she calls him on it, for a split-second, I swear, in Dever’s air you can sense real agitation. But it’s brushed away by being laughed off, evocative of a rom com with a bizarre fear of confrontation in a genre that demands impediments. It’s also a genre that demands a good sidekick and the way Lily and Gede’s Meet Cut ends, with Wren essentially having been forgotten in the water by the lovelorn, is less humorous than illustrative of how the movie the assigns her a single trait (drunk) and then forgets about her just as it forgets about other supporting characters, including Gede’s family. I’m not sure if Miller was afraid of audiences taking offense at jokes about another culture, but if movies in this vein tend to spotlight differences in social strata for both comedy and drama, “Ticket to Paradise” mostly looks the other way.

Georgia and David’s crude plan to stop the wedding involves stealing Lily and Gede’s rings so the ceremony cannot proceed. An inherently absurd plot point, Miller turns it into a weirdly serious, non-violent version of Chekhov’s Gun waiting to go off, failing to exploit the considerable comic potential. What should become a version of the Father of the Bride being attacked by dogs and falling in the pool of his in-laws’ home when he goes snooping around is instead rendered passively. This is true of all the movie’s myriad screwball elements, from David getting attacked by a dolphin to David and Gede, ostensibly at odds, literally hunting for a pig to eat after they and Georgia and Lily get stuck on an island. The moment in which we realize they are stranded speaks to the whole movie, the boat David has failed to properly tie up to the shore floating away seen from up and above and far away, the would-be punchline delivered not with a hysterical thwack but a leaden piffle. 

It’s clear that in straining to stop their daughter from marrying impetuously, David and Georgia are merely trying to emotionally correct the wrong of their own impetuous marriage. This is clear not least because Lily literally explicates it in a late movie monologue that might have been as wink-wink as the meet cute but instead works best to highlight how “Ticket to Paradise” fails to bake that diagnosis into the plot and thereby forcing itself to just stop and say it. That failure is born of the thinly conceived backstory of its principals, their falling out ultimately uninteresting and undramatic, hardly the genesis of such supposed cutthroat antagonism. That is unfortunately furthered in the sniping of David and Georgia and the way Clooney and Roberts play it, more like a bickering couple that is still married and has been for a long time than two people who have not seen each other in a long time and harbor deep anger and resentment. Indeed, Clooney and Roberts never evince any kind of true romantic tension or sexual energy like they did in the “Ocean’s Eleven” and “Twelve,” betraying a movie so scrubbed and sanitized that even as it unfolds on the screen in front of you seems to disintegrate into nothing. 

Friday's Old Fashioned: Escape from New York (1981)

Though John Carpenter originally wrote “Escape from New York” in the mid-70s, it took a few more years to find financial backing and distribution through a triumvirate of independent production companies, the filmmaker indicating that no major studio had wanted to touch it. Maybe that’s not surprising, but I can’t imagine a better Pitch Meeting Movie than “Escape from New York.” As in, what if Manhattan Island was just one big penitentiary, Air Force One crashes there, stranding the President, and a rogue (named Snake![with an eyepatch!!]) has to sneak in to rescue him? Like a lot of cult classics, or maybe just classics, I’ll let the scholars and Carpenter devotees hash that demarcation out, Carpenter’s 1981 film benefited from such independence, utilizing its small budget to the fullest. True, 41 years after its release and 25 years after it was set, Manhattan as Prison has not come to pass, and much of the technology on display, like the opening computer graphics, look primitive by present-day standards. But weirdly, or perhaps not at all, the retro look is beneficial, Steampunk as a kind of IBM5150Punk, or something, one of those movies where the lo fi vision of the future evokes the future as being worse than the present, as if in so much ostensible advancement, everything has regressed. Except for nuclear war, I guess, or the threat of it, lingering over the movie as much as the micro-explosives injected into Snake’s neck and waiting to detonate in 24 hours if he doesn’t get the job done, with the President on the way to a peace summit when his plane is hijacked and needing to recover a cassette that can prevent annihilation by atom bomb.

If the traditional action, especially as “Escape From New York” culminates, is something of a rote letdown, it nevertheless succeeds by virtue of atmosphere and world-building. Ernest Borgnine’s Cabbie, still driving a taxi through unlit streets as the name implies, comically encapsulates how even in the face of the end of life as we essentially know it we are somehow programmed to stick to what we know while the Statue of Liberty recontextualized as a guard tower, with Carpenter wrangling permission to film there at night, feels eerier, frankly, than end of “Planet of the Apes” (which the movie’s poster quotes), emblematically evoking the golden door as closed and locked and the lamp as extinguished in the face of a completely dark borough across the way. Location shooting in East St. Louis neighborhoods burned out from a 1976 fire, meanwhile, utilizes visual evidence of the very late 70s desolation Carpenter cited as inspiration for the desolation of “Escape from New York” in the first place.

