In-Advance Analysis of the Twisters Soundtrack

The summer of Glen Powell rolls on. It’s almost July, meaning we are about to flip the calendar from “Hit Man,” starring Glen Powell, to “Twisters,” starring Glen Powell. The former was a success, and the latter also seems all set for success if the rowdy, gloriously goofy trailer is to be believed. I still can’t believe that “Twisters” might well, in fact, be believed but, man, here we are. I think it’s the moment when the Daisy Edgar-Jones character says “I don’t chase anymore” that makes me believe. I’ll judge it when I see it, of course, but boy, a line like that gives me hope that “Twisters” knows what it’s doing, that it gets it. But here’s what I worry “Twisters” doesn’t get – the soundtrack.

The original “Twister” soundtrack, as we have written before, epitomized the fun-loving 90s proclivity of soundtracks as grab bags, a little country and a little rock ‘n’ roll but a little alternative and a little pop and even a little New Age too. The “Twisters” soundtrack, on the other hand, appears not to be a little bit of country so much as just country. I mean, ok, fine, but you’re telling me the Daisy Edgar-Jones character doesn’t listen to Taylor Swift? Or maybe somebody else on the Billboard Hot 100 that we could have more easily convinced to record a song for “Twisters?” Chappell Roan, maybe, pride of Willard in southwest Missouri, not far from the Tornado Alley border? I’ll bet she understands the terrifying power of a rotating column of air.

More than that, if the marketing department insists the “Twisters” soundtrack must be exclusively country, I’m disappointed once again by the lack of Johnny Cash considering everyone describes a tornado as sounding like a train and because of those famous alternating bass notes, every Johnny Cash song is “steady,” to quote June Carter of “Walk the Line,” “like a train.” And if they don’t sound like a train in the manner of a cyclone, necessarily, then, I don’t know, man, how about you call up Sheer Mag and pay ‘em to write a song that does.

Nothing, though, makes me more upset than the presence of a Luke Combs song in the movie trailer. Should Luke Combs have a place in “Twisters?” Maybe. I’m open to it. But. What does the Glen Powell character say in that same trailer? “Sometimes the old ways are better than the new.” And you’re telling me that guy listens to Luke Combs? Not a chance. My guy is a hard country neo traditionalist, 100%. If I was curating the soundtrack, he’d be pointed straight toward the titular twisters with George Strait on full blast. 

In Memoriam: Donald Sutherland

Donald Sutherland was too recognizable to be a That Guy. You can’t have starred in “M*A*S*H” and “The Hunger Games” with all manner of memorable movies in-between and be considered a That Guy. A Canadian, he helped carry the Olympic flag at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver; the world knew Donald Sutherland. And yet, he had an air reminiscent of a That Guy, nonetheless. Maybe it’s that he was never nominated for an Academy Award, an absurdity, only receiving a Lifetime Achievement Oscar in 2017 at age 82. Maybe it’s because despite his distinct bearing, the lanky 6’4” frame, long face, expressive eyes, and unmistakable baritone, he was also a chameleon. Maybe it’s because as he got older and received fewer leading roles, he still never stopped working, and ever the consummate professional, picked up so many paychecks with an idiosyncratic pulse. Sutherland, in fact, worked so hard for so long that I have never known a movie world without him. Until now, that is, because Donald Sutherland died on Thursday June 20, 2024, at the age of 88.

Demonstrating practicality and passion in equal measure, Sutherland majored in both engineering and drama at the University of Toronto, though the latter eventually won out, graduating and going to the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art before dropping out and deciding to learn by doing. He cut his teeth on the stage, and then in television, and then found his way to Hollywood. As chance would have it, I watched one of his first credited roles in 1968’s heist movie “The Split” for the first time this year. Though it was meant to showcase Jim Brown, he was upstaged by Sutherland’s quietly charismatic menace. “Although his role is not major,” wrote Renata Adler in her New York Times review, “Donald Sutherland is remarkable.” He stood out, too, in “The Dirty Dozen,” despite playing, in his own amusing words, “one of the bottom six.” That role led to his breakthrough in Robert Altman’s Oscar-winning black comedy “M*A*S*H” at the dawn of the 70s. If it foreshadowed his many counterculture roles, like “Animal House” and the weird, half-awful, half-awesome “Steelyard Blues,” Sutherland proved versatile, equally at home in thrillers like “Klute,” in horror like “Don’t Look Now,” and in traditional drama like “Ordinary People.”

