Love Lies Bleeding

“Love Lies Bleeding” begins with Nevada gym manager Lou (Kristen Stewart) unclogging a toilet. This unclogging, we don’t see it from afar or abstractly, no, we see it from above and right up close. I can’t imagine a more blatant metaphor for someone’s life having gone down the crapper, but then, that’s why this moment is so indicative of director Rose Glass’s neo-noir, not so much portending gritty realism as excess. “Love Lies Bleeding” is set in 1989, after all, tail-end of a decade defined by excess, including, though in no way limited to, anabolic steroids and bodybuilding, two details that are key. Indeed, describing something as being that thing on steroids might be a hackneyed rhetorical tic, but rest assured, “Love Lies Bleeding” is not just a movie quote-unquote on steroids but a movie that in its intense motivations, gruesome violence, and occasional aesthetic exaggeration seeks to put us not in the shoes of its characters, so to speak, but on its steroids.

Virtually every noir begins with a look of love, nay, lust, and “Love Lies Bleeding” is no different. On her way to Las Vegas for a bodybuilding competition, transient and aspiring bodybuilder Jackie (Katy M. O’Brian) stops by Lou’s gym for a workout, the two exchange looks, and just like Burt Lancaster putting the hook in his own lip when he sees Yvonne De Carlo in “Criss Cross,” it’s all over but the murder and the mayhem. In this case, though, it’s not just the flouting of gender stereotypes but the flouting of the push and pull. It’s not just Jackie who draws in Lou, but Lou who draws in Jackie. The latter might claim her physique is au natural, but when Lou brings out her syringes and steroids, Jackie accepts as “Love Lies Bleeding” essentially brings to life those scenes infamously described by one-time Oakland A Jose Canseco of plunging a drug-infused needle into the butt cheek of his Bash Brother Mark McGwire in a bathroom stall, just with an erotic twist. This is a roid rage romance, in other words, like if Dee of the Hundred Dollar Baby episode of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” was a femme fatale.

To make ends meet, or just make enough to pay her way to Vegas, Jackie takes a job at a gun range that happens to be run by Lou’s father, the appropriately named Lou Sr., who essentially runs the whole town, and who is played by Ed Harris with a tremendously bad wig that is also tremendous because it feels like the kind of hair an overcompensating kind of guy would sport. Lou also has a sister, Beth (Jena Malone), married to the abusive J.J. (Dave Franco), and that abuse comes to a head very early on in “Love Lies Bleeding” which is what causes a spiral of brutal violence, secret revelations, and desperate measures, mostly by Lou to keep Jackie out of trouble and their love alive. Those desperate measures are neither meticulous nor shrewd, the kind to make a certain sort of viewer throw his or her hands in the air and incredulously demand, “What is she doing?!”, but in her omnipresent anxiety, Stewart renders it believable that everything Lou does is what Lou would do.

Stewart is better than the script, in fact, so affectingly jittery that she hints at Lou suffering a psychological scar that the ultimately rote explanation of not wanting to be a chip off the old man’s block inadvertently douses. The same is true of O’Brian, both her turn and her character, rife with potential but ultimately just two-dimensional. Yet, despite that lack of dimension, and deeper meaning, it’s hard to deny a pervasive feeling, nevertheless, that carries through. It is best epitomized in some potent image making near the end that appropriately takes the whole thing over the top, providing a gleeful high even if you know that feeling is artificially enhanced. The closing credits, in fact, prove to be the funniest thing in the whole movie; they’re the crash. 

Friday's Old Fashioned: Straight Time (1978)

What sticks out in finally watching “Straight Time” 45 years after the fact isn’t, as it turns out, how Bruce Springsteen lifted the title for “Ghost of Tom Joad” Side 1, Track 2 but just how much it influenced resident American movie directing genius Michael Mann. In fact, Mann worked on the screenplay of director Ulu Grosbard’s movie, though did not end up with a credit, not that it really matters. You can see the fingerprints of “Straight Time” all over parts of the exalted Mann oeuvre, from “Thief” to “Heat,” right down to an inverted version of the canonical 30 seconds flat speech. Indeed, “Straight Time” was based on a novel by one-time real-life convict Edward Bunker, who co-wrote the script, and he would become something of a spiritual collaborator with Mann from that point forward. Mann, though, is a perfectionist, and so were his thieves, Frank and Neil McCauley in, respectively, “Thief” and “Heat.” Max Dembo (Dustin Hoffman), on the other hand, of “Straight Time” might think he’s a perfectionist, but events demonstrate otherwise, and unlike Neil McCauley, who wasn’t going back to the clink no matter what, Max is drawn to it like a tractor beam.

“Straight Time” begins with Max being released from prison after six years on a burglary charge and the first thing he does is buy a hot dog from a street vendor, which Hoffman does not play like a newly free man indulging joy so much as lack of a better idea, underscored by his weird indifference, sort of staring into space, at first forgetting to pay and then just sort of shuffling off. He is supposed to check into a halfway house but ditches for a hotel instead, explaining to his parole officer Earl (M. Emmet Walsh) that he wanted to spend his first night of freedom feeling truly free. He says things like this, about enjoying his freedom, about living on the straight and narrow, but the movie never seems to take it all that seriously. With the help of Jenny (Theresa Russell) at an employment agency, Max lands a job at a canning factory, but “Straight Time” barely bothers with that subplot. And though Earl’s condescending air denotes a system not necessarily designed to help, in their conversations, you can also sense Max already pressing to find the cracks, to see what he can get away with. More than a guy used to life on the inside, really, Hoffman portrays Max as a simmering pot, and by the time he breaks parole, he has come to boil. 

