Old Long Since

As I have sort of alluded to in previous years, New Year’s Resolutions don’t interest me much, not anymore. That’s not to say I don’t have goals, I do, but in a more specific, less self-pressured way than vague commitments to Bettering Myself. My chief goal in 2022 was to finally read Larry McMurtry’s 1985 Western novel “Lonesome Dove,” all 864 pages, about a cattle drive from a small border town in Texas all the way to Montana and the Bighorn Mountains. And what I loved most about the book is how the cattle drive, while epic in the essence of its undertaking, is arbitrary, almost pointless, put into motion by Captain Woodrow F. Call (his name an ironic counterpoint) for nothing, really, than lack of a better idea. His partner in cattle driving and fellow ex-Texas Ranger Augustus “Gus” McCrae (a name communicating honor and informality in equal measure) is content where he is, sitting on the porch more than working, watching the sunset and drinking whiskey, philosophizing, in a manner of speaking, a real European sensibility in the American Southwest, mad respect. True, he uses the cattle drive as an opportunity to seek out Clara, his beloved who got away, but he winds up back where he was at novel’s end, if not quite in the way he might have hoped, and hey, Call does too. What did it all mean? Who the hell knows?

Running parallel to this cattle drive is Roscoe Brown, deputy to Sheriff July Johnson of Fort Smith, Arkansas and an imprecise, kinda crooked echo of Gus. Where Gus sits on a porch, Roscoe sits on a couch (in the Fort Smith jail with one cell that doesn’t have a lock); where Gus drinks whiskey, Roscoe whittles; where Gus philosophizes, in a manner of speaking, Roscoe is happy not to think too much at all. (Barry Corbin apparently played Roscoe in the television miniseries, but I kept picturing younger Harry Dean Stanton with a pitiful pencil moustache.) Roscoe is, however, happy where he is, which McMurtry’s line about the “sparkling” Arkansas River just down the street from the jail conveys on the day that changes his life. This happens because July has ridden off to find an escaped killer, and because July’s wife Elmira has ridden off to find her one true love, causing Roscoe to be reluctantly enlisted by the towns folk to ride off to advise July about his spouse. If he’s considered slow, Roscoe seems to know from the jump that this will not end well, though McMurtry does treat this as fatalism but an antithesis of the hero’s journey, things getting blurrier rather than clearer, only getting further and further from the place he wants to be, sleeping on the ground rather than lying on the jail couch (I kept thinking of Jennifer Lawrence once saying that when she’s out somewhere, she’s mostly just thinking of her couch), from a place with trees to a place with no trees to speak of, all climaxing not in an awakening, or reckoning, or understanding, but a kind of anti-epiphany that feels, to me, like the quintessential year-end tribute. 

“Every time Roscoe tried to think back along the line of events that had led to his being in a place where there was no trees to lean against, he strayed off the line and soon got all tangled up in his thinking. It was probably better not to try and think back down the line of life.”

My 2022 Mixtape

The emerging trend, I have noticed, is to share your Spotify Wrapped list at the end of the year as a way to convey your favorite music of the year, or at least the music to which you listened most frequently. And that’s why I’m not sure it’s the most accurate way to gauge your favorite music of this year. I mean, what would my Spotify Wrapped tell you? That I like Lady Gaga (this year I was really into her performance of “Artpop” with Elton John, which is shot through with the kind of sincerity she couldn’t evince on “Joanne” and is the only time in recorded history The Muppets have interfered rather than enhanced) and Bruce Springsteen (this year I was into his 1992 Meadowlands live recording with The Other Band because, man, I have really come to cherish The Other Band)? But then, I don’t have Spotify anyway. No, I’m more old school, which is to say I like to compile a year-end specific mixtape. Not a real, mixtape, of course, but a playlist on my iPhone and a hypothetical mixtape here on my blog, which, come to think of it, is about as old school as a cassette. (Click on the title to hear the song.)

My 2022 Mixtape 

Daytona Sand, Orville Peck. I don’t karaoke all that much and so I don’t really have my karaoke song, per se, not least because I can’t really sing. But I can sort of perform, in a manner of speaking, and what I love about this song is how Orville Peck performs it in a way befitting his mysterious masked persona. And while I know this song would never appear on any karaoke bar’s playlist, I wish it would, because I’d like to make this my karaoke song.

The Light Saw Me, Jason Boland & The Stragglers. Like if Fox Mulder fronted a honky-tonk band.

Chicamacomico, American Aquarium. The Best Bruce Springsteen Song of 2022. 

Born Tough, Nikki Lane. One of my recurring faves trades a little of the twang in her guitars for a little more crunch, a deal I heartily endorse. 

 

Talk Tough, Bat Fangs. Embedding this video and not the others because this is my favorite song of 2022 even though it was technically released in 2021. It speaks for itself, I’d like to think, but I admire how Betsy Wright drops in a guitar solo, there, right after the first verse and before the chorus, like Carl Lewis throwing out a 28'6" at the start of a long jump competition just because he could, just to show you what’s up.

Lost, Zola Jesus. The goth chanteuse of the north woods checks in with her state of the nation.

Alien Superstar, Beyoncé. Sometimes people refer to her mononymous majesty as a god or God herself. I don’t know about all that, but the two times the chorus comes in on this one, reader, I tell you straight up and with nary a hint of exaggeration, I see God.

False Dichotomy, Metric. My favorite cut off my favorite album of the year, the album Arcade Fire was trying to make its last two albums and couldn’t. Also, special citation for a 20-year band putting out perhaps its best record two decades into its run. That ain’t easy.