It is Russell, however, who stands out by not standing out, despite that name and that eyepatch, so much as blending in, keeping us at an emotional arm’s length, not inviting us in, not straining to play to much of anything except moment-by-moment survival and disinterest in everything else. A year later Rutger Hauer would play a so-called replicant, a genetically engineered person, in “Blade Runner” with more humanity than Russell does as an actual human, the former’s monologue about attack ships on fire and C-beams glittering near Tannhauser Gate bringing tears to your eyes while the latter’s being mentioned as having flown a Gullfire over Leningrad is treated like nothing more than putting up drywall at the new McDonalds. All this quietly lays the groundwork for the conclusion, one foreshadowed in the movie’s most memorable image, Snake finding a chair amid all the rubble and plopping down. He may as well be taking a seat at the edge of the apocalypse.

Some Drivel On...Demon Knight

The full title of Ernest Dickerson’s “Demon Knight” (1995) is “Tales from the Crypt Presents: Demon Knight,” marking it as the first cinematic venture of the HBO horror anthology series “Tales from the Crypt.” My family didn’t have HBO most of the time I was growing up and so I remember the show more for when it began appearing in a somewhat toned-down, edited form on Fox on Saturday nights, giving me something to flip over to when SNL got boring, which it usually did right around that time, after Weekend Update. These versions of “Tales from a Crypt” were softened, yes, but given the airtime still honored the original spirit, the idea that you were getting away with something by watching something you were not supposed to be watching, like getting a rap album with a Parental Advisory sticker beamed straight into your eyeballs. That’s why my first time seeing “Demon Knight” since, well, the mid-90s, I’m pretty sure, felt entirely appropriate. I watched it at Chicago’s Music Box Theatre though not in the theatre itself but out back in the Garden Theatre, a remnant of the worst parts of the Pandemic, beneath the streetlights. It felt not low rent, not at all, but kind of fly-by-night in a way honoring the hoary but enjoyable plot of a group trapped in a place – in this case, a boarding house – with bloodthirsty creatures – in this case, demons – lurking outside. Grant Park is for screening “Footloose”; Millennium Park is for screening “Dirty Dancing”; an alley on Southport is for screening “Demon Knight.” 

These demons, commanded by a kind of demonio supremo called The Collector, and mostly seen in human form to take full advantage of Billy Zane’s performance (more in a minute), are after a key that can unlock an all-consuming cosmic darkness and protected by the eponymous Brayker (William Sadler) holed up inside the boarding house with the requisite motley crew, from a prostitute (Brenda Bakke) to a maid named Jeryline (Jada Pinkett) on work release. The ensuing rising and falling action has plenty of fun with horror movie tropes and just fun in general, like the owner Irene (C.C.H. Pounder) getting her arm lopped off, which once the shock has worn off for the character, Pounder plays like she has merely discarded a sweater, no time to sweat the small stuff like no arm when the world needs saving, remember that, kids. Sadler takes this all incredibly seriously but even within that seriousness finds shades of fun. “You want to know what’s going on? Shall I tell you?” he rhetorically asks in a script-winking line cuing up the crucial exposition that Sadler nevertheless says like someone who has told this story a thousand times before and is sick of it. Brayker has been the key’s guardian since WWI, made immortal so long as he holds the artifact bearing it, one filled with the blood of Jesus. We see all this in a Good Friday flashback that through the prism of time frankly looks more convincing to me now than any computer-generated Calvary Hill. It also reminded me that if Jesus appeared in this day and age, he’d probably appear to a motley crew like this rather than some clean-cut crew in a GAC production.

The dudes that introduced the movie at the Music Box praised Zane’s turn, noting that he turned his acting up to 11 (coinage: Nigel Tufnel) throughout, as much as Owen Gleiberman writing for Entertainment Weekly 27 years ago inveighed against it. “Like all of today’s wisecracking psychos,” Gleiberman wrote of Zane, “he derives his style from the Ur-moment of contemporary horror, that scene in ‘The Shining’ where Jack Nicholson axes his way into Shelley Duvall’s room and announces, ‘He-e-ere’s Johnny!’” I think they’re both wrong. Zane’s performance is far more modulated, a 3 here, a 6 there, occasionally dialing up to a 9 or a 10 before cooling back off, finding a sweet spot between the lampoon of debonair he plays in the parodic prelude of “Poetic Justice” (1993) and his thickly sliced holiday ham of “Titanic” (1997), epitomized in the scene where he momentarily masquerades as a bartender, playing more on a Spuds McKenzie tip, the straw that stirs the drink rather than the other way around. True to that, just as Brayker hands his knight duties off to Jeryline, Zane spiritually hands the movie itself off to Pinkett. That’s partially, it would seem, to set up a sequel that never materialized, though I’m thinking of this in broader, more cosmic terms. If The Sequels Matrix, “Resurrections” and “Revolutions,” were good for anything, it was to demonstrate that Jada was a bonafide burgeoning action movie star, so long as someone wanted to take advantage, which given the ghouls and goblins that run the industry, they haven’t. Credit to “Demon Knight,” however, which saw it all the way back then, foretelling a Hollywood prophecy still waiting to truly come true.