Walsh is a marvel as Earl, acting as if he’s patting Max on the back even as he’s hanging him out to dry. Russell, meanwhile, effects something past mere sympathy for Max, more a kind of youthful ennui that goes a long way in suggesting how she would be carried away by him even after he goes on the run and even though her character mostly exists just for him to jettison at the end as recidivist representation. More effective, is the reflective character of Jerry Schue (Harry Dean Stanton), a career criminal like Max who has managed to go straight but yearns to break free by breaking bad. In the scene where Jerry confesses this, Grosbard almost lays the dichotomy on too thick, putting Jerry and Max beside the former’s backyard pool, the two of them eating hot dogs, though how Stanton says it cuts right through all that anyway, the plaintive B-side to Tom Sizemore in “Heat” admitting the action is the juice. Jerry’s subsequent rendition of an old gospel tune begging forgiveness might have been laying it on thick too, though the way the camera drifts, up, up, and away renders it poignant, evoking God not turning His back, per se, but putting a little distance between the two of them, nevertheless. 

He Is His Hair

As I near 50, the physical wear and tear of middle age seems more acute with each passing day, one creak eternally giving way to another moan, and yet, despite it all, I still have my hair. I’m lucky, I know, and I don’t intend to rub it in, I truly don’t, because hey, if I could trade my hair for a mere average mouth of teeth, I would seriously consider it. But nope, hair is what I got and it’s what I still have, and so I’ve tried to take advantage. I’ve aimed for a European soccer player look for most of my 30s and 40s, and now have been trying to reconfigure that look into Timothy Olyphant from “Justified: City Primeval.” Looking a few years into the future, however, when my hair undoubtedly will start to thin somewhat, I’m thinking the windswept style of Daniel Day-Lewis might be a better tack. And beyond even that, I find myself thinking that Michael Douglas would be a good hair idol. Because of throat cancer, Douglas almost lost his voice, and losing a voice that rich would itself be tragic, but as he nears 80, he’s still got his hair, and what hair it is. I did not see “Ant-Man and the Wasp” (2018), but I did see Michael Douglas’s hair in “Ant-Man and the Wasp,” and cosmetologically, the dude still brings it. 

I thought about this over the weekend while reading Matthew Garrahan’s interview with Douglas for the Weekend Financial Times. Douglas is currently starring in an Apple TV+ miniseries as Ben Franklin who, as Garrahan notes, did not wear a wig, unlike most founding fathers, meaning Douglas could still show off his hair. “Jack Nicholson always accuses me of being a hair actor,” Douglas told Garrahan. “I find a lot of my character through hair.” As evidence, Garrahan cites the actor’s slicked back look as Gordon Gekko for “Wall Street” (1987) and crew cut in “Falling Down” (1993). These might be two of the more blatant examples, but they also demonstrate the wide variance in Douglas’s movie hair, how he can transition from Coach Pat Riley to peeved peon without missing a beat, the length he’s willing to go to get under the coiffure of his character.

He does not simply excel at broad leaps with his hair, however, proving equally successful at subtler shades. In “Haywire” (2011), his hair is like a G-man play on the Gekko look but styled with a little more volume, as if shady ostensible civil servants and greedy corporate raiders are separated by mere degrees, and his “Haywire” hairstyle is contrasted against his role as the chief executive of government in “The American President” (1995) where he opts for a tamped down but distinguished grey. And that distinguished grey is juxtaposed against his role as America’s drug czar in “Traffic” (2000), tamped down, distinguished, and with a nearly identical part but conspicuously colored, as if the face of the war on drugs has not quite figured out how the war on drugs is not what it really appears to be.

Between “Wonder Boys” (1998) and “King of California” (2007), and with the help, respectively, of hair stylist Joseph Coscia and hair department head Jennifer Bell, utilized key distinctions in scraggly grey haircuts to evince a messy literary professor and then a conspiracy kook.

In “Black Rain” (1989), Douglas plays a requisite on the edge cop named Nick who at one point proclaims, “Sometimes you should forget your head and grab your balls,” which fair enough, except as his hair evinces, he thinks about his head a lot, an intense mullet that renders the part as close as Michael Douglas has ever come to portraying a Michael Mann protagonist. And though his cop, also named Nick, three years later in “Basic Instinct” has got some troubles too, his hair is far more reined in, a means to underline how he lets it down and comes unglued when his character encounters Sharon Stone’s.

With his wig in “One Night at McCool’s” (2001), Douglas was essentially playing Liberace before he played Liberace in 2013’s “Behind the Candelbra,” and if I’d had a Letterboxd account in 2001, not that I have one now, I would have written a review that went something like, the whole movie should have been made in the image of Michael Douglas’s hair. Perhaps that’s a good rule of thumb for any movie; if Michael Douglas starred in this, would it be worthy of his hair?

Like “Romancing the Stone” (1984) and its subsequent sequel “Jewel of the Nile” (1985), not as good as the original save for Douglas’s coif, convincingly playing the cover of a romance novel come to life by ensuring that you could hear his mane of hair roar. It’s funny, as a recent New York Times article by Bob Mehr remembering the late Diane Thomas, who wrote “Romancing the Stone” remembered, Douglas, who also produced, originally wanted Jack Nicholson for the part. But for all his qualities, in that role, Nicholson’s hair would not have been up to snuff. You can almost imagine Douglas saying, “You wish you were a hair actor, Jack.” 

What Movie Will Margot Robbie Make Next?

On the heels of Cinema Romantico quite possibly predicting Tom Cruise breaking into a submerged submarine in the next “Mission: Impossible” movie, this blog’s esteemed powers of prescience are at it again. Longtime and extremely frustrated followers might recall that last spring, to mark the release of “Air,” detailing the birth of the Air Jordan Nike sneaker, we proposed some other products that Hollywood could exploit for entire movies. Bartles & Jaymes Wine Coolers, the Rubik’s Cube, even Monopoly, the boardgame that I think was supposed to be teaching me the basics of finance but that I mostly treated the same as the classroom, a conduit to daydreaming, in this case, imagining the extravagant beauty of places like Marvin Gardens and St. Charles Place, and hey, before I slip into another St. Charles Place daydream right now and forget, did you hear, fresh off her “Barbie” triumph, Margot Robbie’s LuckyChap Entertainment will produce a Monopoly movie. [Searches blog for bugging device.]