Tired of Taking It Out on You, Wilco. I’ll be honest, I’d given up thinking I’d ever love a Wilco album again. “A Ghost Is Born” all the way back in 2004 was the last one I loved (a somewhat controversial stance, I believe, among the Wilco aficionados). But this new record, even despite the tracks I didn’t love, I loved. I’m not sure it’s quite the return to country it was billed as being, but it occupies a middle ground between the country of their early years and the indie rock they eventually gravitated toward, which is maybe what I was waiting for all along. This song is the one I liked most, because while it doesn’t soar, in a manner of speaking, it still sounds like the current incarnation of Wilco in full flight.

Teach Me How to Stay, Stephen Bruton. Maybe because of Wilco, who I was listening to fervently back around the turn of the century, I found myself seeking out lots of circa 2000 singer-songwriter stuff. Old favorites, like Matthew Ryan, yes, but new finds too, like the late Stephen Bruton (who died in 2009), especially this tune from 2002 which it turns out I had been waiting lo these 20 years to hear, evocative of the infinite treasures floating in the sonic-time continuum. 

Tryin’ My Best, Los Angeles, Mandy Moore. Speaking of which, Mandy Moore put out a new album this year and that album led me back to the album she released in 2020 which I loved. And if back at the turn of the century Mandy Moore was just another teen pop idol, twenty years later, after considerable personal strife, she’s reemerged with a California soft rock sound that she wears well. She’s approaching middle age, and even though I try, to some degree, to stay plugged into the popular music scene, well, I have already arrived at middle age, and boy does her adult contemporary give me life. 

My Favorite College Football Games: Game 17

December 22, 1984 (Florida Citrus Bowl): Florida State - 17 Georgia - 17

Did you know that until 2002 a college football player’s individual statistics compiled in a postseason bowl game were not considered part of their overall season totals? The still standing single season rushing record of 2,628 yards set by Oklahoma State’s Barry Sanders in 1988 remains as astonishing now as it was then not least because his record is shortchanged the 222 yards he gained in that year’s Holiday Bowl triumph over Wyoming. That’s 222 yards, not to mention 5 touchdowns, that are just sort out there in the ether, as if the 1988 Holiday Bowl took place on the opposite side of the International Date Line and when Sanders crossed back over, all his stats were lost. The official records show Nebraska’s Tommie Frazier gained only 604 yards on the ground in 1995, not 803, because his magnificent 199 in that year’s Fiesta Bowl belong not to him, I guess, but to the Fiesta Bowl Committee and the City of Tempe. Indeed, when bowl games are sometimes cited as being figuratively meaningless, it’s forgotten that for much of their existence they were literally meaningless, their statistics spiritually scrubbed while up until 1965 the sport’s national champions got crowned via polling before the bowls were played. And even when the concluding polls were finally released after the bowl games, only a few postseason contests generally ever factored into the championship discussion, meaning the others remained unofficially inconsequential, like the 1984 Citrus Bowl, the exemplar of the meaningless bowl game, matching 7-3-1 Florida State against 7-4 Georgia in a game played one day after the mythical National Championship had in effect already been decided. 

 

For its first 35 years, the Florida Citrus Bowl was the Tangerine Bowl. Tangerines, though, are not the only citrus products in the Sunshine State, and in 1983, the Florida Citrus Commission paid $1.25 million to change the game’s name to the Florida Citrus Bowl, becoming the very first bowl named for a corporate sponsor. That evoked its status as a kind of boom bowl, destined in a few years to upgrade its December date to the (then) prestigious New Year’s Day, mirroring its host city Orlando, fueled in the 80s by Walt Disney World which had opened 13 years earlier. After all, long before bowl games became predominantly made-for-TV fodder under the umbrella of ESPN, they were civic events meant to showcase their host cities, a detail some of the more esteemed bowl games have since forgotten. The Fiesta Bowl moved inside to a sterile dome years ago, eschewing the free advertising of showing freezing Midwesterners like me the Valley of the Sun in all its luminous glory, which I thought of during last year’s Citrus Bowl when the long shadows cast by the warm sun in the second half became juxtaposed against the snow falling right outside my window. Used to be that you didn’t just watch a bowl game to watch the game but to point at the TV screen and at Orlando, at Tempe, at Pasadena, and think “I want to go to there.” 

Your game cannot rise to the hallowed level of CFB postseason criterion on context alone, however, and the 1984 Florida Citrus Bowl is a paragon of its kind because it is more daffy than dramatic, more spirited than scintillating, the partially prosaic, technically inconclusive score both saying it all and not beginning to say it. The game opens on a festively inauspicious note with Florida State smartly driving right down the field and then fumbling the ball away, foreshadowing a game that regardless of Georgia staking a 14-0 lead at halftime is rife with emotional turnabouts. Georgia losing its starting quarterback to injury proves less a cause of concern than bringer of great joy, in the form of freshman backup signal caller James Jackson, a dual threat quarterback in the antiquated era when that term was considered avant-garde, taking the galley proof of notoriously conservative coach Vince Dooley and making some substantial edits with his big scrambles and deep bombs that earn him the game’s MVP award. Florida State’s offensive identity, on the other hand, is a kind of fun-loving lack of one, looking toward the colorful future by throwing the ball around to its speedy wide receivers and running a smattering of trick plays even as it reverts to monochrome in running the triple option. 