Sutherland could steal a scene, as he did in “Space Cowboys” as one of four geriatric astronauts alongside Clint Eastwood, Tommy Lee Jones, and James Garner. In a scene on Jay Leno’s Tonight Show, their hierarchy is established with how they are seated, but if Sutherland gets third chair, in his bawdy yet twinkly countenance, he emerges as first banana. He could steal a whole movie as he did with Oliver Stone’s “JFK” playing the mystery man X enlisted to deliver one epic mid-movie monologue. Sutherland had a gift for infusing his eyes, his whole face, really, with this sly good humor suggesting someone sitting on a secret he was weighing whether or not to share and this gift never manifested more than as X, spinning a conspiracy theory as campfire story. But he wasn’t just a scene stealer. In “Klute,” his square detective’s eyes are captivated by Jane Fonda’s call girl in every shot but in a way that always seems to refract the focus back on her. He did the same years later in “Pride & Prejudice” but with a paternal bent when his Mr. Benet consents for his daughter Elizabeth (Keira Knightley) to be married. Fonda won her first Oscar for that role, and Knightley received her first Oscar nomination for hers, and I like thinking of Sutherland as their Tenzing Norgay.

Sutherland’s catalogue was so extensive and varied that I really think you could ask ten different people for their favorite Sutherland performance and get ten different answers. I’ve always retained a special fondness for his turn in Robert Towne’s “Without Limits” (1998) as Bill Bowerman, the titanic Oregon track and field coach (and Nike co-founder). It’s a biopic of the running prodigy of Steve Prefontaine (Billy Crudup), and though there are numerous characters, it’s spiritually a two-hander between coach and athlete. Sutherland plays Bowerman as a gently commanding old oak and Crudup plays Prefontaine as a cocky little shit and set as it is at the end of the 60s going into the 70s, there is an undercurrent of change, or attempts at change, made plain in their constant sparring. Coach tends to always know best in movies like these, but here coach’s council lets his charge down when Prefontaine loses at the Munich Olympics. Their hashing out that race is the movie’s best scene.

“If I’d gone out faster, I might not have gotten boxed.” 

“And you blame me?” 

“Do you blame yourself? 

“That’s a constant, Pre.”

And when Sutherland says that line, he chuckles, he smiles, he infuses it with this bemused weariness of a thousand condemnations pointed right back at himself. Indeed, then Sutherland does the most incredible thing – before saying his next line, he looks away and to his right...

Well, you can see it all in there, can’t you? You can see him going over every defeat, embarrassment, failure, loss, and regret and what’s more you can see him blaming himself for all of it all over again. It’s the vision of a whole life summoned in a split-second.

Hit Man

The comedian Chris Rock once joked that “When you meet somebody for the first time, you’re not meeting them, you’re meeting their representative,” a keen observation that Richard Linklater’s new movie “Hit Man” manifests not just to a degree but in a way I never would have thought possible. In adapting Skip Hollandsworth’s Texas Monthly profile of Gary Johnson, a fake contract killer, Linklater has improbably uncovered the perfect vehicle to explore the tenuous nature of love and relationships, the difficulty in truly understanding another person, to paraphrase a character from a different Richard Linklater movie, the struggle not simply to know another person but know one’s own self. Material, in other words, that would have seemed designed to elicit an action-thriller, or even a drama, instead becomes a subversive romantic comedy. 

Based very loosely on the real story, Glen Powell stars as Gary Johnson, a psychology professor in New Orleans who moonlights parttime for the city’s police department as one of the nondescript guys in the van during sting operations meant to nab people looking to hire a hit man. When the op’s lead undercover detective Jasper (Austin Amelio) is suspended, Gary is suddenly thrust into the role, coached up by Jasper in the front seat of a car in which the two men are deliberately costumed to appear as opposites, like the disparate halves of a movie poster showing the hero and his geeky sidekick. Speedwalking to a clandestine meeting with a man seeking a hit on his wife, trying to psyche himself up, you wonder how Gary can play the part, yet in the next cut, he is. One second, he’s Gary, the next he’s a Hit Man. Rather than see him metamorphose by removing his Dwight Schrute glasses like Clark Kent removing his black horn rims, it has already happened, as if it has always lurked inside. In a key conversation with his ex-wife (Molly Bernard), we learn of Gary’s struggle to open up, and his undercover success stemming from becoming just what the other person needs him to be suggests a delightful, disturbing funhouse version of that MIA emotional availability. 

Aided by his psychology background, Gary proves a natural master of disguise as we see him ensnaring a variety of clients through an assortment of costumes, wigs, even accents, each one deftly played by Powell. It is remarkable how effortlessly he shapeshifts, never evincing wild swings of persona, a la Val Kilmer in “The Saint,” but grounding them in a subtle realism while he simultaneously, almost without us, the audience, noticing, allows Gary to quietly slip away, bit by bit. That transition begins in earnest when he meets Madison Masters (Adria Arjona) by pretending to be a man named Ron she has hired to kill her abusive husband. Ron is dressed like a heartthrob, carries himself like a heartthrob, and essentially becomes one when he tells Madison to walk away and use her money to buy a new life. She does, but that new life also involves a relationship with Ron, and that relationship comes under scrutiny both when Jasper discovers it and Madison’s husband winds up dead. 