Margot Robbie after drinking too much Surge.

What a Monopoly movie might look like, whether it’s a tense game of a family stuck at home during a blizzard that comes to life, a murder mystery on the Reading Railroad, or something that causes Marco Rubio to take out an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal about Marxists, is difficult to determine and undoubtedly dependent on who winds up directing. No, the question of what a Margot Robbie Monopoly movie might look like interests me less than wondering what movie based on which product this blog pitched will Robbie and LuckyChap take on next? 

United Airlines probably needs to put its focus elsewhere these days, and a movie based on the Dominique Wilkins sneaker is probably less likely at this point than one about Caitlin Clark’s forthcoming footwear. No, I think Robbie’s most likely post-“Monopoly” move is a movie about Surge, the ostensible Mountain Dew Killer that was advertised as the soda of the extreme sports crowd, meaning her performance could combine Glenn Howerton in “Blackberry” with Dan Cortese, which could maybe paint economics as nothing more than a version of extreme sports, or vice-versa. I’m picturing an ending where her character is reduced to eating at the Shakey’s Pizza buffet, wistfully noting they still have Surge on tap. 

Road House

A commercial and critical failure upon its theatrical release in 1989, Rowdy Herrington’s “Road House” found a cult audience through cable TV and home video. And though I understand director Doug Liman’s frustration at his “Road House” remake not receiving a run in theaters, I also sort of understand the impulse of its distributor Amazon to send it straight to streaming, the cable TV and home video of our time, as if seeking to maximize its cult potential right up front. If watching at home worked for “Road House” (1989), why wouldn’t it work for “Road House” (2024)? We’ll see how that goes. As of this writing, the audience score for “Road House” (2024) on Rotten Tomatoes is lower than the critics score, though, c’mon, what do those snot-nosed, horn-rimmed glasses and black turtleneck wearing ‘audience’ members know anyway? True, this remake isn’t at the level of the original, or maybe, merely not in the same zone as the original, which in its violent flamboyance became something like the camp version of a movie for guys who like movies. Liman’s model is more akin to a traditional jokey-kinda action movie, and on those terms, it proves generally successful, not least because of the secret weapon that’s staring you right in the face and getting shirtless, what, two, three minutes in – Jake Gyllenhaal.

Like Patrick Swayze before him, Gyllenhaal plays a dude named Dalton, though unlike his predecessor, he’s not a bouncer by trade. He’s a UFC fighter with a UFC-centric secret that has made him so feared people pay not to fight him in the ring. This prompts Frankie (Jessica Williams), who runs a roadhouse called the Road House in the Florida Keys, to hire him to help tame her unruly place. The Road House, though, despite its beachside betting is never as evocative a place as the original’s Double Deuce. No one is likely to teach David Lee Henry and Hilary Henkin’s script for Herrington’s movie in a screenwriting class, but it’s all relative, and I found myself yearning for a similar block by block structure in Anthony Bagarozzi and Charles Mondry’s screenwriting update. The place never stands out, the characters surrounding Dalton never emerge, not so much as fully rounded people as entertaining presences. Dalton’s bar-taming is achieved in nothing less, really, than the space of a montage, demonstrating how this Road House exists mostly as a venue for a rotating cast of musical guests and a stage for Dalton to fight. (The script also does an exceptionally bad job with the crocodile set-up and payoff, which comes way too early and is, oddly, too muted when it does, like it knows this can’t be the real payoff.)

The original “Road House” might have been released in the 80s, but it evoked a western of Hollywood past in so much as Dalton tamed a whole town as much as he cleaned up the club, freeing it from the grasp of grizzled kingpin Brad Wesley (Ben Gazzara). The new “Road House,” then, evokes not so much a western as, well, an 80s movie in so much as its villain is a spoiled brat, Ben Brandt (Billy Magnussen), who wants to build a resort in the Road House’s place which sounds like the plot of an 80s movie. But because Ben is not the kind of guy that can mano-a-mano with Dalton, the script engineers an excuse to bring in a second heavy played by real-life UFC star Conor McGregor. He is playing a character named Knox but really, he is just playing Conor McGregor playing Conor McGregor. His whole performance feels like he took Liman’s notes, threw them out the window, and did whatever he wanted, way too much, in fact, and virtually to the point of distraction, yet paradoxically, simultaneously fitting right in. Dalton might romance a local doctor and make friends with the father and daughter proprietor of a bookshop, but his real reason for being here isn’t so much to save the town as meet Conor McGregor, er, Knox in the ring, so to speak, to become Ultimate Fighting Champion, a showdown with a gleeful undercard on a speedboat that’s like the end of “Patriot Games” on a multi-colored upper, to quote Hunter S. Thompson.

Despite so many monster trucks and polar bears, the original “Road House” was ultimately defined by Patrick Swayze, and not just in the image of his chiseled abs and exultant mullet but in the air of his Zen countenance and his omnipresent smile, the one that seemed to know every character better than they knew themselves. Gyllenhaal has a small smile too, though a countenance that’s less Zen than charismatically blasé. When one of the myriad baddies calls him rage-filled, Gyllenhaal’s response is quietly astonishing, like he’s living an LOL text, so bemused by the insult that he’s actively trying to wrap his head around it. Given that we meet him by way of a suicide attempt, and considering the bloody carnage to come, this Dalton feels a little like Denzel Washington in “Man on Fire,” but in Gyllenhaal’s air, Denzel Washington in “Man on Fire” manifested as a Parrothead, as if telling us to just let go and be carried away by the blood-splattered, limb-snapping breeze. 

