Friday's Old Fashioned: Odds Against Tomorrow (1959)

This review was originally posted ten years ago and is being reposted today in honor of Harry Belafonte who died this week at the age of 96. 

The first 20 minutes of Robert Wise’s “Odds Against Tomorrow” seem very much cut from genre granite. Three men who are down and out decide to rob a bank to score the funds that will make their lives bloom. We expect them to plan the robbery, to execute the robbery, and for the robbery to go awry. But then at roughly the 20-minute mark something happens – one character calls another character a derogatory term. I will not type that term and instead say the character subjected to the term is played by Harry Belafonte. Who is black. And did I mention this film was made in 1959? It is jarring, a kick in the ribs, and at that point, “Odds Against Tomorrow” boils over into something else, both a tough-minded character study and a harbinger of the racially radical 60s.

The bank job is the brainchild of ex-cop Burke (Ed Begley) who wants a stack of cash to square him for life. Into his web he tries to pull Earl Slater (Robert Ryan), an ex-con, and Jonny Ingram (Belafonte), a nightclub singer and gambling addict. Initially each man stands Burke up. They may need money, but robbing banks is immoral. “That’s for junkies and joy boys,” Jonny declares. Little do you know, Jonny.

Each man’s respective situation will eventually dictate his part in the plan, but the film is refreshingly patient in watching each man wind his way there. Backstories emerge. Jonny may be impeccably suave, but that in-control appearance belies an out-of-control addiction to the track. He loses more and so he gambles more and so he loses more and then he’s deep in debt to his bookie (Will Kuluva), a bookie who moseys around town with a flunky (Richard Bright) who is not so subtly gay, appearing to even sorta make eyes at Jonny the first time he sees him and/or issues a warning. This also goes to show how ahead of its time this film must have felt, particularly because his sexuality really isn’t even overplayed or explicitly addressed or meant as a key plot point…..it just is.

Jonny has a daughter (Lois Thorne) and wife (Kim Hamilton)…..well, make that ex-wife. She’s been driven away by Jonny’s money-wagering and she and his daughter partly exist to be threatened by the bookie. But they are also there to offer further insight into Jonny’s worldview, and the fact his ex-wife is ingratiating his daughter into white society does not sit well with him. He is sophisticated but also seems convinced that racial lines should remain separate.

Which is about all he and Earl have in common. That Earl’s violent racism is never explained feels accurate, because like Lady Gaga he was just Born This Way, baby. His reason for being re-led back into crime stems from his lady friend (Shelly Winters) for whom he wants to provide the requisite better life. Not that you should mistake him for an enlightened romantic. When his buxom (and married) next-door neighbor (Gloria Grahame) comes calling he does not hesitate.

Yeah, there is anger in this film, these dudes are ticked off, and that volatility is what drives them to the heist. Based on a William P. McGivern book, the screenplay was co-written by Nelson Gidding and Abraham Polonsky. Well, in 1959 no one knew Polonsky co-wrote it. He was famously blacklisted for refusing to testify before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee in 1951 and did not actually earn a proper writing credit for “Odds Against Tomorrow” until 1997. And it is not difficult to detect a seething Polonsky behind the scenes, aggressively taking out his understandable anger on the page, firing 12 Point Courier Font missiles at everyone.

The heist goes wrong, but that goes without saying, and by that point the heist has actually become less important to the story then the men committing it. The cops arrive, only to fade into the background, ceding the stage to the tension between Jonny and Earl that has been threatening to erupt for ninety minutes into something so much more. They are so discontent with themselves and their fate that they turn on each other, though the showdown winds up less personal than allegorical. Racial inequality in America was a powder keg. The fuse was lit.

Definitely Not Cult Classics

If Danny Peary did not invent the term Cult Movies, he certainly popularized it with the publishing of his 1981 book employing the familiar term as its title and embodying the expression’s nebulous criteria with entries ranging from Orson Welles’s “Citizen Kane” (1941) to Monte Hellman’s “Two-Lane Blacktop” (1971) to and Cheech & Chong’s “Up in Smoke” (1978). Almost anything goes! “Special films,” Peary wrote of his subject, “which for one reason or another have been taken to heart by segments of the movie audience, cherished, protected, and most of all, enthusiastically championed.” Of course, back in 1981, and prior to that, before the full bloom of home video, never mind the future of digital streaming, when it was far more difficult to access movies, it naturally made things more conducive to smaller pockets of appreciators. When asked by Ben Lindbergh for The Ringer in 2021 about whether cult movies “can survive and flourish even when most movies are more easily accessible,” well, Peary gave a few answers, but did not seem to suggest that accessibility was in and of itself a bad thing. If cult movies were once cult movies partially because they had so few eyeballs on them, availability becomes something like a win for movies themselves.