Few filmmakers excel at the art of conversation quite like Linklater. Putting Gary, er, Ron and Madison in a diner booth for their first encounter, it’s mostly shot-reverse shots crackling with a giddy tension as they feel one another out while for their follow-up meeting, a walk and talk in the park, the camera drifts along with the two characters as they stay in the same frame, almost imperceptibly fluttering back and forth even as it drifts closer to them, underscoring with each movement how they move toward one another and then ever so slightly away so they can you practically feel the spark between them. It’s as hot, really, as the hot scenes to follow. And yet, for all the resplendent carnal knowledge, each moment is infused with dislocation and tension. 

Madison never becomes as deep a character as Gary, though this is by design, withholding so that we only know her as well as he does and always wonder what she might truly be capable of, adding a second layer unknowability to a relationship based on a lie. Gary admits this in his recurring voiceovers that Powell shrewdly always recites in his Gary voice rather than his Ron voice, not so much evincing a split personality as a person aware he is playing a role. And that is the emergent nature of their relationship, taking the idea of role-playing to a whole other level, brought home in an electrifying sequence in which the two are forced to playact to save their skins. The excitement in their airs is palpable, as palpable as it is in the actors, and in moment like this, burying yourself in the part opens up into something three-dimensional, moviemaking, lovemaking, all an earnest put-on that is hard to resist. 

It should be noted that “Hit Man” was distributed by Netflix and if you watch it at home, as I did, it comes coated in the streaming giant’s patented low-rent sheen. I can’t say whether it’s like that on the big screen, but either way, it’s a possible portent of our streaming future where even good movies look like TV. Furthermore, while Powell convinces as a college professor, the classroom scenes themselves are not necessarily always convincing, a little too neat in the way the dialogue mirrors and underlines Gary’s conundrum, the possibility of leaving an old self behind to create a new one. That neatness extends to conclusion, in which all the plot threads converge is what a tantamount to a tidy bow, surprising for a movie so wily. Even then, though, in the image of a requisite happy ending, a delectable sleight of hand emerges, calling back to Linklater’s other great romantic movies, the Before Trilogy, namely, the third one. “Before Midnight” concluded on a deliberately false note of make-believe, and in its way, “Hit Man” quotes that ending by blowing it up into something even more ironically revealing.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Pretty Poison (1968)

When Anthony Perkins starred in “Pretty Poison” in 1968, he had not been an American movie since “Psycho” in 1960. A lot had happened in his native country in the intervening time, culminating in the pivotal year of “Pretty Poison’s” release, 12 months as rife with turmoil as with change. None of that turmoil and change is expressly addressed in Noel Black’s cinematic adaptation of Stephen Geller’s novel, either in dialogue or the plot, but it is felt, nevertheless, in the stifling setting of a generic Small Town U.S.A. from the moments we first hear the strains of Sousa over the opening credits. It is almost as if something might be in the water. That’s what Dennis Pitt (Anthony Perkins) thinks anyway, fresh from a mental institution where he was put as a teenager after burning down a house and now working at a chemical plant where in a distorted Mittyesque daydream he comes to believe that poison is being pumped into the town’s river and that the CIA has enlisted him to the crack the case, triggering a blackly comic thriller with a mid-movie switcheroo that isn’t the same sort of about-face as “Psycho,” necessarily, but no less jaw-dropping.

How much Dennis believes in his own faux government quest remains in question. When he is released from the mental institution, he references his forthcoming job at the factory but then notes he puts to use a course he has been taking in interplanetary navigation. The tone in Perkins’s voice at this moment is curious, suggesting he could be out to lunch, or that he could just be having some fun, or that it could well be both. Indeed, he plays the part with a childish malevolence reminiscent of his famous turn as Norman Crane mixed with Charles Grodin’s mischievous glee at impersonating a secret agent in “Midnight Run.” Something is off, you know it is, but you can’t quite bring yourself to take him entirely seriously. Evoking the character’s puerility, Dennis begins dating teenage drum major Sue Ann (Tuesday Weld), living with a critical mother (Beverly Garland, dripping acid) and in a home festooned with wallpaper masking the depths of anger and exasperation lurking within inside. Dennis recruits her for his ostensible CIA missions, and though Weld’s turn initially suggests Sue Ann as a bored teenager eager to play along, when the plant’s night watchman winds up dead, the true meaning of pretty poison becomes clear.

