Lessons in Darkness (cont.)

In a Best Picture race that is all but over, Werner Herzog at least threw a little more flour into the dying flame with his controversial, or maybe just confusing, remarks on Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie.” Talking to noted horse’s ass Piers Morgan, the eccentric and esoteric German director was asked to weigh in on the Barbenheimer phenomenon that in so many ways defined moviegoing in 2023. Herzog confessed he had yet to see “Oppenheimer,” likely Best Picture winner, but of “‘Barbie,’” he said, “I managed to see the first half-hour. I was curious and I wanted to watch it because I was curious. And I still don’t have an answer, but I have a suspicion – could it be that the world of ‘Barbie’ is sheer hell?” Of course, Herzog also admitted he had only watched the first 30 minutes of “Barbie,” which perhaps ruled his view out of order, though plenty seemed to suggest he was just out of order in the first place. 

Though like most takes on “Barbie,” if not most takes in general, this one could stand to just be laughed off and ignored, I feel somewhat qualified to weigh in, nevertheless. After all, astute readers might note that this blog’s banner deploys a phrase - The Ecstatic Truth - of one Werner Herzog. What is The Ecstatic Truth? That can be hard to pin down. He sort of laid it out many years ago in a 12-page speech in Milano, Italy, translated by Moira Weigel, describing The Ecstatic Truth as “the enemy of the merely factual.” In his discursive manner, he eventually arrives at another explanation, describing “a deeper stratum of truth—a poetic, ecstatic truth, which is mysterious and can only be grasped with effort; one attains it through vision, style, and craft.” He submitted another version of that same sentence in 1999 at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, transcribed by the late Roger Ebert who deemed it the “‘Minnesota Declaration’ of (the director’s) principles.” “There are deeper strata of truth in cinema,” Herzog explained, “and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.”     

Fabrication, and imagination, and stylization? Werner, baby, that’s “Barbie.” But then, as some on social media suggested, was Herzog even really insulting “Barbie,” or was he complimenting it in his own enigmatical way? After all, the final point of his 12-point Minnesota Declaration is this: 

“Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of a hell that during evolution some species - including man - crawled, fled onto some small continents of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue.”

I mean, could one not argue that is “Barbie?” Barbieland is life in a pink-hued ocean of artificial hell, and in traveling out of Barbieland to the real world, and eventually passing from plastic doll to human, Barbie herself has evolved, crawled, and fled, with a conclusion suggesting nothing if not the Lessons of Darkness continuing. “Oppenheimer” can have Best Picture, mate, no worries; “Barbie,” on the other hand, found something deeper, the poetic, ecstatic truth.

One Perfect Moment

It might seem strange to consider Tony Gilroy’s “Michael Clayton” (2007) in conjunction with Wim Wenders’s “Perfect Days” (reviewed yesterday), even if, like me, the former is a movie you are thinking about all the time. “Perfect Days” is a contemplative drama in which nothing much happens. Indeed, nothing much happening is the point. It is a portrait of mindfulness, of a man, Hirayama (Kōji Yakusho), fully aware of and present in the moment, and how he seeks to remain that way each successive day. “Michael Clayton” is a fast-moving crime thriller with a jigsaw plot structure and an eponymous character (George Clooney), a law firm fixer, who is anything but mindful, his mind always churning instead, eternally on the clock, evinced in the opening scene’s early morning consultation. He is dealing with familial strife stemming from a deadbeat brother, and a bar business that went bust in part because of his deadbeat brother, and a mob debt on account of the bar business that went bust, and trying to wrangle one of his firm’s lawyers who has gone off the deep end, or maybe just come to see the light, making a case against his biggest client who, in a way, Michael starts making a case against too, all of which comes to a head during a fateful drive through the country roads of upstate New York in a car with a bomb wired to the GPS by two corporate hatchet men who are tailing him, or trying to, and trying to find the right moment to trigger the explosion. 

The contrasts extend further than the narrative too, and to the character, the performance, the framing. Hirayama is frequently seen alone in “Perfect Days,” but he is not alone, whether reading in his small apartment by lamp, or eating alone at a noodle bar, a picture of contentment. In images of Michael Clayton alone, on the other hand, he is the furthest thing from. When he’s sitting at a police precinct, waiting for the off-the-deep-end attorney he is struggling to corral, Clooney puts his chin on his hand, staring into space, and you can practically see his mind on everything. One of my three-hundred favorite moments in the whole movie is when Michael is in his office and on the phone with a client and says “Let me get a pen,” even though we can see he already has a pen in his hand, and as he momentarily lowers the phone, pretending to go find a pen, he comes across as a bone-weary man trying to steal a moment for himself in a world that won’t let him have it.