Florida State’s special teams, meanwhile, are daredevils, all, trying so relentlessly to block kicks that twice they are penalized for roughing the kicker. This causes no small amount of bellyaching on the part of NBC color analyst Bob Trumpy, imploring Florida State to take it down a notch, until, hey, wouldn’t you know, trailing 17-9 in the fourth quarter, their special teams crash through, block a punt, and return it to the end zone for a touchdown. Third time’s the charm! They convert the two-point conversion off a nifty reverse to knot the score, leading to a final few minutes that despite the teams trying to break the tie, is not so much suspenseful as just kind of exuberantly frantic, epitomized in a crowd that never sounds cacophonous, just in high spirits, having a good time, and underlined in how even as Criqui calls the action, he is also saying thanks to the broadcast crew and various bowl game officials, as if this is all the conclusion to a big show. (One fun added ingredient is NBC frequently transitioning to commercial breaks with dollops of Bruce Springsteen’s “Bobby Jean” because it’s 1984 and “Born in the USA” is just about the biggest thing going. If that song seems like a curious choice for such a milieu, I don’t know, I think there’s something a little Auld Lang Syne-ish in Bruce’s breakup anthem for his BFF bandmate Little Stevie.) 

There is this sensation I remember from Christmases of my youth, one I innately felt back then but didn’t intellectually understand and could not have intelligently described, where the whole world as I knew it suddenly came to a pleasing halt, no homework, no basketball practice, no plans. I didn’t understand what being on the clock meant because I had yet to ever officially clock in, but that, I realize now, is how it felt, off the clock, not timeless but without time. And because bowl games have always been inextricable from the holidays ever since the very first one, the Tournament East-West football game, was staged specifically to coincide with the Rose Parade in Pasadena on New Year’s Day, for me, they always went hand-in-hand with that interregnal feeling. Of course, that’s simply because as a kid the whole world only extends from the front yard to the backyard with your own home in-between, a feeling that fades as you get older and you realize that despite a few days off around the holidays, time doesn’t really stop but just plods on. “Happy Holidays,” as Paul Krugman put it just the other day for The New York Times, “now get back to work.” 

 

I can’t help but think that for me, bowl games are the last vestige of that theoretical lull, where rather than infused with stakes and stress, the majority of them mean nothing, reaching the true sports ideal that is often unthinkingly cited but never truly lived out, just for fun. But even that is being compromised now, with players opting out of them as business decisions, protecting their future earning potential as professionals. And I understand it, I agree with it, I applaud them for it, and still, I want to say, your whole life is about to become a business decision, a series of transactions, of tasks, of stuff to do, and this is your last chance not to make it count, per se, but to do something that does not count, to live your life off the clock, in this last little space across that metaphorical international date line and out of arm’s reach of the dreaded big picture.

The 1984 Florida Citrus Bowl concludes with Georgia illustrating what should always be a team’s (un)official bowl season credo – Why Not?! – by sending on Kevin Butler to attempt a game-winning 71-yard field goal. True, Butler was a 1984 first team All American and connected on a 60-yard field goal earlier that season, but 71 yards would have been the longest in the history of organized football; it would still be the longest field goal in the history of organized football. The notion of him making it seems so remote, almost comical, that Criqui cracks that he will “do a double gainer right outta the (press) box” if Butler succeeds in sending the ball over the crossbar. Butler does not succeed, naturally, because if he had you’d know about it, and you’d probably know about Criqui doing a double gainer out of the Citrus Bowl press box too. But he comes close. This field goal, it is dead center and though camera angles back then are not what they are now, really looks as if it would have been good from 70. It is the most mind-blowing failed field goal I have ever seen.

It’s not necessarily more apropos that Butler missed. I like thinking of the longest field goal in organized football history occurring in the strange postseason firmament unique to college football, in the record book but also out there in the wild gridiron yonder. But in coming up a breath short of history, that kick proves a captivating moment in time, if ultimately insignificant, which is nothing if not an apt metaphor for the whole reason bowl games exist in the first place. 

What's Going On?

What in the world is going on in this photo Joe Telles snapped for Deadline to accompany Joe Utichi’s piece about the writer/director and co-stars (from left to right, Colin Farrell, Martin McDonagh, Brendan Gleeson) of “The Banshees of Inisherin?”

A.) Did Telles say “Cheese!” and prompt Gleeson to take the direction a bit too enthusiastically, McDonagh to contrarily refute it, and Farrell to half-heartedly obey (“I don’t really feel like smiling”) in a way to which I can totally relate?

B.) Is this each man summarizing his attitude toward the movie promotional process? Gleeson mocking it? McDonagh denouncing it? Farrell remaining neutral because, hey, he’s in the thick of the Best Actor Oscar race here and can’t afford to rock the boat?

C.) Has Gleeson just cut wind? Is McDonagh reacting to it? Are we capturing Farrell the split-second before he realizes it? Does the second photo in the roll feature Farrell scrunching up his nose and screaming “Feck!?” 

Haul Out the Holly

Generally, characters in Hallmark Channel Christmas movies have lost their secular faith in the secular season and need that secular faith restored. But Emily (Lacey Chabert), heroine of “Haul Out the Holly,” just doesn’t love Christmas enough. Recovering from a break-up by housesitting for her parents after they light out to the Sunshine State for the holidays, Emily plans to just hang out and watch Christmas movies, hardly the sign of a Scrooge, more someone needing a little me time. Just hanging out, though, is not sufficient for her folks’ Homeowners Association, managed by Jared (Wes Brown) whose black spectacles are less evocative of an endearingly nerdy Clark Kent type than a stickler for decorative holiday guidelines, citing her for insufficient Christmas lawn ornaments and such. This attitude mirrors the whole neighborhood, most of which appears to have no life outside of the HOA limits. Indeed, even if there is an unlikely love story tucked into Emily and Jared relationship, “Haul Out the Holly” is more about how Emily comes to accept and is accepted by the community. Well, perhaps “accepted by” is not the phrase we are looking for there. Because the boisterousness bordering on belligerence of the community coupled with the movie’s own aesthetic vigor causes that acceptance to ultimately feel more like assimilation.