If up until this point Dennis has been authoring their story, so to speak, now Sue Ann takes control, plotting an escape to Mexico as the authorities close in and as Dennis does his best to cover up the crime. “It’s “a very real and very tough world,” he is cautioned upon leaving the mental institution, and in the movie’s back half, Perkins lets that reality in. Not in a terrified or frenzied way, but like a kid who’s made a mess of the house with his parents out of town and is now waiting for them to come home and see what happened. If Perkins changes his air, Weld does not, and neither does the movie around her, maintaining the same tone yet unmasking Sue Ann’s own mental illness merely by recontextualizing the circumstances around her. In the aftermath of the movie’s darkest moment, Sue Ann collapses on her bed, laughing to herself, the eventual flipped perspective of the camera epitomizing a teenage reverie turned upside down.

Vintage Ebert Reviews

This is another installment in our non-existent series Vintage Roger Ebert Reviews.

Matt Singer concluded the acknowledgement section of his 2023 Siskel and Ebert book “Opposable Thumbs” by thanking his wife Melissa: “I hope it was worth all those nights,” he wrote, “I ditched you to watch Gene and Roger debate the merits of ‘Speed 2: Cruise Control.’” He added a parenthetical: “I still can’t believe they gave that one two thumbs up.” Indeed, when Singer appeared on the so-called flagship film podcast Filmspotting to promote the release of his book, he submitted a Top 5 list of movies Siskel and Ebert got wrong, and “Speed 2” was his runner-up. It’s not that Singer is wrong about Ebert being wrong about “Speed 2”; I didn’t like it either. But. One of my all-time favorite Ebert reviews, along with “Apocalypse Now,” and “Bonnie and Clyde,” and “Lost in Translation, and “Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo” is, as it happens, “Speed 2: Cruise Control.” Was he ‘wrong’? Maybe objectively, but what his review captures is that sometimes the experience of watching overrules objectivity, and as long as you cop to it, which he does, it’s ok. There is a film festival bubble, after all, in which a movie watched during a film festival can sometimes come across different, usually better, than that same movie watched in any other context. And in reviewing “Speed 2: Cruise Control,” Ebert essentially alludes to a Summer Evening in Chicago bubble, which as a two-decade resident of the Windy City myself, is a bubble I have been in too. 

Here then, copied and pasted directly from RogerEbert.com in its entirety, with no permission whatsoever and merely hoping that as one of the few champions of Roger liking a movie no one else did means we’re cool, is his three-star review of “Speed 2: Cruise Control” originally published on June 27, 1997.   

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I love the summertime. I love strolling down Michigan Avenue on a balmy June evening, past the tourists and the shoppers and the lovers and the people dawdling on their way home from work, and I love going into a theater for a sneak preview of a summer movie and buying popcorn and settling back in my seat and enjoying a movie containing:

* A chainsaw.

* An explosive device with a red digital read-out that nobody will ever be able to see (this one is concealed inside a fake golf club).

* A villain who travels with jars of leeches, to suck the copper poisoning from his blood.

* A sweet girl and her lover on a Caribbean cruise. He just happens to be a member of an LAPD SWAT team.

* The other passengers on the cruise, who just happen to include members of a diamond dealers' association, who have filled the ship's vault with treasure.

* The villain's plot to hijack and destroy the ship, steal the diamonds, and get revenge on the computer company whose ``electromagnetic fields gave me copper poisoning,'' after which he was fired and cast aside.

All of these pleasures, and more, are in "Speed 2: Cruise Control,'' which is a sequel to "Speed" in name only--since even the basic premise is different.

In the first movie, if the bus stopped, everyone would get killed. In this one, if the ocean liner doesn't stop, everyone will get killed. It's a small twist, I grant you, but a decisive one.

[EN: That's my favorite line in the whole review. "It's a small twist, I grant you, but a decisive one." Pithily descriptive.]

The movie stars Sandra Bullock, from "Speed", and Jason Patric as her boyfriend. (The dialogue explains that she split up with the Keanu Reeves character from the earlier film for a lot of reasons, one of them possibly being that he did not want to appear in the sequel). They go on a cruise, and are unlucky enough to pick the boat targeted for revenge by a villain named Geiger (Willem Dafoe), whose laptop computers can take over the ship's own systems and control them.

Bullock plays the same fetching character she played the first time: warm, likable, stuttering a little, calm under pressure. Unfortunately, considering that she was crucial to the success of "Speed", the screenplay gives her a secondary role and hands most of the best scenes to Patric, who handles them like a traditional action hero. At one point he puts on scuba gear and dangles inches from the giant spinning props of the ocean liner, and at another point he shoots a seaplane with a spear-gun and reels himself in. These stunts make the original "Speed" look plausible.