There is one moment ostensibly confounding moment in “Michael Clayton,” “the case of the three horses,” as a Roger Ebert Answer Man column put it the year of the movie’s release. This moment occurs at the climax, when Michael is driving around upstate New York, and suddenly pulls off to the side of the road, and gets out of his car, and ascends a small hill, all because he is riveted by the semi-surreal sight of three horses all on their lonesome in the early morning light. It’s true that Gilroy has planted little seeds in the narrative to make this make literal sense for the message board-styled critics, but it’s also true that you could not so much interpret this moment a thousand different ways as project what you think this moment means a thousand different ways, as Googling “Michael Clayton horses meaning” will attest. But a movie is only “exactly what is shows us,” as the esteemed Ebert also once noted, “and nothing more.” And what we have is an unmindful man who, for the first time all movie, becomes fully aware of the moment, and only the moment, and as his car going up in flames over his right shoulder illustrates, that newfound mindfulness saves his life. 

Perfect Days

Hirayama (Kōji Yakusho) wakes every morning in his small Tokyo apartment naturally, no alarm clock, to the sound of a woman sweeping up outside, suggesting the sleep of the contented. He trims his salt and pepper moustache and steps outside, stopping to glance up at the sky before grabbing a canned coffee from a nearby vending machine and setting forth on his job cleaning public toilets across the wide expanse of the Japanese capital, evoked in the name emblazoned on the back of his blue uniform, The Tokyo Toilet. When he’s done for the day, he cleans up at a public bath, grabs dinner at the same subway noodle shop, and then settles in for the evening, reading, usually a classic, until he turns out the lights and goes to sleep, seeming to dream in half fragments of the day he’s just experienced, like he really does live 24 hours at a time.

These are Hirayama’s perfect days, in other words, and for an hour of this two-hour movie, this is essentially all it is, plotless, and defined by the smallest variations, slight changes in camera angles, a different cassette tape on his way to work, Van Morrison one day, Lou Reed another. At lunch in the same park each afternoon, from the same bench, Hirayama looks up at the trees, noting the cracks of light between swaying leaves, snapping a photo that he files away with the hundreds and hundreds of photos before, suggesting “Perfect Days” as a sort of cinematic version of Monet’s haystacks, intending to capture the small shifts in the everyday.

Initially, there is no drama, no real conflict, even his job, suggesting something unpleasant, features no more trouble than an annoying co-worker and a still-drunk salaryman stumbling for a place to relieve himself. Gradually, however, hiccups emerge. His annoying co-worker up and quits, leaving Hirayama to cover two shifts in one day. His niece shows up announced, leading her mother, his sister, to come find her, leading to brief, cold interaction hinting at familial drama. An interruption of a routine toward the end prompts Hirayama to buy beer and cigarettes, suggesting an addictive past. But that’s all these are, suggestions, as Wenders pointedly refuses to fill in blanks, never following up on these narrative strands and forgoing a voiceover that might have provided more clarity. That, however, is not the kind of clarity Wenders seeks.

Though Hirayama favors legacy acts on his musical cassette tapes, one artist he does not play is Bruce Springsteen, though I kept thinking of him anyway, and how his work in the 90s, both released and unreleased, is packed with his own variations of lines about slipping, or shedding, his skin. Hirayama has shed his skin too, and all these encounters signify fragments of the past he has left behind. And that’s where they remain, too. They do not alter his future, because in “Perfect Days,” there is no future, and there is no past, there is only now, a line he literally says at one point, which, for a minimalist movie, I honestly could have done without. And that only goes to show why “Perfect Days” requires no voiceover; whatever he says, would be redundant. 

What needs to be said is said in Hirayama’s face, in his expression, in his looking to the sky, in the way he cracks open his can of coffee, in the way he leans back at the noodle bar, so that you can practically see contentment wash across his face. More than merely a man sticking to his routine, “Perfect Days” is a portrait of mindfulness. 

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Match Factory Girl (1990)

“The Match Factory Girl” brought Finnish director’s Aki Kaurismaki’s Proletariat Trilogy (see: two previous Friday Old Fashioneds) to a close by essentially mirroring the execrable downward mobility of the exploited working class. Indeed, it is the grimmest of the three, by far, and perhaps why it’s also the shortest, running just seven minutes over an hour. If it went any longer, you might be tempted to drink rat poison yourself. But then, I’m sort of giving away the end. No, “The Match Factory Girl” appropriately begins as an industrial montage, two minutes taking us through the processes of the eponymous workshop, seeing exactly how a matchstick, or matchsticks, get made. You’d be forgiven, in this moment, for thinking the machines have won, and not in the Marxist utopian sense but in a John Mellencamp writes an album about Skynet sense. It takes two minutes before we see a human being, Iris (Kati Outinen), working on the matchmaking line, and even then, it takes several more minutes before we hear a person speak. And when we do, it’s not her, it’s her father, and when he does, you wish he wouldn’t, not once, not ever again.