Now don’t get wrong, I am not impugning that aesthetic vigor. Far from it. I have seen some Hallmark Christmas movies in my time, reader, oh, have I, and aesthetically speaking, Maclain Nelson’s “Haul Out the Holly” might be the best one of these I have ever watched. It’s not perfect, mind you. Chabert’s face-first pratfall into obviously fake snow could have been cut and the would-be comical slow-mo is as uninspired in its conception as its execution. But when I say “Haul Out the Holly” is the best I have watched, I don’t mean in the big flourishes but the little things, in the elemental rendering. These movies are plot-driven, and those plots tend to have screwball elements, but screwball elements need to be evoked with pace, crackle, and wit whereas most Countdown to Christmas entries tend to move with a polite assembly line pace. The screwball elements of “Haul Out the Holly,” on other hand, are accentuated by snappy editing (by Bryan Capri), surprisingly droll writing (by Andy Sandberg), and clever acting. And the clever acting is not just limited to Chabert. Melissa Peterman evokes a Kristen Johnson vibe that emerges as something all her own, a haughty neighbor knows best, while wily old vet Stephen Tobolowsky plays an HOA crackpot to the hilt, his turn summarized in a line about therapy spoken by Ellen Travolta where she epitomizes her impeccable comic timing throughout. Even Eliza Hayes Maher scores as Emily’s emergent best friend with nothing more than facial expressions suggesting how she’s learned to deal with living in an unrelenting winter wonderland.

If the best screwball comedies tend toward commentary tucked in amid all their hijinks, “Haul Out the Holly” manages for a while to play as a commentary on the oppressiveness of Christmas, evinced in characters like Tobolowsky’s, suggesting Clark Griswold seen through the looking glass the other way, a cuckoo Christmas militant. But even if the movie never entirely eschews its humorous tone, it still cannot prevent a gradual slide into more typical Hallmark sentimentality. The last half-hour reversal not being the standard-issue reappearance of an ex or some secret withheld bubbling to the surface but Emily failing to recruit Jared as the Christmas carnival Santa when he really wants the role for himself is pointedly not tied back to some childhood memory gone wrong, or some such, just an inadvertent allusion of Peter Pan complex, signaling a movie that’s become addled by its own eggnog. (I really wish Ellen Travolta would have received one line calling attention to this, just to let us know the filmmakers knew despite having to paint within Hallmark’s mandated lines.) Emily just rolls with this, like she gets it, which I suppose by the time the movie ends and the whole HOA shows up on her porch to sing carols, she does. Even the best holiday movie Hallmark has ever produced can’t help indoctrinating its character in the Christmas spirit.

Who Was the Golden Globes-iest Golden Globes Nominee?

The Golden Globes are back! True, they didn’t really go away last year, even if the fallout from the Los Angeles Times exposing lack of diversity within its governing body the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, not to mention that governing body’s willingness to be feted with prime rib and champagne, so to speak, in exchange for nominations, caused actors to boycott them and NBC to pull the plug on the annual January broadcast. Still, the HFPA announced winners over Twitter in-between, per Cinema Romantico’s faux-sources, gulps from a giant fishbowl cocktail, the whole calamity reducing the Globes to their true essence, that being a desperate cry for attention. Part of me hoped they’d stay that way,  but no, here they are again, diversifying their ranks to some degree and making the all-important cosmetic changes like installing Jerrod Carmichael as host and having Mayan Lopez and Selenis Leyva announce the nominees. (Leyva stepped in for Mayan’s father George Lopez who bowed out after contracting COVID.) I can’t wait until Dave Chappelle and Elon Musk present an award on the actual telecast and the former lectures us to give the new HFPA a chance and Musk stops mid-joke read from a cue card about how badly he is managing to Twitter to explain that, actually, he’s running Twitter quite well, thank you, and you clods just can’t recognize a Genius At Work. 

Of course, forging ahead with the 2023 Globes will cause great consternation for its nominees, no doubt hashing out this very dilemma with their various public relations teams. Brendan Fraser, nominated as Best Dramatic Actor for “The Whale,” has already indicated he will not attend, and as a long-heralded industry mensch, we have no doubt he is sincere in this vow. Others, though, I’m sure are wrestling right now with the notion of how much virtue signaling is too much. We shall see, just as we shall see if the HFPA is more determined to throw shade at Fraser for this snub by giving Austin Butler the award for “Elvis” (if Austin Butler attends) or retain its role as symbolic Oscar weathervane and give it to Fraser anyway. How all this affects the Golden Globes’ long-standing status as Hollywood’s unofficial office holiday party remains to be seen. Office holiday parties are changing the world over given the Pandemic and it only makes sense that Hollywood’s might too. Maybe it’s time. Until such time, though, when the Hollywood glitterati decides once for all to get off the fence, the blog will maintain its bit of determining the Golden Globes-iest Golden Globes nominee. That is to say, not the best nominee (boring), nor the most deserving nominee (lame), but the nominee that most encapsulates the HFPA’s off the record mission statement of starf***ing.