The ship itself is of course supplied with a cross-section of typical passengers, who in addition to the diamond dealers include a fat-acceptance group and a deaf girl who gets trapped in an elevator and can't hear the abandon-ship alarm. The captain is thrown overboard early in the film, after Geiger explains his grievance. (Seems like a waste, somehow, to go to the trouble of lodging your complaint with someone you immediately kill.) Then it's up to the hero and his girlfriend to save the day.

I will leave you in suspense as to whether they succeed. I will observe, however, that it's not every day (unless you live in New Orleans) that you get to see a ship crashing into a pier. The special effects sequences in the movie are first-rate, especially that one. I know some of the houses on shore were models and that all kinds of fancy techniques were used, but the progress of the ship, as it crushes piers and condos, restaurants and trucks and cars, looks surprisingly real. And I was grateful to Jan De Bont, director of this film and the first one, for not overlooking such touches as The Dog Who Survives.

I chortled a few times. The first was at the digital read-out. Why do mad bombers always go to the trouble of supplying them? There's not much room inside the head of a golf club (even a wood), so why waste space on a digital read-out? I also chortled a few moments later, when the villain pulled out a piece of equipment labeled FIBER OPTIC CONVERTER in letters so large they could be read across the room. Doesn't mean much, but it sure looks good. And I will long treasure a moment when a computer asks Geiger, "Time to initiate?'' and he types in, "Now.'' Is the movie fun? Yes. Especially when the desperate Bullock breaks into a ship's supply cabinet and finds a chainsaw, which I imagine all ships carry. And when pleasure boaters somehow fail to see a full-size runaway ocean liner until it is three feet from them. Movies like this embrace goofiness with an almost sensual pleasure. And so, on a warm summer evening, do I.

The Last Stop in Yuma County

“The Last Stop in Yuma County” refers to a filling station in the Arizona desert where the gas pumps are dry, and the fuel truck hasn’t shown up, meaning that anyone without a full tank of gas who wants to proceed, can’t, forced to post up at the diner next door to wait. That includes a traveling Knife Salesman (Jim Cummings), his profession betraying the movie’s non-modern setting as much as the lack of smartphones, peddling his wears to the waitress Charlotte (Jocelin Donahue). Not long after, two more dudes needing gas turn up, icy Beau (Richard Brake) and irascible Travis (Nicholas Logan), their green Pinto just happening to match the description of a car responsible for a nearby bank robbery that morning. And that is only the beginning. Like the cups of coffee that Charlotte continually refills, writer/director/editor Francis Galluppi just keeps pouring more complications into his plot, keeps sending more characters walking into the coffee shop, these relentless narrative top-ups cresting with a weapon-drawing impasse in which just when you think one more gun cannot possibly be drawn, it is. “The Last Stop in Yuma County,” in other words, is a piece of pulp that spares nothing of its low budget to keep you entertained, a B movie with an A student’s work ethic.

If there are prominent echoes of Quentin Tarantino, well, that can be attributed to the celebrated writer/director inserting all manner of echoes to other movies in his own. No, “The Last Stop in Yuma County” can be traced at least as far back as 1936 and “The Petrified Forest” which also features a tense standoff in a diner in the Arizona desert. That movie, however, was based on a play by Robert E. Sherwood and whatever its qualities, it tended to feel stagy. Though Galluppi’s film can sometimes feel staged, and staged to its own detriment, like Beau putting a song on the jukebox that turns an otherwise tense moment into one too cool for its own good, it never feels stagy. That is a testament to Galluppi’s writing as much as his directing, baking the story into the action rather than unspooling it through reams and reams of dialogue, ensuring “The Last Stop in Yuma County” remains tightly coiled throughout. And when it does dial up the moviemaking heat, it’s not just for show, as two fluid long takes go to show, one demonstrating Beau’s cool command, the other the Knife Salesman’s desperate improvisation.

The performances are generally good across the board, though the characters can suffer from Galluppi’s plot-forward approach, occasionally too blatant in their existence as pieces on chessboard rather than people who have wound up here on what inadvertently turned out to be the worst day of their lives. (One standout performer is Michael Abbott Jr. as the local sheriff married to Charlotte, his slow drawl belying a quick-thinking savvy when the pressure is on.) If there is an exception, it is the Knife Salesman, played by Cummings with a twitchiness that might suggest an antisocial hero waiting to rise, or a guy sitting on a big secret. It’s neither, exactly. By revealing right away that the fuel truck has crashed, the suspense then derives not from wondering when it will arrive as what is going to happen knowing that it won’t. That’s what the Knife Salesman is waiting on too, and in a way, “The Last Stop in Yuma County” becomes a manifestation of the coin toss in “No Country for Old Men” in which an unsuspecting gas station attendant (Gene Jones who, as it happens, also appears in this movie) is made to pick heads or tails for the right to keep living. “You’ve been putting it up your whole life,” he’s told, “you just didn’t know it.” The Knife Salesman has been putting it up his whole life, he just didn’t know it, and now he must decide just what kind of person he really is. And as Cummings plays it, like a man skittishly coming unplugged from his own conscience, you can detect someone realizing he might not know himself at all. 