Dinner in America

Adam Carter Rehmeier’s “Dinner in America” begins with several aesthetically combative sequences designed to be almost as off-putting as the main character itself, a pyro punk rocker named Simon (Kyle Gallner), who winds up on the lam after setting a house with an immaculate bay window on fire before happening upon junior college dropout Patty (Emily Skeggs) and taking shelter in her family home. It’s a funny idea in and of itself, a radical non-conformist forced to hide out in suburbia, like if The Boy in the Police Station (Charlie Sheen) in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” had ditched the precinct and hidden out with Jeanie Bueller (Jennifer Grey). And even if Simon encourages her to open up and express herself in song, that song proves a come-on to him only in so much as it proves a kiss off to everything, epitomizing how “Dinner in America” never betrays its punk ideology. 

The timeframe is nebulous, references like Riot Grrrl culture suggesting the 90s even as it also feels very much left over from the 80s, evinced in the bit part casting of Lea Thompson as an alcoholic housewife, cosmically intimating Lorraine McFly if she had never been saved by her son going back in time. If there is plenty of hyper-editing to match the soundtrack’s frequent aggression and Simon’s overall surliness, Carter still frequently tempers the camera, zooming out in shots of bus stops and a weedy lot in the shadow of a single office tower that put into striking perspective the notion of these lands of the dead (eyed) wasting so much space. The title, meanwhile, hints at the movie’s supper-eating motif, the characters sitting down several times for dysfunctional family dinners. This notion of the kitchen table as a symbol of togetherness has been satirized and picked apart frequently over the years, and nothing in “Dinner in America” is quite as raucous as Will Ferrell shouting about his Dodge Stratus all those years ago. Still, in their own way these sequences sort of a throw a figurative table through the kitchen table metaphor, evoking families not as small communities but an unlikely collection of individuals, atoms and molecules colliding in whole new ways.

The movie’s heart, though, is in the relationship between Simon and Patty. One early moment in which he asks her to remove her glasses teases “Pygmalion,” but ultimately, she never ditches the glasses just as rather than changing who she is she unearths who she was all along. Here, Skeggs’s performance harmonizes note perfectly with Carter Rehmeier’s writing, to create a wonderfully weird character, socially awkward, socially stunted, not so much looking to Simon for approval in peppering with him questions as someone emotionally shut in too long, underlined in the actor’s constant squint, someone struggling to see the world. Simon, of course, is her conduit, but he is also not merely an ideal, his backstory gradually unspooled so as to put his commitment to integrity and DIY ethos under the microscope. Movies like this are often about getting out of the place you’re stuck, but there is something more profound, if bleak, about how no one gets out in “Dinner in America.” The change, it comes from within, though even that subverts the cliché, Patty’s concluding scream going into the void even as it sets her free. 

The Classic Movie Broadcaster of Record Has Spoken

Roger Ebert’s Great Movie series provided my introduction to classic film, but Turner Classic Movies is where I developed and refined my classic film taste. It’s where I was truly able to delve into the deeper backgrounds of the oeuvres of Bacall and Bogey and Harlow, and Mitchum and Woodward too. It’s where I saw “Once Upon a Time in the West,” “From Here to Eternity,” “Meet Me in St. Louis,” “Stromboli,” and “The Misfits.” It’s where I watched basically every Elvis movie I’ve seen, including “Viva Las Vegas,” which I distinctly recall because when I saw “The Lady Loves Me” scene I vividly remember thinking: “That. That’s everything I want from a movie.” Seeing “The Heiress” on TCM was almost as good as my best movie theater experiences; even though I had recorded Olivia de Havilland’s acting master class to my DVR, I couldn’t make myself pause it to walk 15 feet to go to the bathroom! Yes, that bastion of venerable cinema has introduced me to so much that I consider foundational, that when something else foundational for me appears on its schedule, I don’t feel validated, just elated, like the cinematic clergy have raided my personal canon. That happened in 2016 when (in)explicably “Ice Pirates” (1984) was broadcast on The House that Robert Osborne built, demonstrating that a classic could also be a cult classic even if that cult was just me and my childhood friends watching it while devouring Planters Cheez Balls. That, though, was nothing compared to this weekend, when scrolling through the cable menu I realized TCM was premiering a movie for which I still have my ticket stub, “Ronin,” my dearly beloved “Ronin.” Alas, because Xfinity axed TCM from our cable plan in 2019, I was forced to imagine Ben Mankiewicz’s intro instead.