That does have the effect, however, of not necessarily negating cult movies but turning everything into a cult movie, which is what Lindbergh’s Ringer colleague Bryan Curtis suggested on a recent episode of his Press Box podcast. “If you have something that stunk in the past, somebody will make a podcast about it,” Curtis said, “a web site…an amateur documentary.” Curtis said, broadly speaking, that if you go to the Wikipedia page of just about any movie, you will find it referenced as a cult classic. To anecdotally test his anecdotal theory, I immediately thought of a movie – “The Great Outdoors” – and went to its Wikipedia page and, hey now, there it was, right at the top, before the entry even got to the plot description, “The film was met with mixed reviews and has gained a cult following.” Everything really is a cult classic.

Except maybe not. I became less interested in becoming the forty-thousandth person to dissect the definition of Cult Classic and instead look through the looking glass the other way. Are there movies we can (un)officially determine are not cult classics? Oh, you bet we can.

Definitely Not Cult Classics

Wait a minute. Kilmer. Kilmer doing accents. Shue. Shue takes heart medication that she no longer needs once she falls in love with Kilmer. Moscow locations. No, you know what, I have to re-categorize “The Saint” as a Possible Cult Classic pending further investigation. 

Just a second. The only thing I know about boats is that they’ll get out of the way, which was the wisdom dispensed by Captain Ron (Kurt Russell) himself in briefly mentioning his time piloting the USS Saratoga. I think we need further time to evaluate. “Captain Ron” is rescinded from our list and re-categorized as a Possible Cult Classic. 

As chance would have it, this past weekend, Friend of the Blog Daryl mentioned “Kuffs” unprompted, seeming to suggest (Editor: plz insert name of “Kuffs” director here)’s-directed 1992 action comedy as a Possible Cult Classic. TBD 

Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre

Like many modern movies, it seems, Guy Ritchie’s “Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre” is an almost two-hour action-comedy affair where despite a lot happening, it feels as if nothing does, a cinematic cake made of plentiful ingredients that fails to rise. There is one memorable shot in the whole movie, in which the camera half-circling a sports car traversing a seaside road picks up both a helicopter shot out of the sky and the character in the passenger who did the shooting. Otherwise, Ritchie feels strictly on autopilot, wasting a nifty idea in which the British government enlists a bawdy private contractor (Jason Statham) to retrieve a stolen MacGuffin before it’s sold on the black market by enlisting the favorite actor, Danny Francesco (Josh Harnett), of the man brokering the deal, Greg Simmonds (Hugh Grant), to get close to him. In other words, it’s the Impossible Mission Force team doing an “Argo” with the help of Rick Dalton. Harnett, bless his heart, is game, but Ritchie and his co-writers Ivan Atkinson and Marn Davies never exploit his turn or his part of the plot to the fullest. Just when it starts to cook, Danny disappears for a stretch, and his climactic car chase never truly realizes the idea of an actor who claims to do his own stunts living out the role. The best gag is both the smallest and biggest, recurring billboard in the background for the fictional Francesco-starring “Barbary Coast” billboard; could we have just screened that movie instead?

Grant puts on a Cockney accent for this one but doesn’t have as much fun as he is normally might, and never feels frighteningly larger-than-life as the role requires to really elicit the immense fear of being in Simmonds’s orbit, coming across more like the sidekick than the featured antagonist. Statham, frankly speaking, looks less like an Orson Fortune than, say, a Mike Hook, which happens to be the name of the dueling private contractor (Peter Ferdinando) who shows up at all the wrong moments to throw an extra wrench into the proceedings. Indeed, Orson is set up as a man with a taste for the finer things in life, demanding the most expensive wines aboard private flights and such, but this is a character detail that is set up and then never really followed through, not least because Statham doesn’t seem interested in playing him that way. No, as Nathan Jasmine, the handler overseeing Orson’s team, the droll, dapper Cary Elwes honestly comes across more like the version of this Orson Fortune that “Operation Fortune” is peddling and left me wishing for the Elwes-aissance by way of him playing Orson Fortune. I know, I know, I hear you. The whole point of “Operation Fortune,” you’re countering, is to see Statham kick butt. A fair rebuttal. Except. Why does every butt that Statham kicks come across like he’s just meeting a quota, rendered with so little panache? Because both Statham and Bugzy Malone, as Orson’s sharp-shooter right-hand man J.J. Davies, emit similar stiff airs, it might have made sense to cast Statham in the J.J. Davies role with Elwes as Orson.

Then again, computer hacker extraordinaire Sarah Fidel (Aubrey Plaza) is also made part of the team so that Plaza can play off Statham like Statham and Dwayne Johnson played off one another in “The Fate of the Furious.” Alas, just as that bromance never ended in the fight that was brewing all movie, Statham and Plaza’s chemistry never takes full flight either, not least because narratively “Operation Fortune” chooses not to see it entirely through, all the more unfortunate because Plaza’s patented dry wit is sort of the life preserver you glom on to as the reason to see the “Ruse de Guerre” through. When Sarah and Orson first meet, she bows, and Plaza quips, “Your majesty.” I don’t know, it’s entirely possible that line was written, not improvised, but Plaza makes it feel impromptu, the one time all movie I laughed out loud, the one time the movie ever feels truly alive.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Stress is Three (1968)