Iris still lives at home, even though her parents treat her like dirt, and falls in love with a man, Arne, who thinks she’s a prostitute, and when she gets pregnant with his kid, he tells her to get rid of the brat. It’s relentless, this movie and her life, living as existing as a series of gut punches. In long shots, Iris seems to disappear amid her drab surroundings, the bleak(er) Nordic version of the Milford Academy stressing that one should be neither seen nor heard. In close-ups, she betrays nothing, her unforgettable visage, the slope of her forehead, like a human eave, the daily rain of b.s. rolling right off. And though Kaurismaki’s entire trilogy might exist on a muddy line between crying and laughing, “The Match Factory Girl” stretches that line the furthest, a movie that virtually sacrifices any kind of commentary to simply sustain itself as one, long grim mood, pushing you and her to the breaking point until finally, at the end, it figuratively twists its lips into a blackly comic grin. Sometimes you just have to laugh knowing that the world is a hellhole from which there is no escape. 

Ten Biopics + One

If you thought Peter Jackson’s 3-part, 468-minute “Get Back” was as close to a definitive, what-else-do-we-need experience of The Beatles, a rock n roll band from Liverpool, as we were ever gonna get and/or needed, think again. This is 2024, son, savvy? Rather than leave the people wanting more, we seek to give the people more than they ever needed, or better (worse) yet, wanted, and so Sam Mendes has announced plans to make four Beatles movies, one biopic each of John, Paul, George, and Ringo, sort of the cinematic version of each member of four-person Kiss recording his own solo album in 1978. And that, as it absolutely had to, got me to thinking. It got me to thinking about what band I would want to see get the same treatment.

There are so many ways to go here, too many fact, so many that no matter how many bands I mention, I leave myself open to comments of “What about…” and “You didn’t mention…” Still, it’s too tempting not to attempt. Dueling Hall & Oates film would be sublime. Three Smashing Pumpkins joints would be great, mainly because I imagine Billy Corgan demanding final cut on all of them. If my faux movie studio had unlimited funds, I would green light a movie about every Go-Go in a heartbeat. But the only suitable answer, at least from where I’m blogging, has to be Fleetwood Mac.

The only real problem with a Peter Green movie followed by a Jeremy Spencer movie is that we would need 60s Dennis Hopper to direct them both.

The Fleetwood Mac rhythm section will be combined into one movie, recounting the period when Mick Fleetwood and John McVie just tried holding the whole thing together between Green & Spencer and Buckingham & Nicks.

The Christine McVie movie would cool things off, at least a little. 

There would be six Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham movies, three each, all of them answering the one before it.

Buckingham I. 

Nicks I. 

Buckingham II. 

Nicks II. 

Buckingham III. 

Nicks III.

Then a Stevie Nicks solo movie.

20 Days in Mariupol

As “20 Days in Mariupol” begins, three Ukrainian journalists, including director Mstyslav Chernov, watch from a Mariupol hospital as black plumes of smoke from artillery shells rise in the distance and tanks emblazoned with the letter Z, marking them as Russian, roll into view. It feels like something culled from a war movie aiming for intense realism, but this is no docudrama, this is a documentary, and when the camera briefly zooms out so that we see one of the journalists perched at the window, snapping pictures of the unfolding scene outside, it breaks the spell. “Film it,” someone says in a line functioning as the film’s dire mantra. Chernov and his Associated Press colleagues, Evgeniy Maloletka and Vasilisa Stepanenko, might have eschewed fleeing the eponymous city in the Donetsk Oblast as Russian forces mounted their invasion of Ukraine in 2022, but they are not cowboys, and this is not “Live from Baghdad,” the 2002 HBO movie recounting CNN’s broadcast of the beginning of the Gulf War. Those airstrikes were timed specifically for the American evening news and became advertisements, militaristic cheerleading, the “We’re going to war!” scene in “Starship Troopers” (1997) lived out for real. “20 Days in Mariupol,” on the other hand, takes the form of Chernov’s detached voiceover, numbed by trauma. 

Though occasionally Chernov and his team are waved away by people who would rather not appear on camera, they are just as frequently approached by people who would, like a policeman specifically wanting to bear witness to the atrocities he has seen, or a doctor who matter-of-factly recounts a pregnant woman who lost both her own life and her baby, transforming the entire documentary into something akin to moving testimony. The images here are as brutal as they are relentless, death and terror and the terrorized aftermath, people with no place to go, their homes destroyed, their lives violently upended. Chernov repeatedly shows us the images that he and his skeleton crew shot, and then he shows us these same images being broadcast over various news networks, at home and abroad. This is less self-congratulatory than an evocation of their mission, to show the world what’s happening, all of “20 Days in Mariupol” rendered in the image of one shot peering through a spider-webbed window caused by a bullet, a cracked view into this obscene conflict. 

“My brain wants to forget what I saw,” Chernov says at one point in voiceover, “but the camera will remember.” It’s an observation as broad as it is specific, underlining the purpose and power of a movie camera in the first place, and becoming an emphatic rejoinder to Russia’s UN Ambassador, seen near the doc’s end dismissing so much of the footage emerging from Mariupol as fake news, the standard-issue deflection of blowhards, con artists, and strongmen, daring us to bury our heads in the sand, to not believe all that we have just seen. Watching this unfold, you can only hope there is a Chernov on the ground in Gaza right now. 