Mankiewicz Voice: “1998 thriller ‘Ronin’ was the penultimate film of director John Frankenheimer, who died four years later at the age of 72 from a stroke due to complications from spinal surgery. ‘Ronin’ borrows its name from a Japanese term for masterless samurai seeking alternative employment with no lords to serve. In this case, these drifting warriors are ex-Cold War spies and military operatives, brought to life by an international cast including the likes of Robert DeNiro and Jean Reno, and summoned to Paris by a mysterious Irish woman, played by Natascha McElhone, to retrieve a case. Having previously helmed the 1966 Formula One drama ‘Grand Prix’ as well as 1975’s sequel to ‘The French Connection,’ Frankenheimer stages several hair-raising car chase scenes, notably without the use of CGI or greenscreen, even if by his own admission, ‘Ronin’ was predominantly a movie about people. Though the final screenwriting credits proved controversial, with David Mamet hired for a rewrite but opting for a pseudonym alongside original writer J.D. Zeik, the humanity of the characters is demonstrated less by plot than acting, countless small moments of behavior and mannerisms speaking volumes, such as the riveting opening sequence in which DeNiro’s Sam stakes out the bistro where the ronin first meet. The contents of the case, meanwhile, mark one of cinema’s most memorable MacGuffins, a term coined by Angus McPhail and made famous by Alfred Hitchcock, a device that is the reason but irrelevant in and of itself. That irrelevance in conjunction with two alternate endings that were filmed by Frankenheimer but not used, only work in retrospect to underline a movie that is all about dramatically rendering the process, uninterested in the result. Though rest assured the movie’s effect is substantial. Here then, from 1998, ‘Ronin.’”

Pitch Meeting: Third Saturday in October

The University of Tennessee Volunteers defeated the University of Alabama Crimson Tide over the weekend (stay with me - eh, if you want) in a 52-49 game epitomizing why college football will forever be the sport closest to this blog’s heart. It was a crucible of plot twists and pressure under the lights of a 102,000-seat stadium yielding as much electrifying brilliance as eye-covering folly that opened incredible cosmic portals to the sport’s history (we were on the precipice of The Fifth Down sequel for a minute there), demonstrated crucial shades of dimension (to my mind, the best player on the field was, in fact, the losing quarterback) and concluded not simply with a last-second field goal (that went over the crossbar as a kind of pigskin knuckleball demonstrating how even then the college football gods saw fit to throw in one more twist) but with the field overrun by bewildered, jubilant, orange-covered humanity and goalposts uprooted from the end zone and paraded through the streets of Knoxville, living out the sport’s perfect nexus between exultation and insanity. And that insanity, that’s what I’m thinking about. Because college football movies, whether the plethora of them released in the 30s and 40s when the game was king in America alongside baseball, or the more recent ones, tend to channel that insanity through the comedy genre, a la “Horse Feathers” (1932) or “Necessary Roughness” (1991) or some sort of gritty drama, a la “Saturday’s Heroes” (1937) or “The Program” (1993) (there is also the reverential fluff of “Rudy,” but don’t get me started). Rarely, though, if ever, do you see the college football thriller. And that is where Cinema Romantico comes in.

Tennessee’s game with Alabama is a rivalry even if it had been some time since Tennessee had prevailed, bearing its own nickname – The Third Saturday in October, simple-sounding, perhaps, but evocative of how, in their own minds, the date is reserved just for them. But I have always envisioned that moniker as something more, the title of my college football thriller, one I have heard for years and years in the voice of Don LaFontaine as an aerial shot of Neyland Stadium unfolds on the screen. “On the Third Saturday in October, tensions always run high. But this year, they are about to explode.”

An Alabama man, Henry Mize (Michael Shannon), with a personal history tied to the Crimson Tide football team gradually doled out over an hour and forty-five minutes, pilots a boat loaded with a bomb from a dock in Huntsville, Alabama and up the Tennessee River toward Knoxville, lowering his Crimson Tide flag at the border and raising a Volunteer one, a la “Captain Blood.” The plan: he will dock with the famed Vol Navy – an armada of tailgating boats moored on the banks of Neyland Stadium – where in a pre-planned ceremony the football team’s bluetick coonhound mascot Smokey will be brought aboard the boat of the informal Admiral (Luke Wilson) of the ostensible navy and blow them all to kingdom come. 

Henry’s preparations and voyage are crosscut with newbie UT Daily Beacon reporter Kelsey Slocum (Ayo Edebiri) who discovers in would-be puff piece about Smokey that the dog has received a death threat. When the local police laugh the threat off as just some jokester blowing smoke and her editor advises it is fake news (“Really? That’s really your response? You’re being serious right now?”) she skips her latest deadline, class, and huge exam to travel to the Yellowhammer State and open a time-sensitive investigation, taking her into the sordid heart of college football, from Paul Finebaum-ish radio personality John Theodore “J.T.” Pope (Bruce McGill), the self-proclaimed supreme pontiff of SEC Football, who becomes Kelsey’s unlikely co-detective, to an unctuous booster (Michael Rooker) who Knows More Than He Is Saying, to Henry’s ex-wife (Amber Benson), to some entity called the Huntsville Touchdown Club that proves to be less a non-profit for children’s medical needs than the front for a militant football fan organization, and finally, to a shady boat and RV salesman Grady Smith (Walton Goggins) who unlocks the mystery. (“You’re a Volunteer,” I imagine Goggins saying in his resplendent native Alabamian accent. “Why don’t you volunteer to show yourself to the door.”)