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Split (1968)

1968’s “The Split” is a heist movie in which the heist comes to feel perfunctory. It might be elaborate, pulling down a half-mil from the LA Coliseum while an LA Rams game is in progress, but it goes off without a hitch, and is conveyed in such a way by director Gordon Flemyng to accentuate that cool-eyed execution as opposed to ratcheting up suspense. No, the heist is more about happens after, when the money goes missing and the participants suspect the ringleader McClain (Jim Brown) is seeking to keep it all for himself, though even these games of cat and mouse, as well as the climactic shootout, don’t really rise to much. Neither do the interpersonal relationships, as the intriguing nature of McClain’s relationship with his older white partner (Julie Harris) goes unexplored, and his desire to start over with his ex-wife Ellie (Diahann Carroll) comes across like screenwriter motivation than anything real. And yet “The Split” still leaves mark, and not just because Donald Sutherland in an early role leaves one. The “Parker” novel on which it was based, “The Seventh,” was by all accounts, dark and tough, and though the overall tone of the movie never mirrors it, there are these incredible jolts, not exactly of grim reality but reflections of it, rendering a movie that is not quite more than the sum of its parts, per se, but rememberable for the parts that stand out, nevertheless.

Though the specific narrative ingredients of “The Split” do not necessarily concern race, released in the racially tumultuous year of 1968, it is notable just how much Flemying still finds ways to effectively inject race into the proceedings. Indeed, “In the Heat of the Night” had made waves a year earlier for Sidney Poitier’s black detective slapping Rod Steiger’s white southern sheriff and in “The Split,” McClain slaps one of his white colleagues, too, though it is at once much less sobering and much more intense even if it is conveyed in a manner approaching slapstick: in other words, anyone can come get it now. It is surpassed by an earlier moment when McClain seeks to test potential members of his crew by secretly turning the screws on them, like he does by showing up at Bert’s (Ernest Borgnine) place of work and punching him without a word, just to see how he will react. Never mind that Ernest Borgnine could never credibly contend in a fight with Jim Brown and just revel at the raw impact of this moment, Jim Brown, costumed not unlike a Black Panther, socking a white dude straight in the face with nary a warning.

And even if “The Split” fails to render Ellie as true character, setting her up just to sacrifice her life, the manner in which her life is sacrificed still manages to make her matter. Confronted by her jittery white, underline, landlord (James Whitmore), who recognizes McClain as being wanted for the LA Coliseum heist, he first demands money to keep quiet, and then he demands something more. Eventually he stumbles upon a hidden cache of automatic weapons, taking a machine gun and pointing it right at Ellie, the scene ending the way you might assume, a metaphor for racial and sexual violence so wrenching, it virtually stops “The Split” right in its tracks.

Some Drivel On...June 17th, 1994

June 17th, 1994 began with a ticker tape parade for the Stanley Cup-winning New York Rangers hockey team in Manhattan and golf trailblazer Arnold Palmer teeing off for his final round in a U.S. Open at the Oakmont Country Club in Oakmont, Pennsylvania and the day concluded with Game 5 of the NBA Finals between the Houston Rockets and New York Knicks being preempted on TV to instead show celebrity and ex-NFL star Orenthal James Simpson, wanted for the murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, being chased down a Los Angeles freeway in a white Ford Bronco in what became tantamount to a twisted Hollywood version of a New Orleans Funeral. In other words, historic celebrations of athletes gave way to the infamous fall of one. In his astonishing 2010 documentary chronicling that bizarrely jam-packed day, director Brett Morgen eschewed narration and traditional talking heads to instead cultivate it almost exclusively from TV footage, creating the effect of a story told through channel-flipping fragments and sensations. After all, O.J. Simpson, as James Poniewozik essentially reckoned for The New York Times in the wake of the former’s death last week at 76, was as much media personality as man. The World Cup might have kicked off in America, too, on June 17th, 1994, but the hunt for a fugitive Simpson and the subsequent freeway chase managed to supersede the planet’s biggest event, at least for a day, with a vintage American-style spectacle.

For a comprehensive personal, political, social, and cultural examination of Simpson, “June 17th, 1994” is not it. That’s Ezra Edelman’s sensational five-part “O.J.: Made in America” (2016), and if you don’t have time to watch all eight hours then reading Ray Ratto’s evaluation of O.J. for Defector with Joel Anderson’s assessment at Slate as the necessary chaser will do. But that isn’t to say Morgen’s movie is uninterested in or unaware of these ideas. Far from it, he just manifests them in different ways. As an earlier sequence in which “June 17th, 1994” cuts from the elder Arnold Palmer hitting a tee shot at Oakmont to monochrome archival footage of the younger Palmer rocketing a golf ball down the fairway, Morgen tends to see history in eerie echoes and rhymes. During the freeway chase, a cut to archival footage of Simpson in an old Hertz commercial dashing through the airport echoes becomes a macabre joke, holding up these two sides of Simpson at once and then splitting them right down the middle with a figurative axe. Images of people cheering the Ford Bronco alongside the freeway and from overpasses reverberate with footage of the erstwhile football star being cheered on at L.A. Coliseum during a touchdown run in 1969 in USC’s Game of the Century versus UCLA, portending the Trial of the Century. Perhaps Morgen’s most cutting supplement is adding the recordings of an LAPD detective trying to talk down a possibly suicidal Simpson in the back of that Ford Bronco, underlining the grisly nature of the whole ostensible carnival, a man wanted for murder threatening to kill himself to the primetime entertainment of millions, reality and a distorted, disturbing funhouse reflection of reality blending until you can’t tell them apart.

By never zooming out, “June 17th, 1994” takes a Where Were You? moment and puts us right back in the middle of it, but with accumulated knowledge over time to put into perspective what it always was, a twilight drive through this country’s own splintered, media-addled psyche.