Carlos Saura’s “Stress is Three” opens with the married Fernando (Fernando Cebrián) and Teresa (Geraldine Chaplin) and their playboy pal Antonio (Juan Luis Galiardo) speeding from Madrid to Almeria coast, ostensibly for a weekend getaway though metaphorically they are pointed straight into the heart of darkness, foreshadowed in a car crash they suddenly happen upon and just as suddenly move on from, that would seem a violent dream if not for the blood very much still there on Teresa’s dress. The docudrama sensation that Saura imbues the car crash sequence with also evokes the movie’s overriding air, very much akin to a National Geographic special for people, behavior speaking volumes, like Teresa putting out the cigarette Fernando gives to her as a sign of marital disaffection and the motorcycle joyride Fernando takes midway through the movie shining a harsh, even hilarious light on so much macho posturing. Indeed, the movie turns on Fernando’s suspicions that his wife is having an affair with Antonio, spying on them from afar and up close, portrayed in voyeuristic shots through a telescope, a window, a crack in the door, cutting the figure of a pitiful peeping tom in his own life. That Teresa is never quite her own person makes sense, because even if she’s almost always on screen, the point-of-view essentially comes to reflect Fernando’s possessiveness more and more, possessiveness if not outright madness, culminating in grandly bleak visions of masculine persecution complex, before abruptly transitioning right back to bleak reality, as if paranoia is just the addled everyday state of the male mind.

Pitch Meeting: More Objects as Movies

In writing over the weekend for The New York Times about Ben Affleck’s “Air” (review to come, eventually, someday), an opus of how Nike partnered with His Airness, Michael Jordan, by designing a shoe in his name, Zachary Siegel flippantly if accurately described the sudden new trend of Hollywood historical dramas: “Hey, remember this old thing?” He cites not only “Air” but “Tetris” (obviously), “BlackBerry” (self-explanatory), and “Flamin’ Hot” (the upcoming Eva Longoria joint about the invention of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos), without even mentioning the recently released “Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game.” “These are not movies about people or events that changed our scientific or political reality,” Siegel reckons. “(T)hey are interested in men (and yes, I do mean just men) who changed our consumer reality.” More than that, though, Siegel continues, they are “centered on the objects.” Stop the tape. That is what interested me. That, as it absolutely had to, got me to thinking. 

There are so many objects! What other objects could become movies?! I’m so glad you asked!

More Objects as Movies

The Unique. Kinda like we here at Cinema Romantico fashioned our own answer to the “Winning Time” Los Angeles Lakers HBO miniseries with “Institutionalized Defeat” about the mid-90s Minnesota Timberwolves, allow us to fashion our own answer to “Air” with “Unique,” about The Human Highlight Reel Dominique Wilkins’s patented Brooks red and white high top. After all, Brooks is kinda to Nike as Blogspot is to Substack, making it feel right at home for our burgeoning ersatz production company. 

Surge. You remember Surge, my fellow Class of ‘96ers, the citrus-flavored soda haplessly enlisted by Coca-Cola to go toe-to-toe with Mountain Dew, marketing itself as the soft drink of the extreme sport crowd, or something, and a fitting metaphor for “Surge.” Directed by Middling Thriller titan Gary Fleder, this will be our object biopic to demonstrate that sometimes all Xtreme energy gets you is discontinued.

VHS vs. Betamax. “King Kong vs. Godzilla” as the famed Videotape format war. Possible sequel: “VHS vs. Toshiba DVD Player.”

Monopoly. If the studio is worried that all of these potential movies merely objectifying consumer objects will fail to bring Young Americans to the movie theater, worry not, we will simply greenlight “Monopoly” as an action-packed critique of capitalism, and failing that, just, like, you know, commission a remake of “King of Marvin Gardens.”

Rubik’s Cube. The UK Christmas Number 1 reimagined as the UK Christmas Number 1 Selling Toy of 1980 set against the backdrop of the emergent Thatcher regime. 

Bartles & Jaymes. Now we could make a movie about the Frank Bartles & Ed Jaymes ad campaign that ingeniously fused a 1980s yuppie product with 1950s folksiness, but we would rather turn Frank Bartles & Ed Jaymes into real characters, sort of “Grumpy Old Men” as Jay and Silent Bob meets “Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Marr.” Bartles & Jaymes: Blue Hawaiian. 

Busch Beer. A Ponce de Leon-like quest in which a gullible viewer searches American mountain ranges for mystical Busch six-packs cooling in literal streams, just as the TV spots of yore promised. 

Fly the Friendly Skies. Granted, this is not an object, this is a slogan, but I enjoy watching old college football games on YouTube, especially college football games from the 80s, and one I watched at some point in the recent past included a vintage United Airlines spot. I had forgotten that Gene Hackman worked as the voice-only pitchman and, man, I gotta tell ya, on this ad I saw (heard), Hackman’s “Come fly the friendly skies” was nails, just ad-reading brilliance, not friendly, really, now that I think about it, because it’s Hackman, you know, but, like, majestic, regal, truly worthy of the accompanying “Rhapsody in Blue,” for a brief couple seconds embodying how air travel might have sounded during the Golden Age of Flight, long before the friendly skies transformed into poultry plants at 35,000 feet. Would I like to see a movie about Leo Burnett’s famous ad agency devising this slogan? Sure. But really, I’d like to see a whole movie about convincing the irascible Hackman to do this ad.