Friday's Old Fashioned: Ariel (1988)

As “Ariel” begins, Taisto (Turo Pajala) is put out of work when his mine in the far north of Finland closes. Seeking council in a café, Taisto’s father hands over the keys to his 1962 white Cadillac convertible, councils his son to leave town and get further south, that staying put will leave him drunk or depressed, or both, hands over the keys to his car, goes into the bathroom and blows his brains out. It is difficult to explain without the scene’s accompanying tone just how funny this is, so long as you’re into bleak humor, which, I confess, I whole-heartedly am. It’s evocative of a movie in which the characters speak little yet when they do, tend to say exactly what they mean, no fuss, no muss, and pitched between a line of all-out surrender and taking extreme action, evocative of a world so downtrodden there isn’t much middle ground left between the two. Taisto simply lights another cigarette after his dad’s demise, then packs up what he little he owns, withdraws all his money from the bank, and drives his new car away, the wooden shed where it’s been kept crumbling in the background he does, barely one step ahead of a fallen world. 

In this, the second of writer/director Aki Kaurismäki’s so-called Proletariat Trilogy (see: previous Friday Old Fashioned), there are echoes of The Coen Brothers, the formerly united Ethan and Joel who were getting their start around the same time, and whose movies are often akin to elaborate torture devices for their main characters, comic theaters of cruelty, to borrow a phrase by the critic J. Hoberman. Indeed, as Taisto hurries south, he is beaten and robbed of all his money, loses a dock-working job to make that money back, and winds up in prison after he roughs up the very same thief who robbed him. That all sounds like a comic maze of cruelty, too. Yet, in his tall, wiry physique and long black hair, Taisto never comes across like a mere punching bag, cutting the image of an off-kilter movie star, like if Hollywood had known how to utilize 1990s Kevin Corrigan, and his character, and those he counters, virtually breathe defiance. When he meets cute with a meter maid (Susanna Haavisto), she tosses her meter maid hat to the ground and goes for a joy ride in his convertible. After he sells his convertible for peanuts to an unscrupulous dealer, he eventually goes and steals his car back, manifesting the point where antihero loops around to become hero again.

An early scene when Taisto briefly bunks in a hostel ultimately feels no different from when he’s locked up in his prison cell, underlining how little difference there is in “Ariel” between the world outside and inside the cell. When Taisto and his cellmate (Matti Pellonpää) make an escape, it’s less about breaking out of prison than it is taking the moose by the antlers, though this sense of carpe diem is as ironic as it is earnest, mirrored in deploying “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” as the credits roll, not to mention just about the greatest deadpan payoff I have ever seen in a movie. It involves the convertible, and the top that won’t go up all movie, and when it finally does, the characters watching with the air of people watching explosions in the sky with the air of people watching paint dry, it’s as if shelter from life’s storm is just that close, and yet so far, so very, very far away.

Maestro

“Maestro” begins with American conductor and composer extraordinaire Leonard Bernstein (Bradley Cooper) playing his home piano. For a second, you might think he is alone, until you notice the television cameraman hovering in the upper left-hand corner of the screen, and as the shot gradually closes in on Bernstein, the more cameras and lights come into view. He is performing, in other words, an apt emblem for a movie that is all about performance, and as much about performance in terms of its filmmaker and star and his co-star as it is about Bernstein, making for a fascinating yet frustrating film. After this sequence, we flash back to the past, the day Bernstein takes a call in his bedroom to guest conduct the New York Philharmonic, setting him on his way to professional glory. When the call ends, the dark curtain that has been drawn over a large window, is suddenly thrust open, revealing an exultant Bernstein standing on a window ledge. It put me in mind of Seinfeld’s immortal Elaine Benes saying of Rava’s boyfriend, the flamboyant possible thief Ray, and his penchant for theatrical flourish and melodramatic monologues, “Shouldn’t you be out on a ledge somewhere?” Cooper spends all of “Maestro” on the ledge.

In directing and co-writing the screenplay with Josh Singer, Cooper has opted out of making a traditional biopic, eschewing Leonard’s childhood and even forgoing any real insight into what made him a musical savant and how that manifested itself. No, “Maestro” suggests an artier “Walk the Line” in so much as the latter, despite a cut and paste kinda non-quality, found its spine through the love story of Johnny Cash and June Carter in so much as “Maestro,” too, preeminently functions as a love story of Leonard Bernstein and Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan). Indeed, it proves her movie as much as his, foreshadowed in that same opening scene where in his on-camera interview, Leonard talks of sensing his deceased wife’s presence in their home, as if she’s still with him in death. In Cooper’s telling, Felicia was very much a moon pulled along in the orbit of Leonard’s massive planet, though one with the wherewithal to keep up. “You have a lot of energy,” he says to her the first time they meet, and the ring Cooper gives this line lets you know it’s a compliment. And though I can’t confess to knowing the real nature of their relationship, and though it is crucial to note “Maestro” was made with the blessing of Bernstein’s children, indicating a movie made in the image of their own feelings on the subject, despite all the wrenching complications that go hand-in-hand with Bernstein’s bisexuality, there is genuine electricity between Cooper and Mulligan that makes their love believable in spite of it all. 