Brad Pitt, there, in the Best Supporting Actor category for “Babylon” comes across pretty Golden Globes-y because the Oscar blogs (I don’t read) suggest his buzz for an Academy Award has been minimal (as far as I know). Ditto Margot Robbie for the same film. Still, that’s a big Christmastime release, an easy cover, and the HFPA works harder than that. Ana de Armas being nominated for “Blonde” is awful Golden Globes-y because without the double barrel Best Actress in a Drama and Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy chicanery it’s doubtful there would have been space for her on the invite list. Speaking of which, there is no way Emma Thompson would have been nominated for “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande” without that convenient second Best Actress category and, hey, Thompson presenting at the 2014 Golden Globes holding a martini in one hand and her high heels in the other is the whole soiree’s vision board. Whether Thompson accepts her award as this year’s Golden Globes-iest, well, TBD. Maybe she and Brendan Fraser can make like Karen and Pam on “The Office” and throw a dueling Hollywood office holiday party down the road at the Beverly Wilshire. I’d livestream that.

Causeway

Though Lake Superior is, as the name implies, first-rate, there is another lake on Minnesota’s North Shore that I think of just as fondly, one that encompasses all of 68 acres rather than some 20-million. Inland, undeveloped, and not right off the Caribou hiking trail near Lutsen but requiring a moderately difficult 2-mile hike to get there, my dad and I have generally had Lake Agnes all to ourselves whenever we have trekked to it. And if there is serenity in this world, reader, I tell you it is Lake Agnes. The stillness, it is profound, how you can both seem to hear everything for miles and hear nothing at all, reaching that state of meditation where your thoughts give way to peaceful thoughtlessness, the closest I’ve come to understanding that Bruce Lee mantra, the one about being water. Not being like water; being water, an emptied mind, formless, shapeless, innately malleable to whatever life throws at you. 

“Causeway” is set in New Orleans, however, not Minnesota, where a U.S. Army Corp of Engineer named Lynsey (Jennifer Lawrence) comes home from Afghanistan after suffering a cerebral hemorrhage in a bomb attack. That backstory is not laid out immediately, however. Director Lila Neugebauer comes from the stage and though this marks her feature film debut, she already demonstrates in assured eye for guiding us visually and allowing her performers to evince emotion rather than having them impress it upon us with words. In the introductory scenes of a home care nurse (Jayne Houdyshell) getting Lynsey back up to speed with the basics, which could have been a movie unto itself, Lawrence gradually lets you see Lynsey plugging back into the world while Houdyshell evinces a hard-won optimism that never becomes cloying, and the kind to which Lynsey unwittingly inspires.

Eventually, Lynsey returns home to the little house she shares with her mother (Linda Emond), though her mother’s initial absence upon her arrival and their elliptical conversations speaks volumes to the nature of their relationship without saying much at all. Lynsey is silently suffering her trauma, in other words, and rather than utilizing dialogue or flashbacks to fill out that trauma, Neugebauer honors her main character’s repression by repressing it on screen too, the tension it causes merely humming on the periphery and in Lawrence’s gestures. After taking a hit from a joint and expressing disbelief if not disgust at being back home, Lawrence turns just her head to the right and expels the smoke in such a way to suggest a brief expelling of all that emotional bile. In that exhalation is everything. Even when Lynsey’s doctor (Stephen McKinley Henderson) asks that she explain in detail what happened to her in Afghanistan, her explanation is cold, matter of fact, saying the words deliberately stripped of any feeling, not letting herself feel them.

If she makes emotional inroads, it is with James (Brian Tyree Henry), a mechanic who helps when her truck breaks down. Though their initial meeting is a tad narratively contrived, the portrayal of their relationship is the furthest thing from. He has suffered his own trauma but, crucially, never exists merely as a reflection of Lynsey or cheerleader to her (or something even worse), instead a full-fledged character in his own right, co-equals. Henry consciously plays someone further along in his own recovery, illustrated by his kind of chill air, even as grief palpably lingers, a performance of someone who is still learning to live with that grief and who needs a friend just as much as Lynsey. Neugebauer likes to frame them in two shots, allowing space for their natural chemistry to breathe and also to bring home each other’s presence in the other one’s life. In a nighttime scene on a park bench, we see them both in the frame both up close and from a distance, and though from a distance they are expressly shown as alone, together they still come across less lonely. 

Many of their scenes take place in or around the pools on account of the job Lynsey takes cleaning them. Nominally, this ties back to her role within the Army Corps maintaining water systems, though Neugebauer deploys this small piece of plot to heighten the emotional effect, the stillness of so many pool surfaces of the pools mirroring the stillness of Lynsey, a character gradually heeding an inner call to action that manifests itself not in some massive plot twist but one simple question. And if in her David O. Russell extravaganzas and even last year’s “Don’t Look Up,” Lawrence demonstrated a gift for going big, in “Causeway” she strains everything out of her performance until there is virtually nothing left; she becomes water.

The Banshees of Inisherin

It is fashionable to think of modern society’s craving for silence as new-fangled, what with all the screens and social media and the 24-hour news cycle and stories of locating the last place on Earth without human noise. Set in 1923, “The Banshees of Inisherin,” however, is here to remind us that as of at least 100 years ago, silence was already an object of great yearning, even on a small, quaint fictional Irish island like Inisherin. Cozy and quaint, after all, can become an unlikely synonym for oppressive, as it is with Colm Doherty (Brendan Gleeson), who unemotionally cuts off his longtime friendship with Pádraic Súilleabháin (Colin Farrell) as writer/director Martin McDonagh’s movie opens, saying “I just don’t like you no more.” It’s a taciturn line reading befitting Gleeson’s performance, carrying himself in his manner and his posture like a man bearing a great weight but not being all demonstrative about it. (It’s a back a bit, he confesses to a therapist by way of a priest about his depression.) That weight comes in the form of Pádraic, not that Colm’s drinking buddy has the self-awareness to know it. Eventually the reasoning for this one-sided falling out is clarified in a bit more detail, but just in the dueling airs of these two men and you can imagine in an instant a lifetime of Pádraic prattling on – about the weather, about his precious donkey Jenny – and Colm retreating deeper and deeper within himself until he can no longer hear himself think.