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Big Fix (1978)

The title of Howard Hawks’s indispensable noir, and one of my all-time favorite movies, “The Big Sleep” (1946) refers to every person’s impending merging with the infinite. The title of Jeremy Kagan’s “The Big Fix” (1978), then, might refer to the inevitability of men’s souls being corrupted, or at least, corroded. Noir emerged as a kind of commentary on post-WWII America and so does this neo-noir based on a novel by Roger L. Simon emerges as commentary of post-60s America, following Moses Wine (Richard Dreyfuss), a one-time Berkeley radical who is now a private eye not so much down on his luck as divorced, indifferent, and tuned out to the larger world. He is drawn back in when his old girlfriend Lila Shea (Susan Anspach) knocks at his door one night and asks for help in uncovering who is setting up a candidate for governor of California with whom she is working, a variation on the femme fatale in so much as she tempts him with trouble by way of asking him to give a damn. At first, he takes it all as seriously as the game of Clue we briefly see him playing against himself, but when Lila winds up dead, things take a grave turn, in part, anyway, and Moses finds himself dragged through the various layers of political muck and mire, all pointing back toward a radical friend, Howard Eppis (F. Murray Abraham).

Like “The Big Sleep,” “The Big Fix” is as much about scenes, encounters, and quips as on solving the case. And it is all melded together by Dreyfuss playing a consummate smart-aleck but also unlikely master of disguise who never puts on a disguise at all, emblemized in the cast on his hand which becomes the source of recurring jokes, each one summarizing who at that moment he is sort of pretending to be. Moses resembles Ryan Gosling’s pithy PI of the 70s-set “The Nice Guys” but “The Big Fix” takes itself a little more seriously than that Shane Black comedy, maybe because the latter had a decided reactionary streak, pissing on idealists and radicals whereas “The Big Fix” mostly just wants to take the piss out of them. We rarely see the politician on which Lila and others pin so much hope, yet when we do, he sounds as bland and vacuous as any other politician, and when Moses finally tracks down the disappeared Howard Eppis, it turns out he is living in a fancy Los Angeles home with a pool, wielding a spatula at the grill like you imagine he once wielded a bullhorn. When they break into a singalong of the old protest song We Shall Not Be Moved, it comes across a little like an old counterculture band enthusiastically playing the hits on the free stage at a state fair. 

Ranking Brat Packers I Would Most Like to Hang Out with in 2024

Much like bands deemed grunge detested the term, or filmmakers lumped in with the mumblecore movement often seemed to wish they had not been, monikers rarely go over well with the monikered. “It didn’t exist,” Andrew McCarthy insisted to The New York Observer in 1999 regarding the 1980s Hollywood clique famously called the Brat Pack to which the actor is often recognized as belonging. “I’ve never talked to a single one of them since we wrapped [St. Elmo’s Fire]! It’s all just some lazy fucking journalist lumping it all together.” The lazy fucking journalist to whom Mr. McCarthy referred was David Blum who first employed the term Brat Pack in a 1985 New York Magazine article. “It is to the 1980s what the Rat Pack was to the 1960s,” he wrote, “a roving band of famous young stars on the prowl for parties, women, and a good time.” By the next paragraph, though, Blum concedes that “(e)veryone in Hollywood differs over who belongs to the Brat Pack.”

Indeed, though the article cites Emilio Estevez, Rob Lowe, and Judd Nelson, all of whom the passage of time has shown to be generally accepted members of the Brat Pack, Blum also mentions, among others, Tom Cruise, Timothy Hutton, Matt Dillon, Nicolas Cage, and Sean Penn as pending constituents. Andrew McCarthy only gets mentioned once and it’s in the context of other Brat Packers confessing they don’t think McCarthy will ever achieve true Brat Pack status. “He plays all his roles with too much of the same intensity,” some unnamed possible Brat Packer says. “I don’t think he’ll make it.” Au contraire!