If a thousand movies have contained a Supportive Spouse standing in the shadows, Cooper pulls Felicia into the spotlight, demonstrating her own artistic pursuits and honoring her point-of-view, literally even, slipping into a breathtaking shot from her perspective as she lies on her deathbed. And if he puts Felicia in the spotlight, he puts Mulligan there too, putting her name first in the closing credits and offering her smattering of smashing close-ups, ones in color that come across like moving Life Magazine covers, and a monochrome one on a sidewalk as she walks toward the camera as the camera moves toward her, as if illuminating its pull toward her, the wordless language of movie stardom laid out before us. In other shots, though, like the camera gradually pressing in on Felicia as she lays on her side on a blanket, telling a friend about her husband’s incompatible dimensions, Cooper is essentially allowing Mulligan’s acting to carry the image. That occurs later, too, for both of them during a Thanksgiving Day row, conveyed in one take and a long shot that turns their blocking into a reflection of the words. It works so well to leave each character spent and wrecked that the comic capper of a Macy’s Parade balloon floating past in the background falls flat.

For all the attention lavished on Mulligan, however, Cooper the director kind of hangs Cooper the actor out to dry. His controversial prosthetic nose and considerable old man makeup as Bernstein all would seem to symbolize how Cooper vanishes into the character, though in reality, the opposite is true, how despite so much virtual transformation, Cooper himself still shines through. This is never more acute than the climax in which Bernstein conducts the London Symphony Orchestra in Mahler’s Resurrection. Recounted in a six-minute single take, Bernstein is left drenched in sweat, though because Cooper has done so little to demonstrate his character’s conducting genius, what makes him one, how he harnesses the power of the orchestra, this moment becomes nothing more than an exhibition of Cooper’s own technique. It isn’t Bernstein’s sweat we’re seeing; it’s Cooper’s.

Old Movies That Could Have Streamed After the Super Bowl

Just as the importance of the Super Bowl halftime show (is Halftime Show capitalized?) has waxed and waned over the years, so too has the importance of the post-Super Bowl time slot. When I was growing up, the former was extraneous, background noise for bathroom breaks and loading up on more pulled pork while the latter was of great consequence, utilized by whatever network was airing the big football game that year to launch a new show, like “Airwolf” in 1982 on CBS or “The Wonder Years” in 1988 on ABC, or to try and take an already big show higher, like NBC did for “Friends” in 1996, or Fox did for “Malcolm in the Middle” in 2002. Now, though, the pendulum has swung the other way. The Super Bowl Halftime Show (?) has become a showcase event for music’s biggest and the lead-out Super Bowl show has become a half-hearted shrug. This year CBS chose to premiere something called “Tracker,” which sounds like “Poker Face” if Natasha Lyonne was a survivalist. No thanks.

This no doubt stems at least in part from the growing irrelevance of broadcast TV, mostly just existing these days for live sports, not what comes after the live sports. And why stick around for “Tracker” when you could just, like, go stream that new “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” show, or the new last season of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” or “The Equalizer 3” on Netflix. Speaking of Netflix, in 2018 the streaming company tried to an invent a whole new Super Bowl lead-out move by surprise premiering “Cloverfield Paradox.” It did not draw as many viewers as Netflix might have guessed, though, and nobody has attempted to replicate their move again. And though I could pitch some brand-new movie ideas for the post-Super Bowl future, I found myself thinking more about the past, and what movies released the same year as certain Super Bowls might have worked as mythical streaming lead-outs. 

Old Movies That Could Have Streamed After the Super Bowl

Big Trouble in Little China. 1986. The 80s were weird, man, and I like thinking of the people still somewhat sentient after the Chicago Bears’ famous demolition of the New England Patriots, seeing John Carpenter’s (eventual) cult classic, and wondering if they are hallucinating. And if this movie is a little, shall we say, much for broadcast TV, then we will just substitute Willard Hyuck’s “Howard the Duck.”

Who’s Harry Crumb? 1989. This was the John Candy Super Bowl, as in, just before San Francisco 49ers quarterback Joe Montana led this team on their exalted game-winning 92-yard drive, he deflated tension in the huddle by pointing out comedy legend John Candy in the stands. But what if Candy being there was not just a coincidence? What if it was a psyop (sorry), foreshadowing NBC airing Candy’s detective comedy at game’s end, maybe giving it the audience it deserved (from a certain point of view) all along?

The Bonfire of the Vanities. 1990. The San Francisco 49ers beating the Denver Broncos 55-10 remains the biggest blowout in Super Bowl history. Brian De Palma’s notorious bomb from the same year would have been the perfect lead-out, watch 20 minutes and fall asleep, the way it was meant to be seen.