It’s true that despite so much lush scenery “The Banshees of Inisherin” could be translated to the stage from the screen with but a few minor tweaks and no one would be the wiser. (That includes the donkey. I saw “The Ferryman”; there was a goose onstage.) This is to say McDonagh is not telling his story strictly in visual terms. But it is also true that the movie screen is predominantly about the human face and so “The Banshees of Inisherin” becomes predominantly about the weathered, wearied visage of Gleeson and Farrell’s big, bushy eyebrows, the best eyebrows in a movie this year, like the movie’s weathervanes, cluing you into whether Pádraic is perplexed, heated, sad, or maybe all three at once. Indeed, the real drama in “The Banshees of Inisherin” proves less about the why than the what, and the what is Pádraic’s struggle to simply process what he has been told. In that way, McDonagh’s movie calls to mind one Larry David might have made if Larry David were Irish Catholic rather than Jewish. Because no matter how many times Colm tells Pádraic to feck off, because even when Colm threatens to start chopping off his own fingers for every word his drinking buddy utters, Pádraic, frequently in the most bleakly hysterical manner you can imagine, will not, nay, cannot leave well enough alone, looking more and more like his beloved pet donkey Jenny wanting to come inside the house even as Farrell and McDonagh deftly allow the character’s cited niceness to shade into something that begins to feel almost overbearing, flipping the whole idea of niceness on its head.

Pádraic’s winnowing niceness is put into further perspective through the village idiot Dominic (Barry Keoghan) taking Colm’s place, in a manner of speaking, as his new drinking buddy. Granted, McDonagh creates the character of Dominic to put him through the wringer by way of an abusive father in order to ostensibly subvert our expectations and then extract poignancy from his plight, mechanized humanity skewing too close to McDonagh’s previous “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing,” Missouri. Yet, even if the writing tilts toward caricature, Keoghan evades it by creating, when it’s all said and done, a character who feels genuinely nice, warts and all, without having to broadcast it. Pádraic’s sister Siobhán (Kerry Condon), meanwhile, becomes stuck between the rock of Colm and the hard place of her brother. If McDonagh does not write much of an inner life for Siobhán, evoked in just how little care he takes to bake her explicit reasons for wanting to leave the island into the script, like Keoghan, Condon takes up the slack in her turn. In her character’s attempting to broker peace between warring pals, Condon lets a knowingness pass over her face when Colm suggests her character must relate to his desire for a little peace of his own. 

“The Banshees of Inisherin” takes its title from a song Colm composes on his fiddle, evocative of his expressed desire to put the little time he has left on Earth to some sort of purpose rather than wiling it away in unimaginative company. In truth, McDonagh does not express much interest in Colm’s burgeoning songwriting just as he does not express much interest in Colm’s raised query about whether creating something of value in your life is worthier than simply living a contented life, all of it winding up beside the point in the face of escalating violence. The violence provides an avenue for the movie to track toward a resolution though that resolution pointedly finds nothing resolved. The Irish Civil War on the mainland alludes to such an open ending throughout, and McDonagh cannot help but render those allusions explicit with some concluding dialogue, all the more unfortunate because the truth is not in the words but in silence where, it turns out, Colm finds little peace after all. 

Jolly Good Christmas

There is an ominous message lurking in plain sight in “Jolly Good Christmas,” Hallmark’s tale of a London personal shopper named Anji (Reshma Shetty) who got into the gift-whispering business because she put too much pressure on herself so many Christmases ago to find the right present for a significant other. That suggests the hustle and bustle of holiday shopping as honest to goodness neurosis, requiring therapy rather than a mere reminder of the secular reason for the season. That’s not Hallmark’s game, though, and I, as the kidz say, get it. No, finding the right gift in director Jonathan Wright’s movie is not about some soulless product but something personal, or maybe, just maybe, a person, like Mr. Right, like the handsome if slightly awkward and eccentric American architect named David (Will Kemp) Anji bumps into, first in a store and then on a bus, only to discover he is getting his English girlfriend a gift card for Christmas and hey, Anji thinks, I could be of some help here, triggering a whirlwind romance.

“Jolly Good Christmas” is a little like “Serendipity” if Sara and Jonathan hadn’t split apart at the end of the prologue and instead made the whole movie out of the prologue, like if they were searching for a copy of Love in the Time of Cholera rather than Sara putting one out into the world. This means we do not simply watch Anji and David scurry about in search of the perfect gift, but scurry about in front of prominent London landmarks in search of the perfect gift, falling in love along the way. It’s true that despite a commendable nod to London’s extensive Indian community, “Jolly Good Christmas” doesn’t capture the air of London, so to speak, quite like Franco Nero embodied the Eternal City in “Christmas in Rome,” while the familial crises of both characters don’t feel baked in enough and like a lot of these movies, it runs out gas in the final 20 minutes when the various reversals become too predetermined. Still, if Hallmark movies tend to be overly reliant more on plot, “Jolly Good Christmas” is the rare one that flourishes through [makes sign of the cross] vibes. 