Eight years later, though, the Brat Pack designation was already shifting with Marshall Fine of the Los Angeles Times noting that membership unofficially tied back to appearing in one of two 1980s movies, “St. Elmo’s Fire” and “The Breakfast Club.”  Maybe it was simply those movies cementing the idea of The Brat Back in everybody’s heads right at the moment Blum first dropped the term, and maybe it was others considered by Blum for Brat Packdom transcending the label when they got bigger, and maybe Hutton dodged the term by making “Turk 182” at just the wrong (right) time. Who knows? Nobody knows anything, including Andrew McCarthy, it turns out. The palpable fury with the term that comes through in McCarthy’s 1999 Observer interview has, it seems, become something else 25 years later in his recent op-ed for The New York Times: “Something that had cast such a long shadow over me, that I felt had obscured my identity and even clouded who I perceived to be, had transformed into something like a blessing.”

That goes a long way toward explaining why McCarthy has done a 180 and made a Brat Pack documentary being release today on Hulu. He wants to reconsider the experience with his newfound perspective. And hey, he’s not the only one. I, too, want to reconsider the Brat Pack with my newfound perspective. By which I mean, I want to mull over what members of the Brat Pack I would most want to hang out with here, now, in 2024, as a middle-aged man.

Ranking Brat Packers I Would Most Like to Hang Out with in 2024

8. Rob Lowe. Never mind the NFL hat meme, portending a vanilla conversationalist, or at least, a conversationalist who wants to appear vanilla lest he ruffle the wrong feathers. No, I’m most worried that Rob Lowe would spend the whole time trying to convert me to the Atkins Diet. No thank you, sir.

7. Anthony Michael Hall. I feel bad about this, in a way, because if I had been at Shermer High I probably would have been eating lunch with Brian Johnson even if I was in no way a “brain,” more of a “dweebie,” to quote Grace of “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” because “brains” and “dweebies” still tended to wind up eating lunch together, at least, they did back in my day. And he’s not so low on this list just because there is some startling information at the bottom of his Wikipedia page that I don’t want to watch the link to YouTube to officially verify, though that doesn’t help, but because, well, I guess he’s the one I’ve wound up thinking about the least over the years. I feel like I’d just keep asking him about working with Uma Thurman on “Johnny B. Goode” and he’d get up and leave.

6. Demi Moore. It seems like Demi is in a perfect position to really dish on the industry in general, but I don’t know that she would want to dish.

5. Andrew McCarthy. I can’t help but say I’m intrigued by McCarthy’s reinvention as a travel writer; maybe he could provide helpful tips for a Swiss getaway? 

4. Judd Nelson. I feel like the two of us would mostly end up watching the Denver Nuggets / Houston Rockets game on the TV above the bar and really enjoying it. 

3. Emilio Estevez. I don’t mean to toot my own horn here, but I think Emilio and I would get along like gangbusters because everyone else would just want to ask him Brat Pack questions and I would just want to ask him about his directorial decision-making process on “Wisdom” and “Bobby.” Then again, I might get myself into trouble by asking about the Paula Abdul years. 

2. Molly Ringwald. She really seems to have emerged over the years as the most thoughtful of the Brat Pack.

1. Ally Sheedy. On some ineffable level, and more than any of the rest of them, no offense, Ally Sheedy has just always seemed cool. She wrote a book when she was a teenager, made a great 90s indie film, tried the stage, chose New York over Los Angeles, became a professor, she ebbed, she flowed, she left the band, so to speak, and went on to a distinguished if less high-profile solo career. I want to hang out with Molly Ringwald; I want to be Ally Sheedy’s friend.

In Memoriam: Jeannette Charles

We originally published this post on September 20th, 2022 in the wake of Queen Elizabeth II’s death at the age of 96. We republish it today to memorialize the British actress Jeannette Charles who died on June 2nd. She was also 96, one of those little ostensible coincidences that make me believe in a higher power more than any academic study of the divine.

Britain’s longest serving Monarch Queen Elizabeth II (Elizabeth Alexandra Mary) died last Thursday September 20th, 2022 at the age of 96 and was laid to rest yesterday in Windsor Castle. The state funeral at Westminster Abbey was as ornate as a title like Elizabeth II, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith would lead you to expect, right down to Lord Chamberlain’s wand. Indeed, while I’m sure there was a real person in there, somewhere, behind Heading up the Commonwealth and Defending the Faith, Her Majesty The Queen was a symbol, first and foremost. “The institution of hereditary kingship is irrational and impractical,” Rebecca Mead made clear in The New Yorker, “sustained in the present era only through a willful combination of public pageantry and concealed mystery.” It’s why even if Claire Foy and Olivia Colman both won Emmys for playing the Queen and even if Helen Mirren won an Oscar for playing “The Queen” too, the most indelible portrayal of Her Majesty remains, of course, as everyone knows, Jeannette Charles in “The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!” 