Kelsey and Pope then make haste upriver, aided by an idealistic river cop (Emily Procter) who in an emotional conclusion to their longstanding argument over whether Nick Saban is the superior coach to Bear Bryant (she says yes), commandeers the vessel by pushing her superior (Dwight Yoakam) overboard, outfoxing the inside man (Johnny Knoxville) operating a lock and dam, and racing to prevent the Third Saturday in October from being a day that lives in infamy. 

Memory

Liam Neeson’s 2022 “Memory” feels like an unofficial sequel to his “Taken” franchise in so much as rather than some vanilla named vigilante (Alex Lewis taking the reins from Bryan Mills) seeking to rescue his kidnapped daughter or avenge his murdered wife he is exacting retribution for a trafficked teenage girl named Beatriz (Mia Sanchez). If there’s a twist, it’s that Alex isn’t a good guy gone bad, in a manner of speaking, but a bad guy gone good, a contract killer tasked with offing Beatriz to protect a wealthy so & so but refusing and coming after the people who have hired him instead. Along the way, he opens channels of covert communication with the FBI Special Agent, Vincent Serra (Guy Pearce), trying to protect the trafficked girl in the first place, not so much taunting Agent Serra as imploring him to eschew red tape. In a sense, this marks Alex Lewis as both a Malkovich and an Eastwood, which is to say he’s Mitch Leary of “In the Line of Fire” as Dirty Harry. That suggests an intriguing action thriller, especially with Martin Campbell at the helm, previously of “Casino Royale,” “Goldeneye,” and this blog’s weirdly semi-cherished “The Vertical Limit,” a New Zealand director with a gift for staging action scenes. 

Alas, all the action scenes in “Memory” feel perfunctory, disappointingly, lazily conceived. Neeson’s commitment, which we will get to more in just a moment, could have helped yield a genuine drama as opposed to thriller. But if “Memory” is essentially appropriating the grave real-world issue of Juarez’s femicides and moving it across the border to El Paso, it hardly treats it with nuance, exploiting Beatriz to gin up its plot and then forgetting about her, more interested in the woman who would have her killed. That’s Davana Sealman, your typical ignoble philanthropist played by Monica Bellucci in a performance that seems to be taking place in a third movie, the same one occupied by Natalie Anderson in a throwaway part as a bored wife straight out of “Wild Things.” Bellucci isn’t in “Wild Things,” exactly, but still seems to view this whole enterprise as a sweaty neo-noir, of some kind, giving her character a whiff of the father in “John Wick,” considering the the whole movie boils down to Davana protecting a son she knows is morally reprehensible and a total dolt to boot, having a bit more fun than the plot device might necessarily call for, as close to the kind of trash for which Wesley Morris was petitioning for just the other day as anything else I have seen so far in 2022 cinema.

Davana is also into the anti-aging process, a minuscule subplot hinting at the movie’s title, referring to Alex’s memory, given how he is in the early stages of Alzheimer’s and beginning to forget things even as he robotically remembers how to dispatch so much action movie chum. Emblematic of a movie that has too many ideas, however, “Memory” itself never quite uses this for anything more than suspense, Alex forgetting crucial clues and such, just as Davana’s commitment to slow down getting old is just set-up for blackmailing her doctor. This is all unfortunate because if anything here truly seems to interest Neeson, it’s this, showing what he can (still) do when given even a little bit of character bone to gnaw on, even seeming to quietly suggest an actor who has grown tired of the schlock he has spent far too long starring in. The least convincing moment in movies like “Memory” is always the most obligatory one, when the assassin claims he’s done, wants out, which sure enough, Alex does as the movie begins Here, though, Neeson paradoxically comes alive by appearing as tired as he sounds, a guy who just wants out, in more ways than one.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Last Night at the Alamo (1983)

“Last Night at the Alamo” refers not to the famed San Antonio fort cum tourist attraction but a bar outside Houston named for the place where Davy Crockett and others made their last stand. The facts of that seminal passage in Texas history have been challenged, though that’s not anything new as Eagle Pennell’s black and white 16mm movie from 1983 goes to show, not that he is putting such obvious words in the mouths of his characters. As the title suggests, the Alamo watering hole is slated for demolition, putting a more recent first-time viewer such as myself in the mind of 2020’s superb last-night-in-a-bar “Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets.” That, however, was fiction posing as a documentary whereas “Last Night at the Alamo” is fiction that feels like a documentary, the camera an interloper, an eavesdropper, just taking it all in. When Cowboy Regan (Sonny Carl Davis) topples to the floor during a fight, losing his ten-gallon-hat and exposing his bald spot heretofore hidden from view, another movie might have accentuated the simultaneous exposing of the silver screen cowboy archetype. In Pennell’s deromanticized aesthetic, Cowboy just looks like some drunk sprawled on the floor. 