A Night at the Roxbury. 1998. Never mind that Super Bowl XXXII was on NBC and this SNL Studios production could have been an impeccable tie-in, what I’m thinking here is more how the game in which hapless Super Bowl straight man John Elway finally won ended weirdly on an incompletion by Green Bay Packer quarterback Brett Favre that was an injudicious pitch to covered receiver. And how the Butabi brothers dream of a club where the inside is the outside would have fit the mood.

Jurassic Park 3. 2001. There have been a lot of bad super bowls, but Ravens - 34 Giants - 7 gets my vote for worst. Beyond boring, just awful. And if they had premiered the third “Jurassic Park” right after, it would have looked so good in comparison! It would have been a smash!

Along Came Polly. 2004. Only Philip Seymour Hoffman going for broke might have been able to repurpose all that asinine puritanical outrage toward Janet Jackson into after the fact acceptance of the indelicate.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Shadows in Paradise (1986)

“I’m not going to die behind the wheel,” declares an unnamed garbageman (Esko Nikkari) as he advises in monosyllabically impassioned terms about starting his own trash collecting company. “Then where?” wonders his younger co-worker Nikander (Matti Pellonpää). The unnamed garbageman replies: “Behind a desk.” Oh Lord, it’s hilarious, in the grimmest possible way, that line of Noah Emmerich’s in “The Truman Show” about how he’d kill for a desk job taken to the most mordant of extremes, like the journey from blue collar to white collar is as epic as crossing the Matterhorn, and evocative of the deadpan humor coursing through “Shadows in Paradise” and how it is firmly entrenched between not knowing whether to laugh or to cry. That’s how Nikander looks, in fact, when his co-worker’s dream of dying behind a desk goes unrealized when he suddenly kicks the bucket, like he’s caught in the purgatory between laughing at the cruelty, or crying from the absurdity, or maybe the other way around. Instead, he gets drunk, gets in a fight, and gets put in jail for the night.

Part one of writer/director Aki Kaurismaki’s so-called Proletariat Trilogy refuses to sentimentalize, low wage work or anything else, for that matter. Like Nikander being denied entry to a fancy restaurant, he understands his place in the world, on the outside looking in, haunting, you might say, the dim shadows of paradise. This could have rendered his character a rebel, and the supermarket checkout clerk, Ilona (Kati Outinen) with whom he meets cute does, in fact, steal a lockbox flush with cash when she is unceremoniously laid off. Yet, if this suggests a crime movie, two lovers on the run, Nikander instead schemes a way to give the money back. He does this as a romantic gesture, though what they have, it really isn’t romantic at all, as she sort of comes to tolerate him more than love him. (For their first date, he takes her to a bingo hall, the G-rated, straight-faced Nordic version of Travis Bickle taking Betsy to the adult movie.) No, Nikander’s emergent friendship with his cellmate (Sakari Kuosmanen) during that night in jail ultimately proves as important as his relationship with Ilona, misfits, all of them, who find some semblance of strength in solidarity against a world that doesn’t necessarily even seem to want them. 

In Memoriam: Carl Weathers

Carl Weathers was born in New Orleans in 1948 and grew up in the Crescent City before making his way to California, attending Long Beach Poly High, and then Long Beach City College, and then transferring to San Diego State on a football scholarship. His senior year, the team clinched an undefeated season by beating Boston University in what for most of its existence had been known as the Junior Rose Bowl before being rechristened the Pasadena Bowl. College football bowl games and movies, that’s sort of the unlikely nexus of my oft-incongruous interests, and few people have ever occupied that space more than Carl Weathers. “He was a serious drama student even when he was a football player,” Weathers’s SDSU teammate Donnie Rea told the Los Angeles Times in 1986. “All he did in the shower was recite Shakespeare and sing his next part in the play.” Weathers was drafted by the Oakland Raiders but never made it in the NFL, criticized by his coach John Madden for not being tough enough, maybe because Weathers had a thespian’s sensitivity, or maybe because as Weathers himself alluded to, he wasn’t interested in the grind, just didn’t care about football the same way he did about acting. Either way, professional football’s loss was art’s sizable gain. 

After several appearances in Blaxploitation movies and familiar television shows of the mid-1970s, Weathers received his career-making break in John G. Avildsen’s “Rocky” (1976) by playing heavyweight champion Apollo Creed who gives a Philadelphia underdog Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone) a title shot. And if Rocky made Stallone’s mealy-mouthed mumbling famous, it made Weathers’s charismatic baritone famous too. “Apollo Creed versus the I-talian Stallion,” he says, chuckling to himself as he does, one of those movie lines I sometimes say to myself apropos of nothing. “Now that sounds like a damn monster movie.”

The character could merely have been a heel, but Weathers often talked of marrying the cerebral with the physical, and as Apollo, he saw where the lines between athlete and businessman collided, foreshadowing the eras of Jordan and LeBron. Weathers became as integral to the “Rocky” franchise as Stallone, so much so that in what one might credibly contend is the best movie of the whole series, Ryan Coogler’s “Creed” (2015), Weathers goes a long way toward making it count by having created such an indelible, authoritative presence that he hovers over the whole movie without appearing once; you hear the name Creed and instinctively, you see Carl Weathers.