I should probably stop now.

Sharper

In a perfect movie world, or at least a movie world where the movie middle class was just better, I would have no need to ever think of James Foley’s mostly middling 2003 “Confidence” again. But nope, there I was watching Benjamin Caron’s Apple TV-released neo-noir “Sharper” and all I could find myself thinking about was “Confidence,” or more accurately, one sequence from “Confidence,” when Rachel Weisz and her various con men cohorts (including Edward Burns) run a confidence game on poor John Carroll Lynch. When Weisz flirtatiously giggles and looks at him out of the corner of her eye, you feel it, you feel his temperature unwittingly rising (you feel your temperature rising), you feel the meanness of the world. I kept thinking of it because even if the broad strokes of the sequence were familiar, hoary even, they were painted with some real flair, some joy, a level of emotional conning, which is how the esteemed Roger Ebert put it in writing about David Mamet’s “House of Games.” That last one, that’s the movie you sense “Sharper” wanting to be in its elaborate structure of con games and double crosses, and while there is a level of emotional conning going on, it is conveyed with no emotion, which is where it really goes wrong, a movie in which all these real people moving across the screen feel more like the motion captured CGI extras in “Titanic.”

It begins with a meet cute between bookshop owner Tom (Justice Smith) and graduate student Sandra (Briana Middleton). Even if you’re unaware of “Sharper’s” twist-oriented nature going in, the assortment of character details in this opening passage conspicuously come across less like behavior than narrative details you inherently sense Add Up to Something. Indeed, broken up into chapters, this vignette gives way to another vignette about Sandra and a grifter, Max (Sebastian Stan), she encounters, and that vignette gives way to another one about Max and his grifting paramour, Madeleine (Julianne Moore), and so forth, this series of storylines eventually looping back around to the beginning and converging. It’s a jigsaw puzzle, but it’s unsurprising. And I don’t necessarily mean that it’s unsurprising in so much as you can guess what’s coming, though you sort of can, but that fails to paint between the lines of all these puzzle pieces with any real flourish. “House of Games” had its twisty structure, but it also had Mamet’s dialogue, infusing it with a staccato style. “Sharper” has no style, none at all, its sterile posh locations epitomizing its own lack of soul. 

The characters backed into a corner don’t feel desperate just as the characters screwed over emit no real sense of fury just as the characters who get off on running cons effuse no devious charge just as the characters pining for another emit no romantic charge. Though at one point Max and Madeleine put Don Henley’s “Dirty Laundry” on the jukebox and sidle up to one another on a makeshift dance floor, they don’t even seem like people who have sex. The message, meanwhile, about people engaging in these nefarious schemes for nothing more than a little bit of money is not only cribbed right from “Fargo,” it is so limply delivered it hardly comes through, a low-resolution carbon copy straight off the Canon fax/phone/copier from Page 13 of the November 1988 Sharper Image Catalog. 

Friday's Old Fashioned: Long Gone (1987)

The 1987 HBO movie “Long Gone,” never released to DVD and currently only available via roughhewn upload to YouTube, is about a fictional 1950s minor league baseball team in Florida and bears undeniable resemblance to Ron Shelton’s “Bull Durham.” But then, not only was “Bull Durham” released into theaters in 1988, one year after “Long Gone” debuted on HBO, the latter was based on a 1979 novel by Paul Hemphill. Steve Persall recounted the backstory in 2015 for the Tampa Bay Times, interviewing “Long Gone” co-star Virginia Madsen who claimed none other than Shelton himself attended the premiere of her own baseball movie and “sat there during the film taking notes.” Persall contacted Shelton who denied Madsen’s story. I don’t necessarily believe Shelton just as I don’t necessarily believe Madsen. The truth, I’m sure, since it almost always does, lies somewhere in the middle. Still, it’s hard not to notice the similarities between Madsen’s Dixie Lee Boxx and Susan Sarandon’s Annie Savoy. But Dixie Lee begins the film with a National Anthem that goes awry, a scene not only suggesting the sort of fatigue I have always suspected baseball players might have for a song they have to hear over and over their whole lives but evoking Frank Drebin’s misbegotten National Anthem in “The Naked Gun,” also released in 1988. Maybe all sorts of movies have cosmic echoes. 