Given that the whole movie revolves around talkative barflies, “Last Night at the Alamo” appropriately opens mid-conversation – nay, mid-argument between young Ichabod (Steven Mattila) and his long suffering (picture in the dictionary and all that) girlfriend Mary (Tina-Bess Hubbard) in the former’s truck and on their way to the Alamo. This argument, it never really stops, not exactly, just finding something like an armistice in alcohol drawn from the tap and picking right back up where they left off as the movie ends. Then again, Claude (Lou Perryman) might come to the Alamo to find respite from an argument with his wife, but he finds none, their argument continuing by phone and in his mind. His spouse, she is never seen, only groused about, and all that grousing allows Perryman to really wrap his lips around the word “shit,” over and over, again and again. This evokes its lingual place as an all-purpose swear word and emotional catch-all, but in Perryman’s voice becomes profane poetry, his north Texas drawl drawing out that concluding “it” and making it vibrate like an echo off the inside of an empty water tower. You don’t need a sad song on the jukebox; you just need to hear Claude lament “shit.”

The key character here, though, is Cowboy Regan, kind of a Lone Star Harry Lime, the person everyone talks about but who takes a little while to make his entrance, effectively setting him up as larger than life. That very idea though is mocked in Davis’s inherent diminutive stature, and though the character boasts about being on the way to Hollywood to star in westerns, it sounds as believable as his claim that he knows a Texas legislator that can save the Alamo. These are tall tales that sound taller during the first couple of beers, less so a few more beers in, by which point Regan has been unmasked as just one more drugstore cowboy, his fall from semi-towering heights aided by Davis’s shrewd performance, never changing his demeanor, exactly, just allowing the gradually (d)evolving situation to just cast his character in a whole different light. And by the movie’s end, when Cowboy leads something comically approximating an armed sit-in to stop the demolition, he’s essentially playing the Battle of the Alamo as Drunk History. If “Last Night at the Alamo” were released today, it is hard to know whether it would get past the censors of the Texas State Legislature.

Some Drivel On...Cop Land

The title of 1997’s “Cop Land” refers to a town in New Jersey predominantly of New York City cops, exploiting a loophole to live across the Hudson and beyond the reach of internal affairs and protected by slow-moving, slow-witted Sheriff Freddy Heflin (Sylvester Stallone). Freddy is the Will Kane in this “High Noon” scenario, gradually pushed to push back, though writer/director James Mangold’s novelistic tendency to overload the movie with character and plot has the unfortunate effect of thwarting the inherent tension in the build to this climactic showdown. That includes Freddy’s relationship with The Girl Who Got Away (Annabella Sciorra), so unconvincing that Mangold is forced to call up Bruce Springsteen on the soundtrack to carry it. Stallone, at least, helps sell some individual moments, sort of taking his chatty Rocky Balboa palooka energy and then re-channeling it as a taciturn pushover. Much was made at the time of the weight Stallone gained for the part, but in scenes opposite crooked cops played by Harvey Keitel and Robert Patrick, among others, Stallone virtually disappears. His somnolence, however, is so great that even as the climax approaches, Freddy seems to be merely dragged along in the screenplay’s wake rather than rousing himself to action.

The racial undertones of the inciting incident, meanwhile, in which the loudmouth nephew (Michael Rapaport Rapaporting) of the town’s head honcho, go unexplored, this lack of interest inadvertently underscoring real life, though at the same time, “Cop Land” quietly (presciently) twists the back the blue phrase inside-out, never showing these police on the case of anything but protecting their own. That’s what drives not just Freddy to extreme measures but Detective Gary “Figgsy” Figgis (Ray Liotta) too. If Stallone is remixing Rocky Balboa than, in a way, Liotta is remixing Henry Hill of “Goodfellas,” the red-eyed exhaustion that plagues the latter during his Busy Day virtually unchanged from the red-eyed exhaustion that plagues Figgsy throughout “Cop Land,” innately expressing in a way and to a degree the rest of the movie never quite can the muddy line between cop and criminal.

Montana Story

There is a moment midway through “Montana Story” when half-siblings Cal (Owen Teague) and Erin (Haley Lu Richardson) are transporting a newly bought horse trailer back to their father’s ranch. The trailer breaks down, though, and they phone a friend. As they wait, Cal crosses the empty road where the camera switches to a point-of-view shot as he looks across the vast wide-open sky from right to left. Not long after, Erin suggests they check out a nearby mine their father helped build and so they do. That strip mine is just an ugly empty hole dug deep into the ground, its ugliness juxtaposed against those same big skies we have just seen Cal appreciate, quietly signaling the blight on the Big Sky country their own father helped create. It’s a powerful moment lessened at least a little by Erin explicating the myth of Big Sky country in a few lines of dialogue just moments before, evocative of directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s frustrating tendency to undercut their own visual power, resulting in a half-good movie that works like gangbusters when dialing it down and less so when laying it on thick. 