There is a surprising thoughtfulness to Wright’s framing, both in walk and talk scenes and when Anji and David are standing still, tending to position her just in front of him, not leading him on but leading him along, a Christmas gift sherpa of sorts. In his performance, Kemp effuses a subtle kookiness to his turn that calls to mind Bruce Campbell, if Bruce Campbell had chosen to make these movies earlier in his career rather than waiting until now, that not only transcends the abundance of zeroes that tend to fill out these roles but embodies the obliviousness the character has where interpersonal dynamics are concerned. Shetty, meanwhile, possesses a vivacity and wit that makes her character feel truly alive rather than a beachy waved automaton while impeccably playing off Kemp’s eccentricity with expressions that are alternately quizzical, amused, intrigued, and finally, charmed. The best sequence in the movie is one alongside the Thames when he is hustling to catch back up with her and in Shetty’s eyes you can see she’s just reeling this big fish in, not only improbably animating her totally spurious sounding job description but carrying us, the audience, along in her wake. 

If I had one wish that I could wish this holiday season, it’s that Reshma Shetty become a Hallmark Countdown to Christmas regular. 

Elvis

It’s been less than 20 years since the Johnny Cash “Walk the Line” biopic, but after Baz Luhrmann’s “Elvis” it felt 5,000 years old. That is not to suggest that Luhrmann’s kinda, sorta biopic of the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll is futuristic, or something. No, this is the same ol’ Baz, carving a movie almost exclusively out of sensation and spectacle, telling the story of Presley chronologically, but blending all the seismic events of this titanic American tale into an unbroken melody by way of one relentless montage, so much so that it can become disorienting even as that disorientation impeccably captures the turbulent rise and fall of Elvis. And that is what Luhrmann is going for here. “Elvis” evinces not so much a portrait of a person but a phenomenon; indeed, Austin Butler in the eponymous role is carried along by the movie more than he drives it. The framing device of Presley’s insidious mentor Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks), a self-styled P.T. Barnum, underlines this idea, suggesting how this is not really a story about Elvis at all but about someone else’s perception of him. If “Elvis & Nixon,” the good parts anyway, were about the dying embers of the Presley myth than “Elvis” is about the myth in full flight. 

The more Oscar bait-y Hollywood musical biopics often like to equate their subjects with superheroes by giving them origin stories to match, a trope spoofed in the recent Weird Al biopic by way of his glowing Hawaiian shirt. Spoofing, though, is not what Luhrmann does; he goes a hundred and fifty miles an hour in the other direction. Here he makes the superhero origin literal (in a figurative) sense by showing the young Presley reading Captain Marvel Jr. comic books, wearing a yellow lightning bolt around his neck to fashion himself in the image of his own hero, and using bombastic visual language to render the character’s lightning bolt moment. That lightning bolt moment occurs when the young Presley enters a Pentecostal revival tent immediately after peeking into a juke joint where Arthur Crudup (Gary Clark Jr.) is playing “That’s All Right, Mama.” Though it comes close to advancing the idea of Elvis full-on appropriating African American music, it evades this charge in how Luhrmann brings to life the sudden manifestation of the future King’s essential musical nature as marrying the secular and the spiritual, Rock ‘n’ Roll as religious experience. 

True, the country music that also inspired Presley is virtually absent aside from the overly amiable Hank Snow (David Wenham), and in showing famed black performers as something akin to Elvis’s sherpas he risks reducing them in ways he does not intend. But Luhrmann also shows Elvis watching a Little Richard performance, as adrenalized as Presley’s own, wishing he could perform that same song, emphasizing how the music industry worked for whites and how it worked for blacks. In Luhrmann’s telling, Elvis is positioned in the way Public Enemy’s Chuck D saw him years later through the lens of “Fight the Power”: not necessarily as the racist the lyrics overtly say, but as a sin eater for the whole industry, one who capitalized, rightly or wrongly, on the industry’s all-encompassing racism. 

“Elvis” is at its best, though, not when considering its subject through the prism of time but in opening an ineffable portal to the past. If these musical biopics are so often rendered as mere wax museums with a pulse, to quote Vincent Vega, Luhrmann succeeds by making Elvis come alive, to feel the way he must have felt then, to put us in the room with him, so to speak. It’s not so much Austin Butler’s singing, which has been reported as a mix between Butler’s own voice and Elvis’s recordings, but his movement and how Luhrmann and his editors Jonathan Redmond and Matt Villa evoke the communion between Presley and his audiences.

That is never more apparent than Presley’s appearance on the Louisiana Hayride show, where the channel he opens up to his audience is palpable, plugging us into the same figurative electrical socket as all his ravished fans, the involuntary shrieks from the women incredibly, electrically, illicitly disappearing the line between shouting in church and shouting during sex. The “Take My Hand” scene from “Walk Hard” took the piss out of what constituted so-called Devil’s Music, but in this scene “Elvis” puts all the piss back in. Presley’s celebrated 1968 comeback special, meanwhile, is composed as much like a suspenseful action sequence as a musical performance giving great life to the idea of his career and legacy being on the line while Luhrmann deftly employs flashbacks and split screens for Elvis’s inaugural show at the International Hotel in Las Vegas to epitomize it as a synthesis of everything he was even as it sets up as the final nail in his coffin. And we see the Rock ‘n’ Roller’s famous appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1957 partly through a living room television, one that seems to glow, illuminating a King fit for his crown over the airwaves. 