Why the film’s protagonist Cecil “Stud” Cantrell (William Petersen) even recurringly refers to Cantrell’s Law a la Coughlin’s Law in yet another 1988 movie, “Cocktail.” Stud is manager and star player of the Class D Tampico Stogies, his chance at The Show (i.e. the Major Leagues) long since gone, defeated in his bid to make the St. Louis Cardinals as left fielder by one Stan Musial. “He had a prettier swing than me,” Stud says, “but I hit the ball harder.” Petersen takes that line to heart, giving the role a ton of juice, sort of playing the Crash Davis and Nuke LaLoosh of “Bull Durham” at once, as weary as he is wild, and his character determined to field a winning team despite the incompetents in charge, a father and son (Henry Gibson and Teller, respectively) who put into comical perspective how sports ownership rarely conforms to meritocracy.

If many baseball movies employ linear plots building toward climactic games, for a good long while “Long Gone” is content to move sideways as much as forwards, reveling in its people and its place, touching on both religion and race in ways that feel neither simpleminded nor sentimental. The location work at McKechnie Field in Bradenton, Florida makes for an appropriately lived-in feel, evoking how the team exists on the edge of the larger baseball world, while the pink Florida twilight under which it plays still imbues that romantic feeling of loving what you do. Indeed, the bluesy harmonica of Phillip Namanworth and Kenny Vance’s score mirrors this idea, adding a twinge of melancholy that never becomes overbearing, a sense of camaraderie and love of what they do even as off the field issues and responsibilities encroach the diamond, evoking how “Long Gone” is as much about living life as playing baseball.

Of course, life and baseball eventually have to collide in the form of that aforementioned big game, and it happens when Tampico’s St. Louis Cardinals-affiliated rival offers Stud their managerial job, possibly meaning another shot at The Show, so long as he throws Tampico’s looming showdown with the affiliate. It’s not the showdown itself as it is the scene before that lingers, one in which Stud and the team’s slugger Joe Louis Brown (Larry Riley), sticking it out despite the hostile intentions of The Deep South, commiserate in a bar while listening to the game on the radio before ultimately deciding to go join their team despite everything else. The way this sequence is lit, light falling on them through the windows, suggests the bar as a kind of confessional, and Stud’s speech is him confessing that baseball is anything but, as they say, just a game only to then go and live, for a few innings at least, like it is. 

(Not) In Too Deep: Jack Black

Merely reaffirming that I no longer fear death, “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” collected $204 million at the box office this weekend. To coincide with its enormous opening, a music video debuted of star Jack Black singing the movie’s breakout (and Oscar eligible) power ballad “Peaches.” I am less interested in the song itself, never mind the movie, god forbid, which I’m not seeing and which you don’t want me to see anyway, than I am in Black. I tend to be suspicious of the phrase Phoning It In because I generally think actors are professionals doing their level best and that what we frequently think of Phoning It In is, in fact, the director and producer(s) hanging the actors out to dry, but Black, bless his heart, could never be accused of such apathy. “Jack Black,” Spencer Hall said over the weekend in quote Tweeting the “Peaches” video uploaded by the official “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” account, “has never committed to anything at less than a rate of 150%.”

Indeed, the “Boogie Nights” recreation in last year’s “Weird: the Al Yankovic Story” in which the eponymous song parodist (Daniel Radcliffe) attends a lavish backyard pool party would have merely been that, a recreation, were it not for Jack Black elevating his Wolfman Jack impersonation into a true antagonist of young “Weird” Al. Black’s commitment to the bit is no less impressive than Radcliffe’s, the latter’s frenzied accordion playing becoming that much more hysterically triumphant because of Black’s astonished and aggrieved reaction. In Black’s brief cameo in “Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy” (2004) where his motorcyclist drop kicks the broadcasting buffoon’s (Will Ferrell) beloved border terrier Baxter off a bridge, he is not content to just show up and play Jack Black. No, he takes the nameless character’s love of his hog as true motivation, playing him as broken-hearted as Burgundy becomes over poor Baxter.

Though “Nacho Libre” (2006) was not altogether a success, Black’s performance was, demonstrating “his deft ability to balance ludicrous flailing and flopping with affecting emotional earnestness,” as Nick Schager observed. More than that, “Nacho Libre” is a useful metaphor for Black’s career, an actor demonstrating a no holds barred devotion to the role akin to a lucha libre, blurring the line between kayfabe and motion picture acting. Black’s very first feature film role was playing a fanatical fan of Tim Robbins’s titular folk singing conservative politician “Bob Roberts” (1992) where he was already foreshadowing a gift of going just far enough in playing characters who go too far.

In roles big and small, Black was all in, whether playing the smart-alecky windbag yang to Bruce Willis’s patented weary annoyance in “The Jackal” (1997) or in his explosive “High Fidelity” (2000) supporting turn, tellingly cited by Stephanie Zacharek as “almost too painfully accurate as the most annoying species of record store geek,” such a tempest of sound opinions that by the end John Cusack resembles a bent palm tree in the hurricane belt. His concluding cover of Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On” is partially such a revelation because Black has purposely made you expect the worst. Black evangelizes for rock ‘n’ roll to an even greater and more moving extent in Richard Linklater’s brilliant “School of Rock” (2003), turning his whole performance as a (faux) schoolteacher cum frontman into an evocation of Bruce Springsteen’s famous line “learned more from a three-minute record than we ever learned in school.” Black plays Dewey Finn as believing so fully in the ministry of rock ‘n’ roll that sometimes he can’t quite see which way is up.