Both children have returned home because their father has suffered a stroke, leaving him in a coma and cared for by an in-home nurse, Ace (Gilbert Owuor). Cal and Erin might be estranged from their dad, but they prove even more estranged from one another, illustrated by how they are first seen together in frames placing them far apart, suggesting the emotional distance they will have to travel to make amends. Rather than gradually and visually fill in that backstory, however, McGehee and Siegel plunk down in front of us all at once in a melodramatic monologue Cal delivers to Ace laying out in specific detail just what happened. It’s brutal, just brutal, stopping the movie dead in its tracks while simultaneously exposing how “Montana Story” never really cares to know Ace at all, just on hand as a kind of receptor for exposition and occasional dispenser of wisdom. (To his immense credit, Owuor does good reacting work during this monologue, never quite letting you know precisely what he thinks of what Cal admits, a welcome sense of mystery that fits in with the best parts of the rest of the film.) The conclusion, meanwhile, is fueled by nothing less than a thunderous god of machine truer to the kind of mythical western trappings “Montana Story” is otherwise trying to eschew.

Yet despite such overcooked contrivance to help spur the denouement, the resolution of the central conflict between brother and sister remains refreshingly prickly, like a wound sutured rather than fully healed. This is especially evoked in the standoffish performance of Richardson. Her character keeps Cal in the dark about where she has been and what she has been doing, and when she finally reveals it, Richardson plays it almost curt, like Erin is giving just this much rope and no more, underlining how the true meaning of “Montana Story” exists in the spaces in-between the words these two speak to one another. The movie’s best scene takes place on the porch where Cal and Erin’s conversation is overshadowed by the wind whipping on the soundtrack, as if it’s carrying all their halting words away into some invisible void. 

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Whole Shootin’ Match (1978)

The story goes that after screening at the U.S. Film Festival in Salt Lake City in 1978, Eagle Pennell’s debut feature film “The Whole Shootin’ Match” so impressed Robert Redford that he decided to start Sundance. How much of that is literally true, I don’t know, though you can certainly understand how this movie, currently showing on The Criterion Channel, might have inspired what independent film in America became. Originally shot on 16mm, Pennell did a bang-up job demonstrating how budget and equipment impress no limitations on how one can visually tell a story. Pennell immediately puts the central relationship into perspective when Lloyd (Lou Perryman) walks through a door on the left-hand side of the screen, casting the only light into an otherwise dark room, and steps into the right-hand side of the frame where he yanks the cord on a ceiling light to reveal his buddy Frank (Sonny Carl Davis) passed out on a pool table, waking him up. That perspective is furthered in the ensuing scene, the two men driving through the Texas night with Frank at the wheel and Lloyd beside him in the passenger seat, the latter insisting on the need to get your mind right, a slogan copped from some book he read, which Frank laughs off as fortune cookie wisdom. If the blackness behind them is meant to obscure how the car isn’t really moving, it also seems to portray them as just two lonely blots in the void of the universe.

 Lloyd is the brains of the outfit, even if his plethora of get rich schemes like flying squirrel farms have all gone bust, a tinkerer cum inventor, his junk-filled yard evoked as a grassy work bench, picking out crap and seeing what comes of it. His million-dollar idea is a combination mop dreamt up when he’s going through the carwash, a sequence demonstrative of Pennell’s gift for economical movie magic, employing nothing more than rhythmic editing and music to evince Lloyd’s lightbulb moment. That the mop dream goes sideways perhaps goes without saying, though Pennell is far cagier than mere fatalism. The first sign this burgeoning entrepreneurship is doomed comes when a commercial for the invention pops up on TV during a Dallas Cowboys game Frank is watching, their idea being stolen right in front of him flying over his head, football as an escape as throwing the wool over your own eyes. And Frank’s dream of confronting the company man that has screwed them over coming to pass plays less like a premonition than a subconscious realization that they are the ones who have screwed up and it’s too late. 

If Lloyd is Frank’s closest friend, his wife Paulette’s (Doris Hargrave) closest friend is Christian talk radio, which we see her intently listening to in a couple scenes, Pennell cutting to a close-up of the radio speakers in each one, as if it really is a living, breathing character right there in the room. She accepts the generosity of an old high school friend who clearly pines for even as she wards off his advances, not that this matters to Frank, angry and jealous that he can’t replace his son’s bike when it gets stolen like his wife’s would-be suitor can. When his son cries over being ordered to return the replacement bike, Frank takes off his belt and whips him, a terrifying scene that’s more about Frank exerting his own frustrations than imparting any lesson.