Dune: Part Two

“Dune” is set in the year 10191, which is 191 years after the year ten thousand, which is where the Zager and Evans song “In the Year 2525 (Exordium & Terminus)” concludes, a long, long ways out there, in other words, past the point, really, that our feeble 21st Century minds could grasp. It suggests a movie both narratively and visually abstruse, but that isn’t director Denis Villeneuve’s method, and so just like its Part One predecessor, “Dune: Part Two” is not looking forward but back. Whatever Frank Herbert’s original intentions with his 1965 sci fi source material (friendly reminder: I haven’t read it), Villeneuve and his co-writer Jon Spaights are honoring old fashioned Hollywood storytelling by bringing vengeance and destiny up in the mix, crossing “Gladiator” with a more dystopian version of “Roman Holiday.” And even if this 166-minute behemoth does not so much run out of steam about midway through as get bogged down via a filmmaker who has publicly gone on record as not giving a flip about dialogue suddenly becoming overly dependent on it, a paradox weirdly proving his ostensible point, it also does not entirely matter. When “Dune: Part Two” fully engages with its own sense of spectacle, the sandworm will definitely turn for you, my friend.

When last we left Paul (Timothée Chalamet), last duke of the House Altreides, his father (Oscar Isaac) had been slain by order of the evil Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgård) and Paul and his mother Jessica (Rebecca Fergusion) were holed up on the unforgiving desert planet of Arrakis with its rugged inhabitants the Fremen, some believing Paul to be their deliverer. Stilgar (Javier Bardem), leader of the Fremen thinks he is, though others, like young Fremen warrior Chani (Zendaya) are not so sure. Paul isn’t so sure, either, struggling to wrap his youthful mind around such a far-reaching destiny, having ominous visions as “Part Two” begins of a coming holy war. Heavy lies the crown, and all that. Yet, if heavy tends to be Villeneuve’s preferred tone, “Part Two” surprises for frequently being so light on its feet. Aesthetically, Villeneuve toggles between intimacy and enormity, never letting the scale overwhelm his sense of visual clarity and space, and in a sense, his storyline, at least at first, follows suit. 

Chalamet might come cloaked in the visage of a teenage heartthrob, but he also imbues his performance with the uneasy sense of being the new kid at school. The sequence in which he rides a mammoth sandworm through the desert, a feat of special effects intimating what it might be like to ride a wave at Bells Beach during a 50 Year Storm, might be evidence of the prophecy, but Chalamet gives it the air of a kid proving his self-worth, if not also seeking to impress the girl he likes. That’s Chani, of course, and though Villeneuve can lay the puppy dog love on thick, I’m also not made of stone, and one of the dialogue-centric scenes that works best is the two crazy kids having an intimate conversation alone amid the dunes because Chalamet seems to be pulling Zendaya toward him with his eyes. The scene in which the two of them arrhythmically walk side-by-side through the sand so as not to disturb those pesky worms lasts longer than the general 2.5 second edits honored by most modern movies but I found myself wishing Villeneuve would have held it even longer.

Percolating alongside our (possible) messiah’s road of trials are Baron Harkonnen’s ongoing attempts to harvest the spice of Arrakis and rid the planet of its Fremen. If Skarsgård is once again improbably cosplaying Pizza the Hutt then in reprising his role as Harkonnen’s villainous nephew, Dave Bautista has gone from cosplaying Darth Vader to cosplaying Dark Helmet, yelling, stomping comic relief. No, the emergent “Part Two” antagonist is Harkonnen’s other nephew Feyd-Rautha, played by Austin Butler in makeup making the erstwhile Elvis Presley look like Midnight Oil frontman Peter Garrett as a bloodsucking vampire, a sneering murderous psychopath speaking in a malevolent whisper. He receives a helluva introduction, demonstrating his skill in a gladiatorial arena as the warm colors of the desert give way to so much Brutalism in brutal black and white, as if Leni Riefenstahl’s “Olympia” has been reduced purely to its most primitive urges. As soon as you see this sequence, you know where it’s heading, to a duel between our (maybe) messiah and our mercenary. That, however, is when this “Dune” gets stuck in the mud.

If Villeneuve and his editor Joe Walker hardly crosscut at all for the first half, as “Dune: Part Two” moves into its back half, the scenes switch between the good guys and the bad guys and Jessica, too, who takes a worm ride to the south of Arrakis to peddle her son’s prophecy, transforming a movie of sensation and spectacle into one all about moving the plot forward even as it assumes the air of running in place, epitomized both in huge chunks of expository dialogue and in the character of Feyd-Rautha, who after that electrifying introduction is just sort of reduced to figuratively tossing cards into a hat, waiting to go mano-a-mano with Paul. And if Villeneuve proves too literal minded for the more fantastical elements that gradually infuse the plot, like Jessica sipping the so-called Water of Life, he simultaneously proves too evasive to do much with all the political and religious subtext, none of which amounts to much more, really, than whatever the masses watching choose to project onto it.

All that might not even have mattered so much had the movie stuck the landing, but where Chalamet’s youthful air works to his advantage early, it hampers his turn in the back half, as he winds up coming across more reluctantly committed to his fate than twisting into the kind of believer of his own hype the plot would otherwise suggest. And if Chani is meant as the counterweight to Paul’s turn, Villeneuve hangs Zendaya out to dry by mostly just communicating it through unimaginative reaction shots that cruelly leave her looking passive and winsome. The ultimate showdown, meanwhile, between Paul and Feyd-Rautha as well as the emergent cliffhanger pointing toward Part 3 all move with a clinical stateliness that is impressive logically though, unlike the best moments, you never quite feel in your bones. 