I do not mean to suggest that in his eternal hurricane-force commitment that Black is eternally playing roles like a hurricane. Consider “Bernie” (2011), another Linklater joint, and possibly Black’s finest turn to date as real-life Bernie Tiede, a God-fearing funeral director in East Texas who murdered his wealthy, elderly companion and didn’t get away with it yet didn’t much peeve anyone in doing it, a nigh impossible piece of acting by Black that The New Yorker’s David Denby tellingly deemed “disciplined.” If Bernie seemed to bury himself in a part so deep that people around him couldn’t quite detect whether it was a put-on, so, too, does Black bury himself in the part “in which,” Denby writes, “self-seeking and the genuine desire to be useful exist side by side.” Local DA Danny Buck Davidson (Matthew McConaughey) might see the truth, but the rest of us are like Billy Bob Thornton’s “Bad Santa” looking incredulously at Thurman Merman. “Are you fucking with me?!” Who knows?

Jack Black even brought his notable dedication to Hollywood’s biggest night in 2015. Those were the 87th Academy Awards, hosted by Neil Patrick Harris with an opening song and dance number alongside Anna Kendrick about The Magic of the Movie™. I know, I know, The Magic of the Movies™? Barf. But that’s where Jack Black came in, playing a disgruntled audience member who heroically butts in and ascends to the stage to refute NPH’s flattery by critiquing the entire industry right in front of the industry’s biggest bigwigs, concluding astutely, if not presciently, how flickering myths were being relocated from the big screen to screens in our jeans, belting out, over and over, “Screens in our jeans! Screens in our jeans!” so emphatically that Black plays someone burying himself so far in the part that Harris has to verbally yank him back out. 

It’s such high-caliber role-burying that her eminence, Nicole Kidman, the ultimate role-burier, sitting down front, rewards Black with a whoop. Game recognizes game.

Boston Strangler

“Boston Strangler” begins with a cryptic recreation of one of the eponymous mystery figure’s crimes, though the movie ultimately proves much less about him, whoever it might be, than the person, nay, woman attempting to suss out his identity – namely, Loretta McLaughlin. The real-life Boston Record American reporter is played by English actress Keira Knightley with an American accent that doesn’t sound much like a Boston accent, not that I’m really qualified to judge, but that in its skeptical scratchiness nevertheless works quite well for the role. Much to her chagrin, Loretta is assigned the Lifestyle beat, and there is a great shot in which Loretta is framed between her colleagues, looking the wrong way, her head in the clouds, or more accurately, on the mind of three women recently strangled in the Boston area. If her editor (Chris Cooper) does not initially deem this story worthy, Loretta does, at first working at it on her own time and then for the paper with a world-wearier reporter who knows the angles, Jean Cole (Carrie Coon).

The first thing you notice about “Boston Strangler” is its color palette. Exclusively muddy browns and greens, everything here, from Loretta’s home to a police interrogation room to various crime scenes, looks the same. If it evinces an appropriately grim sensation given the circumstances, the unyielding sameness of it all also unfortunately counteracts much of the tension, making it feel heavy rather than foreboding, the city never coming across under terrifying siege the way Loretta and Jean’s stories say it is. That lack of tension is furthered in Ruskin’s approach of solemnity over suspense. A scene in which Loretta enters a suspect’s apartment comes across rote, cribbed straight from David Fincher’s “Zodiac” (2007) and with little perspective of its own. The brief moment just before, a shot of Loretta from across the street generates the kind of omniscient fear the rest of “Boston Strangler” lacks. 

In reporting the story, Loretta and Jean run up against all sorts of impediments to their progress, both within the police department and their own newsroom, though the intriguing idea of these institutions of power conforming to the same sort of misogyny that motivated the killer merely simmers below the surface rather than emerging as an overriding and forceful point. Ruskin, who wrote the screenplay in addition to directing, comes across more concerned with the nuts and bolts of the investigation, though the emergent ambiguity (the movie literally ends by reminding us the case is unsolved) is weirdly negated near the end through a theory proposed by Loretta that both the movie and Knightley’s air suggest as kind of Case Closed. Loretta’s scenes at home, meanwhile, in which Loretta ignores her husband (Morgan Spector) and kids to keep hunting the story are, weirdly in their own way, both boilerplate and the best part?

At some point Loretta says her kids are spooked, but we hardly see her kids, they are immaterial, it’s more about James, who mostly just says the things and acts the way Neglected Movie Spouses always act in these situations. That’s not so interesting, obviously, but what’s more interesting is how Knightley plays these scenes, like Loretta can’t quite bring herself to care that he’s peeved. Coon’s character gets no real backstory, save for one tossed off line about how her home life is a wreck, though Coon seizes on that line and essentially makes the whole performance out of it, like that mess hardly bothers her, like here, at work, this is what’s important. Ruskin never quite dares to truly weave the idea that a horrific story such as this one gave them purpose, or made their careers, but in the last scene when Loretta and Jean toast their drinks at a bar, he does suggest that in their careers they found their home.