After Apollo was sacrificed in “Rocky IV” (1985) so that Rocky could win the Cold War, Weathers appeared in the box office hit “Predator” (1987), an ostensible Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle that still came across like a true ensemble because of co-stars like Weathers. Their handshake turned epic arm-wrestling match turned modern social media meme worked so well because Weathers could fill the frame as fully and electrically as Arnold. The latter had to win that moment because his name came first on the poster, but the two men emerged from that movie like Creed and Balboa – as equals. Weathers got his own movie the following year in 1988 with “Action Jackson,” though it failed commercially and creatively, and when it did, Hollywood eschewed giving him another title shot. Box office hits, to quote Alec Baldwin, provide “an all-access pass that lasts for five years. And, if the movies you make don’t make money in that period, your pass expires.” Weathers, though, barely even got a year, just one movie, and it does not feel like a stretch to suggest that Weathers being black meant the terms and conditions of his pass were inhibited. 

Whoever else in Hollywood might have forgotten about him, his “Action Jackson” producer Bernie Brillstein did not, and it was Brillstein who Weathers credited for getting his role in “Happy Gilmore” (1996). Weathers always had comedy chops, as his spot-on Rev Jesse Jackson impression for Saturday Night Live during the 1988 Democratic primaries attested, and in playing the gruff mentor to Adam Sandler’s infantile hockey player turned golfing pro, Weathers bloomed anew in playing funny. He was never funnier, though, than he was spoofing himself in the cult aughts television show “Arrested Development” as a cheapskate, an actor for whom the greatest thrill in life is not nailing a scene but pocketing his daily per diem, firmly in the pantheon of actors playing themselves. Speaking to Vulture in 2013, show creator Mitch Hurwitz said it was Weathers who proposed this idea, cutting off Hurwitz’s predictable pitches for “Rocky” parodies at the pass, a confession that kind of underlines how the industry never saw Weathers with the same clarity as he saw himself.

I always hoped Weathers, who died Thursday February 1, 2024, at the age of 76, would star in one last big project, and even cheekily dreamt one up, though as a few friends reminded me, one-time “Star Wars” fan turned wearied agnostic, he starred in the recent Disney+ TV series “The Mandalorian.” If I grew up knowing Weathers as Apollo Creed, a whole new generation has grown up knowing Weathers as Greef Karga, ultimately making him an actor who left a mark not in one era but two, which I hoped warmed his heart as much as it does mine. 

The Iron Claw

On their first date, Kevin Von Erich (Zac Efron) tells his future wife Pam (Lily James) that he’s not the oldest brother in his semi-famous family of professional wrestlers because his oldest brother died when he was just six, how one day he was there, and the next, he wasn’t. It’s a moment Efron plays to perfection, not still grieving but almost as if he never grieved at all. Initially seeking Kevin out for an autograph, and almost forcing him into the date, you might have your suspicions about Pam, but this is the moment when her true colors show. She gets up and comes around to the other side of the table, sitting down beside him and giving him a hug as the camera switches to a long shot, infusing the whole room with their warmth and cutting straight through to Kevin’s truth: he’s a guy who just needs a hug.

 

He’s not getting a hug from his dad Fritz (Holt McCallany), that’s for sure, a former professional wrestler who never earned the championship belt he felt he deserved, laid out in a prologue filmed in black and white that injects a sense of foreboding from the jump. As both writer and director, Sean Durkin forgoes ever employing the word kayfabe, a pro wrestling term indicating that events in the ring are genuine, not staged, taking it seriously, and Fritz takes it seriously too, overmuch, transferring the burden of winning a title in the ring to his sons, all chips off the old block only in so much as Fritz has molded them to be. Like Kevin, who opens the movie by unsuccessfully attempting to rouse his youngest brother Mike (Stanley Simons) for a morning workout, casting him in the image of a thousand sports movie heroes, that if he puts in the work, he will earn his way to the top. That work, though, comes not just in the ring but outside it through showmanship and theatrics at which his younger brother David (Harris Dickinson) proves more potent, causing Kevin’s place in the pecking order to suffer. And if the belt eventually comes home, tragedy does too, as David and Mike and even second-oldest Kerry (Jeremy Allen White) perish one by one in horrifying ways, leaving only Kevin. It’s so much death that despite their mother Doris’s (Maura Tierney) emphatic belief in God, the Von Erichs become convinced of a family curse.