Friday's Old Fashioned: Kill Me Again (1989)

Time is fickle. When I first saw John Dahl’s “Kill Me Again” (1989) sometime in the mid-90s, probably rented from Hollywood Video, my knowledge of noir would have been scant, if not entirely non-existent. So, maybe it’s no wonder that I remembered loving it, having nothing, really, to compare it to, or having no real sense of how it drew from myriad predecessors. Seeing it again years later, after feasting on American noir for decades, it’s difficult to not see it for what it really is, or mostly is, anyway. Like Fay Forrester (Joanne Whalley) standing in the entryway of a semi-hapless private eye’s office as the camera ogles her by tilting up, “Kill Me Again” is striking a pose. 

Conveyed as an escalating series of double crosses, Fay and her psycho boyfriend Vince (Michael Madsen) rob a pair of mobsters of a briefcase full of money before Fay robs Vince and then hires cash-strapped Reno private detective Jack Andrews (Val Kilmer) to help stage her death. But after ‘dying,’ she absconds with half the money she owes Jack, making it two lovelorn dudes trying to track down Fay to get what they are owed. (Don’t rewrite in a review, yada yada, so it’s in a parenthetical, but I couldn’t help imagining an alternate movie in the vein of “There’s Something About Mary” in which Jack and Vince team up to go after Fay, and then maybe end up in the company of, say, Jonathan Silverman as, say, Paul, a third guy who gets duped by Fay and joins the team.) And this is to say nothing of the hoodlums seeking to collect $10,000 from Jack in gambling debts. 

The plot might be convoluted, and the characters might get the short end of the stick, but Dahl at least connects the myriad dots with some stylish kick, like an early cut from Jack looking at a broken photo of his wife to Fay peering through the broken window of his office. And in these weird days when a Tubi stream becomes more picturesque than digital film on a big screen, the way the late afternoon light reflected off the red rocks falls on Kilmer and Whalley’s face on Lake Mead makes it look like an old noir poster come to life. But then, this is the hottest moment, really, in a movie that never quite takes full advantage of just how hot Kilmer and then-Whalley-Kilmer were together. There’s a lot of talk these days about how movies used to be hotter, and broadly speaking, that’s true, but boy, even back then, they never fully took advantage of this couple comet blazing across the sky.

The character of Jack Andrews melds two noir archetypes into one, the private investigator and the sap, and Kilmer really leans into the latter, making him overly polite, too nice, just an absolute sucker. Its strangely effective, playing against the public persona he would have possessed in 1989 even as he occasionally evokes nothing less than his Nick Rivers character of the spoof “Top Secret!,” like when the moment when Jack phones for his bank balance (!) and pitifully realizes it’s $7.89, not $789, by forlornly adding the decimal point on a piece of paper. When Jack keeps getting roped in by Fay, you can’t help but want to pat this loser on the head, even as Kilmer’s convincing sheepishness cuts against the romance, not to mention his character’s ostensible gambling addiction and anguish over his wife’s death.

Whalley, meanwhile, winds up just as hampered by the twists and turns of the screenplay as the movie itself. There are so many double crosses, that we don’t so much come to wonder if she is who she says she is as we gradually discover we have no real idea of she is in the first place; she’s not a person, just a function of the plot. All those twists and turns, which come fast and furious as “Kill Me Again” wraps up, have the odd effect of working so hard to make it seem like you never know what’s coming that instead everything winds up being paradoxically obvious while the craft in engineering a climactic title drop – “Kill me, kill me again” – is admirable even if it can’t help but fall flat. 

The Bricklayer

“This type of scandal could destroy the U.S.!” This is the resplendent line of exposition some nameless journalist exclaims as Renny Harlin’s “The Bricklayer” begins, suggesting not just a rollicking good time but a modern conspiracy thriller in so much as the scheme to which the nameless journalist refers involves many of her own being killed in such a way to make it appear as if the CIA is responsible. Alas, neither really proves true. The tantalizing angle of present-day palace intrigue proves merely an engine for the plot, never explored in an interesting, forget about meaningful, way, and though in playing the eponymous Bricklayer, Steve Vail, a one-time Central Intelligence go-between for the Greek and Russian mafia, Aaron Eckhart wears a perpetual smirk, what ensues isn’t much fun. When Vail literally drives through a brick wall during a car chase, “The Bricklayer” doesn’t recognize the irony, allowing the punchline to sail right over its own head. No, Harlin’s movie is as by the book as Vail’s CIA babysitter Kate Bannon (Nina Dobrev) as evinced in how the director dutifully though unexcitedly lays every action movie brick, moving from a rooftop in the rain to a neon club to a dark apartment to a café. The fight in the neon club left less of a mark, in fact, than the song that played during it. By Victoria Celestine. I looked it up after. It’s good. I’ve been enjoying it. 

American Star

Even before Wilson (Ian McShane) removes a gun and dossier from the trunk of his rental car, you know he’s an assassin the minute he shows up in the subtropical Fuerteventura of the Canary Islands all alone and wearing all black. That might immediately mark “American Star” as something familiar, and worn, a lone wolf hitman in a beautiful place. It’s not so much that director Gonzalo López-Gallego, working from a script by Nacho Faerna, reinvents or even reimagines the hoary tale as it is he strips it down to virtually nothing and then builds it out of the essence of its main character, or more accurately, its lead actor. Though the screenplay withholds information about Wilson’s background, offering little teases, about fighting in the Falklands and such, it’s never trying to solve the mystery, exactly, so much as luxuriate in this enigmatic man’s presence much as he luxuriates in Fuerteventura’s. And who better to spend a whole movie luxuriating than Ian McShane. Imagine “John Wick,” except rather than following the eponymous hitman as he goes about the Continental Hotel offing various bad guys, you stayed in the secure room with Winston as he sat on the sofa and drank bourbon.