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Long Good Friday (1980)

There is one moment in John Mackenzie’s “The Long Good Friday” that I can’t stop thinking about. It happens late, after Harold Shand’s (Bob Hoskins) hold on the London underworld has frayed at the seams and he is but moments away from stabbing an associate in the neck with a bottle in a fit of rage. He boards his yacht anchored in the Thames and pours himself a scotch, as one does when stressed. But it’s what he does next that sticks with me, when he goes to his wet bar sink and dollops his liquor of choice with water. Harold is a helluva character, a fascinating mess of contradictions, an East-Ender punching above his weight, manifested in Hoskins’ 5’6” bulldog build, who has a posh middle class girlfriend (Helen Mirren) and, like, you know, obviously, a yacht anchored in the Thames, working hard to cultivate an air of refinement, which is why even here, now, in his darkest hour, he instinctively adds a few drops of water to enhance the aromas of his chosen beverage, a striving for sophistication to the end. In its way, this small moment of behavior is evocative of “The Long Good Friday” as a whole, a movie that churns through incredible amounts of plot even as a character study hides in plain sight, an age-old tale of a corrupt man trying to become legitimate, even if he’s trying to become legitimate with the help of American mafia money, as quietly laugh out loud funny as that scotch and water. 

The movie begins with something of a head scratch, not so much introducing us to characters as just dropping us down alongside a few of them and leaving us to fend for ourselves. It’s confusing, no doubt, but it’s fine. It’s fine because we get up to speed at the same intermittent rate as Harold himself, who is introduced several minutes after this elliptical opening, a deft touch illustrating how events have already been set in motion to uproot his best laid plans. Those plans involve buying up the shabby London docklands with the financial assistance of the American mafia to transform them as a place to construct a stadium for hosting the 1988 Summer Olympics. Harold explains this to potential investors and various lackeys and hangers-on aboard his yacht in a speech where he pitches London as the future capital of Europe, the Tower Bridge looming directly behind him, making it look for all the world like he’s fit for the guillotine and doesn’t even know it. Indeed, as he’s trying to project authority for the Yanks, his authority is being undermined by a mysterious enemy unleashing a series of killings and bombings targeting Harold’s network, turning him into something like a bullheaded private eye by way of peeved kingpin. That his quote-unquote investigation spans Good Friday is a pretty funny joke. Christ suffered for our sins; Harold suffers for his delusions of grandeur.

Myriad film critics and culture writers across the pond have noted how Harold exists as a kind of embodiment of Margaret Thatcher’s capitalist and nationalist platform in becoming UK Prime Minister the year before the movie’s release. But Harold Shand would merely be political cipher without Hoskins’s performance giving it life. It’s not so much the unexpected human dimension he provides in spots as it is how he plays a true force of nature by gradually reducing that forcefulness until all that remains is bluster, a palpably small man who both can’t quite bring himself to see and never fully understands the opposition arrayed against him, not until it’s too late. Though even then, in the unforgettable final scene, in the back of a car, his alternating expressions suggest one part recognition and one part resistance, looking his fate square in the eye and flaring his nostrils. 

Shout-Out to the Extra: John Wick: Chapter 4 Version

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

Among the most famous entries of the late Roger Ebert’s so-called Movie Glossary was “Fruit Cart,” defined thusly: “An expletive used by film buffs during any chase scene involving a foreign or ethnic locale, reflecting their certainty that a fruit cart will be overturned during the chase, and an angry peddler will run into the middle of the street to shake his face at the departing Porsche.” These fruit cart peddlers are sentient extras, in other words, nameless, non-speaking roles that briefly emerge from the periphery to, in their way, comment on the action. One of the most spectacular sequences of the recently released (and reviewed) “John Wick: Chapter 4” contains a whole host of fruit cart peddlers reimagined as club-goers, though one stands above the rest in commenting on the action by, in fact, not commenting on the action at all. 

The specifics of this sequence both are and are not important. Suffice to say that in pursuing the sequence’s preeminent Bad Guy (Scott Adkins) through a Berlin club, our hero John Wick (Keanu Reeves) has to fight his way through an assortment of auxiliary bad guys to reach him, meaning he must wade through so many gyrating revelers, including one gyrating reveler so memorable I snapped a mental picture as she flew by.

It’s a little murky, I know, and I apologize, but it was the best I could do. That guy on the floor, his legs kicked out in the air, that’s John Wick, having just been hurled there by the preeminent Bad Guy towering over him. And you can see how some of the other extras react, like the guy over the preeminent Bad Guy’s left shoulder, freaking out at this savage fight, and even this guy over here to the left, next to our marked extra, who looks over his own left shoulder with some confusion and concern. And though it might appear that our marked extra is looking at them too, she is not, I assure you. Seriously, the still does not do her movement justice, sort of Sprockets as Gumby, the kind of extemporaneous choreography that goes hand-in-hand with 135 beats per minute. And though her thrusts and half-twists briefly turns her toward the hand-to-hand combat, she does not really even seem to register it, too far gone in her spastic groove.