Paula keeps their house from breaking apart even as Frank hypocritically cheats on her, buying a new suit after their advance on their new-fangled kitchen cleaner, picking up a woman at the bar and essentially trying on a whole new life for size. He does this earlier, too, when he and Lloyd pick up a couple younger women at another bar, getting drunk and going skinny-dipping. The following morning, they have breakfast at the home of one of the woman’s fathers, confined to a wheelchair and barely present in the world, a harbinger of a future that just seems to drift pass Frank like a cloud. As moody and mean as he can be, though, always waiting for Lloyd to prop him up, he’s also the one who tries to prop Lloyd up after their possible riches slip through their hands, finding a treasure map and taking him out into the hill country of Texas to find it. That the map yields nothing but a horseshoe plays like a no quick fix punchline to one big cosmic joke.

Wrath of Man

There’s a lot going on in Guy Ritchie’s “Wrath of Man” (2021), too much going on, one might say, which is a hallmark of Ritchie’s films, I suppose, right down to that “Swept Away” remake where even if that was just Madonna and Adriano Giannini stuck on an island all I can remember all these years later is the over-edited would-be comic game of charades. Then again, in those early Ritchie offerings that made him a hot commodity, there was a distinct energy, even if sometimes it could feel All Revved Up With No Place to Go, to quote Meat Loaf. Twenty-three years later after his debut “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels,” Ritchie has matured, in a manner of speaking. That is to say “Wrath of Man,” in which a terse mystery man deemed “H” (Jason Statham) takes a job driving an armored truck, is more composed and solemn than those early punch drunk efforts, with a muted color palette striving to evince elegance and a mixed-up timeline that even in working to generate tension oddly comes across almost as muted as the photography, seeking a novelistic heft, epitomized in chapter headings like A Dark Spirit. It might have worked if there was any emotional follow through to the various emergent subplots, but a band of vets turned robbers feels like Cake covering Gloria Gaynor – i.e., “Wrath of Man” covering “Widows” – and the ostensible backstory surprise of “H” is so unsurprising it becomes rote. And yet! Statham remains compelling as something less like a genuine character than a delay-action action movie bomb, holding everything in and sizing everybody up ‘til it’s time to go. The title might suggest the Bible but “H” is more like a welterweight shaking off the robe, hearing the bell, and unleashing a holy furor. If you’re into that sort of thing.

Confess, Fletch

“Confess, Fletch” is based on a book by Gregory McDonald of the same name in which the eponymous investigative reporter Irwin “Fletch” Fletcher (Jon Hamm) returns to his Boston rental home to discover a dead body, calls the police to report it, and is accused of a murder that has something to do with priceless works of art. If you’re worried about spoilers, worry not, I won’t provide any, and couldn’t even if I wanted to since I sort of lost track of the plot by the end anyway. Heck, so does Fletch himself, giving a big kind of “Thin Man”-ish plot explainer that turns out to be comically wrong. True, that means “Confess, Fletch” doesn’t culminate in anything exactly substantial despite undertones of rich and white privilege, but that’s ok. It’s not the destination, it’s the journey, the saying goes, and in Greg Mottola’s film it’s not the crime, it’s the solving of it.

Mottola evokes this in the movie’s relaxed pace, made in the image of a main character who prefers bare feet, taking it easy and just sort of asking the audience to dip its toes into so much entertaining easygoingness. A lengthy sequence in which Fletch breaks into a yacht is less about suspense or even action, per se, than witnessing the would-be gumshoe’s shrewdness manifest itself. And when the editing does occasionally accelerate, like the scene between Fletch and his pot-smoking next-door neighbor (Annie Mumolo) who unwittingly sets her stove ablaze, it accentuates the brisk comic exchanges of dialogue while simultaneously serving as a humorous contrast to the nonchalance of Fletch, observing a chaotic world with a wry, detached bemusement. His “nothing to see here,” in a manner of speaking, translates to “good luck with all that.” 

True, “Confess, Fletch” doesn’t really introduce us to Fletch, just sort of dropping us into his existence mid-stream. But Mottola doesn’t want us to get to know him through traditional avenues like backstory, not even when the movie flashes back to Rome, but simply in observing the character’s behavior and Hamm’s air. That goes for other characters too, like the detective on his trail, Monroe (Roy Wood Jr.), the weariness caused by his newborn baby at home a reflection of his weariness at having to deal with Fletch, while his detective trainee Griz (Ayden Mayeri) develops something like a Spy vs. Spy relationship with Fletch that honestly might be the funniest thing in the movie. (Mayeri is so funny she transcends the otherwise predictable punchline of spilling a fast food shake all over herself by transforming her into a hysterically hapless cry of the eternally defeated.) But the movie belongs to Hamm, of course, his entire turn carved out of his air in the way he sneaks into a wealthy person soiree by sort of half-dancing, standing out far more than he is trying to blend in, marking his Fletch as more insouciant Houdini than master of disguise. You’d swear he gets himself fingered for murder just so he can prove he didn’t do it.