Upon arriving in the Canary Islands, Wilson proceeds straight away to a lavish home in the middle of nowhere, though the way he takes care not to leave fingerprints denotes it’s not a rental. He’s there to deliver a package, in a manner of speaking, by rubbing someone out, but that someone isn’t there and someone else shows up instead, prompting him to leave and wait until the target returns. The camera’s fluidity in this sequence, elegantly dipping and darting down halls, forward and to the side, evokes the movie to come, and how sometimes the camera represents Wilson’s point-of-view, in complete control, and others, departs from his point-of-view, a mind of its own, eliciting surprise, the two sides of Wilson’s faux getaway. And that’s sort of how “American Star” proceeds, as a faux getaway, improbably merging George Clooney of “The American” with Margo Martindale of “Paris Je T’aime.” He makes unexpected friends with a young boy named Max (Oscar Coleman), searching for a haven from his arguing parents, and Gloria (Nora Arnezeder), the woman he glimpses inside the home at the start and then runs into at a bar. She takes him to see the American Star, the luxury ship from the 1940s that wrecked near the shore in 1994. 

If it sounds dubious that the younger Nora might take an interest in the older, weirder Wilson, this is smoothed out by McShane’s presence, as courtly as it is mysterious, which makes us drawn to him just as it makes her drawn to him. Yet, the reasons for their relationship deepen as the story progresses, and in ways that that I won’t reveal, but that do not evade the age difference but essentially build off it. And though Wilson’s friendship with Max strains credulity a bit more, there is nevertheless something refreshingly startling is his advice to the boy that honesty is not always the best policy, an observation that equally informs his fatalistic relationship with Nora. That fatalism manifests itself as it tends to in noir through a burst of gruesome violence as sudden as it is expected, as if nothing can really ready you for the end. And that’s what makes the otherwise obvious metaphor of the American Star work too. McShane might play his character’s own mortality with a sense of grave dignity, like a man walking unperturbed into the ocean to drown, but upon standing in front of the shipwreck, moving him to remark that he and the American Star, they’re about the same age, I swear, those 26,454 tons feel like they all land right on top of you. 

Friday's Old Fashioned: Diary of a Young Comic (1979)

In appraising Richard Lewis in the wake of his death for The New York Times, Jason Zinoman noted the celebrated comic’s “frenetic, jazzy style…making misery a full-body experience, slumping, pacing, and most of all, gesticulating. To say he talked with his hands seems insufficient. His whole body never shut up.” That makes it interesting, it not also disappointing, to revisit Lewis’s first feature film “Diary of a Young Comic” 45 years later. Because what Zinoman is writing about there, the very specific presence of Lewis, aside from a few isolated moments, like an early one in which Lewis’s character ribs and riffs with another comedian at a bar, is not really found in director Gary Weis’s movie. No, the script that Lewis and Weis co-wrote with Bennett Tramer weirdly zaps Lewis’s character, comedian Billy Gondola née Gondolstein, of the comic’s patented energy by turning him into an observer more than an instigator and opting for an overall laid-back vibe mirroring the character’s geographical trajectory from New York to Los Angeles. 

Essentially, “Diary of a Young Comic” is the Left Coast scenes of “Annie Hall” mixed with Steve Martin’s “L.A. Story,” meaning that rather than looking inward, as Lewis’s comedy on the stage tended to do, it was taking in the absurdity of the world around him and its virtual conveyor belt of eccentrics. When Billy arrives at the residence of the cousin, Shirley, with whom he’s going to stay, he discovers she has literally nothing in her apartment. “It’s the essence of the apartment,” she says. When Billy goes to therapy, it doesn’t unlock anything within himself, it just builds to a pretty good Flipper joke. He is not really a full-fledged character just as Shirley and the therapist never really become full-fledged characters, just as no one else does, more like characters as excuses to shuffle comics and comic actors on screen. Sometimes, the pretense dissolves completely, like when Dom DeLuise appears as himself. 

It’s all as funny as it would have needed to be, I imagine, given the movie was made-for-TV and was specifically made to occupy the time slot of Saturday Night Live when that venerable sketch show went on hiatus in February of 1975. On that score, and in a three-channel universe, I don’t think “Diary of a Young Comic” would have made me change the channel. And even if it’s short on revelation, it ends with Billy telling jokes onstage, as if somewhere in the middle of filming Lewis really did realize that was the best vessel for his material. 

Critical Acumen Lies Bleeding

Last Friday I went to see Rose Glass’s neo-noir “Love Lies Bleeding” at Chicago’s Landmark Theatre, the Century Centre Cinema, in the mall that time forgot, on North Clark. Early in the movie, Kristen Stewart’s character Lou is trying to reverse psych herself into quitting cigarettes by listening to a self-help cassette tape (the movie is set in 1989) warning of the ways in which society brainwashes you into smoking in the first place. I found it interesting, this talk of brainwashing, given how “Love Lies Bleeding” starts…at least, how “Love Lies Bleeding” starts at a Landmark Theatre. That is to say, “Love Lies Bleeding” at a Landmark Theatre does not begin with, like, you know, the movie itself, but with a pre-movie introduction. An exclusive intro is how the Century Centre Cinema’s web site bills it, though this intro is not really a formal presentation of the movie to come so much as an advertisement for it, or maybe more accurately, an endorsement of it. I’m reminded of the public speaking adage, to begin by telling ‘em what you’re gonna tell ‘em, except in this case, Landmark Theatres is telling us what to think about what it shows us before it shows us.

Loyal and extreme frustrated followers might recall that last August I was semi-horrified to discover the existence of MovieTok, a subset of TikTok, the online short video hosting platform that Congress is currently trying to ban in lieu of doing anything for the true greater good, in which people reviewed, not critiqued, underline, movies. Indeed, these MovieTok reviewers are “not,” as Reggie Ugwu noted in a New York Times profile of them, “critics in the traditional sense.” Rather, “their upbeat videos,” Ugwu wrote, “earn them contracts with Hollywood studios.” And though Ugwu deemed them a “new breed,” they were only new compared to, say, Siskel & Ebert, who might have worked under the umbrella of Disney for a decade-plus but nevertheless had it stipulated in their contract that they remained free to critique, underline, any Disney production in any manner they saw fit. No, MovieTok is just a modern version of the public relation hacks that studios employed during the Golden Age to give them good copy, no matter what, to, yes, advertise and endorse their product. And lo and behold, just when I thought “Love Lies Bleeding” was about to start, here was the very same Millennial PR hack I had name-checked in my post stumping for the movie I was about to see. Reader, I was livid. 