The dancers, as I wrote in my review, are there to mirror the dance-like quality of John Wick’s countless one-on-one battles. But John Wick’s ferocious quest for serenity mirrors the dancers, too, suggesting how they are all there, to quote her eminence Kylie, to “lose it in the music.” And our heroic extra has decided in her brief moment of tangential screen time, that her character is not, even now, while death and mayhem is happening all around her, going to let herself be found, a commitment no less noble than John Wick’s. 

Pour one out for the extra. 

John Wick: Chapter 4

The original “John Wick” (2014) was not merely a straight-forward revenge thriller but purposely, even humorously, stripped of reality, reducing the world to good guys and bad guys. Its sequels, Chapters 2 and 3, took the movie’s peripheral world, especially its assassins-only hotel called The Continental, and expanded it. This choice did not necessarily render those follow-ups more convoluted, or even less than good, though by the conclusion of the third, “Parabellum,” you could still detect a creeping enervation, the action movie needle tilting more toward zero than sixty. In deciding to end things with “John Wick: Chapter 4,” however, director Chad Stahelski might further augment his cinematic universe with ornate codes and rituals, but he also puts his eponymous character on a clock, sculpting a movie of baroque valleys and blood-splattered peaks that are adroitly divvied out to ensure this is one two hour and forty-nine-minute movie that never too obscenely wears its running time.

Stahelski is not shy about quoting influences, like his editor Nathan Orloff cutting from a match to the desert a la Ann V. Coates’s famous work in “Lawrence of Arabia,” or the underworld intelligence agent The Bowery King (Laurence Fishburne) literally quoting Dante’s Inferno as “John Wick: Chapter 4” opens. This moment, though, in which Wick pounds his bloodied fist again and again against an inanimate board while The Bowery King goads him on made me think more of Bundini Brown as hype man to Muhammad Ali, equating the eponymous hero with a heavyweight champ readying for one more bout. It’s evocative of the waggishness defining the series and concluding chapter too, like in the emergent villain, the Marquis de Gramont (Bill Skarsgård). Sending up our own world while taking place in its own, the Marquis crystallizes a burgeoning sort of modern aristocracy, never more hilariously than when he has one of the Louvre’s Red Rooms set up with a chic sofa set for a tête-à-tête. If you can’t bring Napoléon on the Battlefield of Eylau to your living room, bring your living room to Napoléon on the Battlefield of Eylau!

The Marquis has been dispatched by the High Table that runs the “John Wick” world to put John Wick himself in a casket once and for all, which is what everyone has been trying to do for going on four movies, a recurring joke that once again fails to run dry because Skarsgard’s smarminess amusingly embodies a supremely self-impressed belief that his attempt will be different. John Wick, however, turns the tables by utilizing his intricate world’s customs to challenge the Marquis to a duel, a ploy suggested by his ever-present hotelier cohort Winston, the as-always debonair Ian McShane imbuing so much exposition with patented breezy regality. This duel, of course, can’t just happen, necessitating John Wick jump through a number of hoops by way of globe-trotting spectacle, all culminating in a sunrise showdown at the Sacré Coeur.

Like the preceding three films, the action here proves almost endlessly inventive, both conceptually and visually, in ways both small and large, from the joyfully modest tradecraft of a blind assassin (Donnie Yen) enlisted by the Marquis to collect on Wick’s head to sensational location work that is rarely mere backdrop. The complicated traffic rules surrounding the Arc de Triomphe in Paris pave the way for a unique car chase / gunfight blend while a mammoth Montmartre staircase transforms Rocky Balboa’s ascension of the Philadelphia Library steps into a cosmically foiled Buster Keaton stunt, breathing new life into the hoary phrase Pick Yourself Up and Try Again. Reviews aren’t the place for Oscar prognostication but I’m not prognosticating when I simply point out Stahelski has argued for the inclusion of a Best Stunt Academy Award, and that I say give the inaugural one to Vincent Bouillon. 

It is 222 steps John Wick climbs to the Sacré Coeur, allowing for multiple landings in-between, each of which becomes a kind of dance floor of wild action, evoking the dance-like quality of this movie and the series in general. Indeed, a lengthy setpiece at a waterfall-strewn Berlin club is filled to the brim with dancers, their exertions mirroring choreographed bloody mayhem all around them. Stahelski shoots these scenes not only with a fluid camera but in long takes and wide takes, allowing us to clearly see the full scope of the action. As impressive as it, however, there can come a point where an assembly line sensation to these nameless, inevitable foils creeps in, effecting a weariness that might have weighed the whole project down if Reeves, whittling his dialogue down to virtually nothing, did not embody that weariness as his character’s own, a man mowing so many other men down so he can finally find peace. John Wick might be the most skilled assassin alive, but in one shot atop an Osaka hotel decorated with a cherry blossom tree, he just looks like another melancholy figure in a Japanese floral painting.