His mother’s religion, though, while cited by Kevin in voiceover as being equally important in their household to feats of strength, never quite feels that way in terms of the movie, coming and going throughout, frequently disappearing altogether, evoking not how “The Iron Claw” bites off more than it can chew but how there is just too much plot to contain in a two hour and twelve-minute movie. Indeed, it was only afterward that I learned there was a whole other Von Erich brother that “The Iron Claw” excises, not wrongly but from dramatic necessity, and explaining why sometimes the brothers can feel more two-dimensional than fully rounded. Then again, Durkin gets around this problem by making Kevin the focal point, the emotional hub, as the introductory scene suggests, and by emphasizing the Brothers Von Erich specifically as a unit. Scenes of them chowing down on fast food in the front seat of a pickup truck while listening to Tom Petty and dancing together at Kevin’s wedding come across as heavenly as “The Iron Claw’s” actual portrayal of the afterlife, the latter so effortlessly true (and without the need for proselytizing) that it feels almost revolutionary for a mainstream movie.

That sun-kissed cinematography of those moments winds up cutting both ways, though, something angelic but also ethereal, like all this is fading even as we watch it happening. Because while this moving sense of brotherly love is a counterweight to “The Iron Claw’s” unceasing tragedy, it is also what their father uses to exploit and undermine them. At the dinner table, he literally confesses to ranking his own sons, and because they are his business assets as much as kids, he has no problem utilizing them as such. McCallany’s performance is as deft as it is disturbing in how he never lets his character detect his own complicity. A scene near the end, in which Doris rekindles her own passion for painting, is as bedeviling as it is moving in the way McCallany has Fritz sit there with a vacuous expression, a man next to his wife who is a million miles away, who can’t see what she sees, who can’t see himself the way others do. In truth, “The Iron Claw” doesn’t entirely either, with an epilogue that seems to view Fritz more lovingly than the movie itself. Even so, it does not undermine the overall punch, both Durkin and McCallany suggesting the nominal family curse is not really one at all, merely the logical result of a father’s toxicity, and tellingly, the triumphant conclusion isn’t in the ring but at home, where the son breaks the cycle.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Sneakers (1992)

Even if the bad guy of “Sneakers” presciently predicts a future where data and information will be akin to the ultimate currency, the aesthetic and structure of Phil Alden Robinson’s 1992 proves old fashioned in so much as it eschews bold statements on the state of the world to merely engineer some quality entertainment. It stars Robert Redford, after all, co-star of “The Sting,” released in 1973 but set in 1936, and even despite its 1992 setting and release, “Sneakers” could have come straight from 1936 too, a technothriller as caper. It’s made from familiar ingredients, right down to reconfiguring the recording of a voice for a clever purpose. Another 1992 comedy caper throwback, “Manhattan Murder Mystery,” successfully did that too, proving that any conceit, new or ancient, is only as good as you render it. And though “Sneakers” hints at a leftist agenda in its opening and closing, these hints are conveyed, too, as something of a lark.

Redford is Martin Brice turned Martin Bishop, a fugitive since his days at Berkeley where he went on the run after deploying his immense skills in the name of semi-political agitation and now the leader of a motley crew of other tech ne’er-do-wells, including ex-CIA agent Donald Crease (Sydney Poitier), that tests bank’s security systems by breaking into them. That is what they’re doing as the movie opens, a deliberate feint underlining the movie’s all for fun ethos. Things get serious, in a manner of speaking, when two NSA agents, one played by Timothy Busfield, a dude born to play a retentive G-man, ask Martin and his team to steal a black box from a mathematician they claim is working for the Russians, reminding us how Russians as villains never really went out of style. That black box, however, proves to be a techno Ark of the Covenant, the ultimate codebreaker, an army that deploys it would be invincible, etc., and oh, those G-Men? Not G-Men, which puts Martin, already on the run, on the run with his whole team.

“Sneakers” is so committed to fun that even a sober cameo from James Earl Jones at movie’s end gets delightfully turned on its head, leaving him taken aback, sort of stammering, and us laughing. It’s also a moment evocative of the screenplay’s penchant for set-ups and payoffs. There all kinds of the latter built into this thing, none more enjoyable than the blind member of Martin’s team (David Straitharin) ending up at the wheel of the car, which James Horner’s accompanying score renders not as a moment of suspense or comedy but sort of glimmer-eyed triumph. Straithairn is also evidence of how the movie pays attention to its supporting characters, like Liz Ogilvy (Mary McDonnell), who might be Martin’s ex but proves more than that, holding her own and having fun, while Martin’s old pal Cosmo gives Ben Kingsley the opportunity to play a Bond villain. And when the hacking team prevents a call from being traced while using the aforementioned voice recording of another character, it’s a demonstration of both this team as just that and of Alden Robinson’s graceful direction to emphasize it.

Indeed, it’s Alden Robinson who stood out to me as much as Redford. Though there are plenty of crisply edited scenes, like the showdown between Martin and Cosmo, so many moments are wonders of fluid camerawork and expert blocking, single takes that aren’t about showy, swooping camerawork but more nimble intimacy. After Martin learns he has been fooled by the G-Men, “Sneakers” cuts to a shot of him looking out a rain-ridden window, itself kind of cheeky, before cutting to a shot inside, looking at Martin looking out the window from afar. Other characters then move to and fro within the shot, speaking, before Martin turns from the window and walks toward the camera and right into a close-up, an impeccable merging of filmmaker and star.