Paradoxically, in a movie of excess, the scenes of excess, of drinking and drugs and his failing marriage to Priscilla Presley (Olivia DeJonge), lag as much as Elvis falters in his own life, offering no real insight, Luhrmann’s own aesthetic extravagance here just doubling back on itself to ultimately feel as empty and rote as any behind the scenes Rock ‘n’ Roll drama. Despite all this, what rescues the movie is that Col. Parker framing device, which both implicates the audience in Elvis’s public pressures and emotional downfall while also evoking the sensation of Elvis being trapped in an emotional prison. If Butler is not necessarily finding anything new in his character’s tragic slide toward the end, he doesn’t need to, Elvis itself evincing the sensation of the Rock ‘n’ Roll raging against the dying of his own light. Luhrmann, though, doesn’t just leave it there. If biographical movies often conclude with footage of the real subject with no conception of that footage beyond an honorary parenthetical of the real person, Butler’s Elvis suddenly gives way to the real one, a transition emphasizing Presley’s voice, and how despite everything, it could still break free. 

My Sight & Sound Ballot

Below is the ballot I submitted to Sight & Sound for their 2022 Best Films of All Time poll, drawn up in the four minutes it took me to eat a bowl of cereal. However, the ballot was subsequently ripped in half and returned to me by mail. I don’t believe it counted in the final tally? Anyway, for the curious, here it is.

The Big Sleep, Howard Hawks (1946)

Roman Holiday, William Wyler (1953)

13 jours en France, Claude Lelouch (1968)

Die Hard, John McTiernan (1988)

The Naked Gun 2 ½: The Smell of Fear, David Zucker (1991)

Ruby in Paradise, Victor Nunez (1993)

Cookie’s Fortune, Robert Altman (1999)

The Insider, Michael Mann (1999)

Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, Adam McKay (2006)

Michael Clayton, Tony Gilroy (2007)

Some Drivel On...A Very Kacey Christmas

The Kacey Musgraves Christmas album “A Very Kacey Christmas” was released in 2016, meaning it’s only 7 years old and not a round number like ten years or twenty years which is what a blogger would typically exploit for a remembrance piece. But writing about the album in 2022 for the copper and wool anniversary, which is hardly the anniversary anyone remembers or anticipates, I think only works to underline how much I cherish it, that I want to write about it right now rather than wait for year ten. Because seven years, I have decided, is enough time to decree, a la Caesar Augustus, that “A Very Kacey Christmas” is my favorite Christmas record. 

Aside from a couple originals called “Ribbons and Bows,” that in its hand claps, horns, and multitracked vocals comes on like the lost classic from Phil Spector’s “A Christmas Gift for You,” and the bluesy “Present Without a Bow,” Musgraves mostly leans on a western swing sound inviting flashbacks to Bob Willis and West Texas dance halls of the 30s and 40s. That’s appropriate. Christmas often seems to take place at least partly in the past tense, like opening today’s door on an Advent calendar you have opened two-dozen times during holidays bygone. And though there is also an air of the country variety shows of the 60s and 70s, “A Very Kacey Christmas” never becomes like her overly accessorized 2019 Amazon Prime Kacey Musgraves Christmas Show, opting for a breezy intimacy suggesting Musgraves eschewed baking Christmas cookies for friends to lay down some Christmas tracks to crackly vinyl and hand those out instead.

 

Though Musgraves is generally classified as a country artist, her sound flits between a traditionalist bent and a more modern, pop-oriented one, an indifference to genre that is evident in her impeccable “A Very Kacey Christmas” curation. The record opens with a pair of standards, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” which isn’t Judy Garland’s melancholia but a sanguine sort of shuffle, where a merry Christmas is not some distant dream but right there within the reach of that star on top of the bow and something that Kacey really wants you to have, followed by a “Let it Snow” with dollops of steel guitar that taken in tandem with Musgraves’s version of “Mele Kalikimaka” reminds us of the instrument’s Hawaiian roots and reminds me how Christmas Day Aloha Bowls of my youth (and Christmas Eve Hawaii Bowls of my ostensible prime of life) have always caused an association in my mind between the holiday and the sounds of the Islands.

From there, Musgraves’s song choice grows more eclectic and inclusive, and inclusive not just because of “Feliz Navidad” and soul singer-songwriter Leon Bridges guesting on “Present Without a Bow” but how “Present Without a Bow” and Kacey’s own “Christmas Always Makes Me Cry” provide space for people who are not into the season, whether just this one or overall. (Oh my god, that Bridges line about “the New Year will come and brings lot of change, baby” is the perfect distillation of mounting dread at the end of each year of having to mount up and go through all this again.) At the same time, Musgraves’s gently playful voice allows her to express the season’s childlike joy as much as its sadness, successfully translating The Chipmunks’ “Christmas Don’t Be Late” without need for the tape speed chicanery, acing the tongue-twisting rhymes of Gayla Peevy’s “I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas,” and submitting a version of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” that really does sound like an Elementary School Christmas Concert with Linda Ronstadt singing lead. 

 

If those songs are for the kids, she’s got one for the adults, too, and not just her pessimistically plaintive version of “What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?” No, I’m talking about the original “A Willie Nice Christmas.” It’s a pun, see, because Willie Nelson is her duet partner, and because it’s Willie Nelson perhaps you can already glean the role played in the song by Nelson’s favorite hallucinogen. I know, I know, a holiday stoner anthem? Musgraves, though, pulled a similar track by opening her 2015 album “Pageant Material” with “High Time,” utilizing a smattering of weed smoking double entendres to advance a universal argument to chill. That call becomes even more acute during the holiday hustle and bustle, when the days get shorter, and we tend to speed up rather than slow down. And even if Kacey cheekily transforms Peace on Earth into “piece on earth,” well, I still hear it as the first one, but less as a Biblical annunciation than the living embodiment of that same Corona Christmas television ad that never goes out of style. I suspect that “A Very Kacey Christmas” never will either.