In general, I don’t care for a pre-movie intro. I’ll make an allowance for the introductions of Ben Mankiewicz, and Robert Osborne before him, on Turner Classic Movies because, as the cable channel’s name implies, these are movies shown in a historical context, their artistic judgements long since rendered. But I don’t like Tom Cruise thanking for me coming to the theater before pitching his latest tentpole, and I really don’t like how ESPN’s 30 for 30 documentaries always begin with the director telling me what the movie we are about to see is about: if you do your job, the movie will tell me what your movie is about. At least, though, they are not telling me that the movie I’m about to see is brilliant – a word my MovieTok adversary used, though in the form of an adverb, as I recall from memory – and destined to be remembered as among the great second feature films of famous directors. What I ultimately thought of “Love Lies Bleeding” is neither here nor there in this context, and in a sense, that’s what Landmark Theatres and my MovieTok adversary were trying to tell me too. It was not even subliminal, this message, it was right to my face; it was the subtext, to paraphrase “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” rapidly becoming text.

When you go see a movie at Landmark, apparently, you no longer even have to decide for yourself whether or not it’s good – more specifically, whether or not you thought it was good. No, they’ll do that for you, and right at the beginning, saving you all that pesky intellectual work, a truly ominous development in the Art v Content War in which the latter continues to win. Indeed, I look forward to the day when you buy your $15 ticket, the Landmark Theatre Exclusive Intro tells you what to think of the movie you bought a ticket to see, and because they do, you don’t even have to stay for the movie. They don’t even show the movie! You just walk back outside after a few minutes, write a five-star review on Letterboxd, and go right back to scrolling.

Fast Charlie

“Fast Charlie” is a movie that begins with the ending. Its eponymous mob fixer Charlie Swift (Pierce Brosnan) is standing in his underwear and an undershirt, surrounded by men with guns, and though he doesn’t literally say in voiceover, “You’re probably wondering how I get here,” what he does say is a variation of that colloquial line, nevertheless. And so, Phillip Noyce’s ninety-minute thriller, based on a novel by Victor Gischler, flashes back to show us how Charlie Swift got here. It’s less what Charlie is saying in this moment that sets up the movie to come, however, than how he looks. After all, this is not the first time we have seen Brosnan on screen in his skivvies; he sported nothing but underwear and cowboy boots in “The Matador,” though in that scene he evinced an irreverent swagger. At the start of “Charlie Swift,” the swagger is long gone. Brosnan even lets Noyce frame him so that you can distinctly see his paunch; he’s letting it all hang out, in a different kind of way, not unlike Harrison Ford at the beginning of the recent “Dial of Destiny,” making his age the point. Indeed, Charlie is dreaming of retiring from Biloxi to an Italian villa, and whether or not Brosnan’s Magnolia accent is believable (I’m unqualified to say), its insouciance elicits the sensation of how our man Swift is slowing down. 

As the movie opens, Fast Charlie has been dispatched along with a kid calling himself Blade (Brennan Keel Cook) to knock off a nefarious dude named Rollo at the behest of their boss Stan Mullen (James Caan). Evoking the age divide straight away, Charlie would rather take care of the dirty business himself but has orders to see what the kid can do, and rather than simply shoot their target, the kid chooses to impart some unnecessary theatricality by blowing him up. That, however, leaves Rollo without a face and difficult to officially ID, necessitating their tracking down Rollo’s ex Marcie (Morena Baccarin) so she can confirm that, yes, their dead meat is who they think he is. You might not be surprised to learn that Charlie and Marcie will fall in love, but you gotta give “Charlie Swift” credit, this is a helluva of a way to engineer a Meet Cute. And despite the quarter-century age difference, Brosnan and Baccarin’s chemistry works specifically because neither of them is trying too hard, each playing a wearied soul searching for an off ramp. His is the villa, hers is taxidermy, which sounds absurd on its face, but I appreciated how it turned the metaphor, a pair of aging people not yet ready to be stuffed.

Rollo’s death is what triggers a showdown between Stan and his younger rival Beggar (Gbenga Akinnagbe), transforming Charlie Swift into something akin to the last man standing. This turf war, though, is much too obligatory, evoked in the character of Beggar, barely a character at all, just a moving impediment. Even so, as this conflict takes shape, the manner in which Stan, beset by Alzheimer’s, holds court while slipping in and out of a mental fog, tempers all the macho hijinks in the best way. This was Caan’s final role, released posthumously after he died in 2022, and given that his character’s days are numbered, it provides an extra level of poignancy inextricable from real life, a la Val Kilmer in “Top Gun: Maverick.”

In some ways, “Fast Charlie” undermines its own sense of mortality in the action scenes by treating 2023 Pierce Brosnan like 1995 Pierce Brosnan. It works better when Noyce emphasizes Charlie’s caginess and wit, like a fateful car ride where recurring close-ups of the fixer’s eyes betray his cooly sizing up the situation, waiting for the right moment to strike. And though the screenplay traffics in clichés typical of the genre, it doesn’t so much find a way to circumvent them as evocatively reimagine them. When our fixer is forced to surgically extract a bullet, an amateur surgery performed by innumerable movie characters over the years, “Fast Charlie” fuses this thriller maxim with another one, namely, the fixer discussing his dream of escaping to an Italian villa, an adroit, affecting manifestation of nothing less than Being Too Old for This Shit.