Her role, really, is to be the butt of the joke, over and over, laying siege to her indispensable courtliness, but I don’t mean this as an insult to the Britons. Why the scene in which she winds up, uh, under Lt. Frank Drebin (Leslie Nielsen) on the banquet table just goes to show why Elizabeth wanted to not televise her 1953 coronation in the first place...who knew what could go wrong?! More than that, though, by not really having a role beyond The Queen Becomes Victim Of Hijinks, she remains a mystery while being shuffled through an array of ridiculous Yank-styled pageantry, all of which Charles, who made a career out of her resemblance to Elizabeth II, plays with a proper Buster Keaton-ish stone face. I mean, the scene in the Abbey in Season 1 of “The Crown” when Foy and Matt Smith as Philip spar over Phil’s having to kneel is all well and good when it comes to demonstrating the weight of the Royal image, but nothing cuts to the heart of the all-important and endless Royal ceremoniousness tedium than Charles in “The Naked Gun” being handed a hot dog at Angel Stadium in the ballpark frank version of a bucket brigade, matter-of-factly regarding it as the Queen might have some commemorative Fountain of Youth dish towels bestowed upon her by the Mayor of St. Augustine, Florida, and just sending the damn thing on down the line. 

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

As the fifth movie in director George Miller’s 45-year-old “Mad Max” series, “Furiosa” functions as a prequel to the preceding “Fury Road” (2015) by showing how its protagonist, Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron), reached the point of that film’s inciting incident. It’s an audacious, if not dangerous, game that Miller is playing. He is not only forcing himself to slalom between required story points, imposing artificial limits on storytelling imagination, but that in making a movie of Imperator Furiosa’s backstory, he is essentially competing against the imaginations of the audience. Like “Solo: A Star Wars” story could never hope to convey the Millennium Falcon making the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs as electrically as we had already seen it in our dreams, there is no way Furiosa losing her arm could be rendered to satisfy our preconceived imagery, right? Well...

“Furiosa” begins in The Green Place, a striking contrast to the surrounding unfertile wasteland. It is a paradise, but it is a paradise lost as the youthful eponymous character (Alyla Browne) ventures too far to pick a peach and is snatched by a pair of bikers seeking to present her as a prize to their vainglorious leader, Doctor Dementus (Chris Hemsworth). It won’t be that easy, though, and Furiosa’s mother Mary (Charlee Fraser) goes after her, a magnificent, curtain-raising stop and start chase across the desert in which the overmatched bikers confront the limitless intensity of the maternal instinct. Though she reaches her daughter, she can’t quite save her, nor herself, triggering a quest for vengeance similar to the first “Mad Max” but with a feminine bent.

Eschewing the saga’s typical spare, straight-forward storytelling style, “Furiosa” skews more novelistic, evoked in its chapter headings, and how it spends considerable time on the budding war between Dementus and Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme), the warlord of “Fury Road.” Furiosa winds up in both their possessions at different times, and the camera always remains cognizant of her, innately reminding us that she remains the nexus of this story amid so much male jockeying. Eventually, she escapes and “Furiosa” flashes ahead 15 years, breathlessly recounted in a time lapse of a tree branch that hearkens back to the beginning and foreshadows the ending. (Anya Taylor-Joy also assumes the lead role.) She joins Immortan Joe’s army by posing as a mute boy, a wry twist on the Mulan legend in which she deceives to save her own life, and then falls in with the war rig crew of the Max stand-in Praetorian Joe (Tom Burke) as she hones the necessary skills to complete her quest.

There are moments during all this palace intrigue when “Furiosa” assumes the air of something closer to a sword and sandals epic; Dementus even seems to have emerged from one. Illustrating how Miller continues to lack for no inventiveness where modes of locomotion are concerned, he sends Dementus parading around the desert in a chariot led by motorcycles. (Dementus is also costumed for a while in a vest striking a dirty, wannabe Napoleon aesthetic.) The character, though, is never so grand, played by Hemsworth as a virtual parody of an alpha male, Uday Hussein-like, a psychopath and a dum dum who thinks of himself as bigger than life and blames everything on everybody else.

Dementus’s bluster is a useful juxtaposition against Furiosa’s preternatural self-possession, evinced as ably by Alyla Browne as the young Furiosa as it is by Anya Taylor-Joy as the older version. Taylor-Joy’s big, bright white eyes have always been ready and waiting for a movie director to truly harness their power and Miller is him, epitomizing the movie screen as a canvas for the human face as much as anything else, continually locking in on Taylor-Joy’s with straight-ahead shots blurring the pesky fourth wall by ineffably opening up a line directly between us and her. What Taylor-Joy’s turn lacks in the depth of Theron’s, it more than makes up for in a fathomless primal urge. 

Despite the occasional narrative meandering, action remains paramount, the great scene that opens it, the great one culminating it, and the showstopper taking place right in the middle when Furiosa stows away beneath Praetorian Joe’s gas tanker making the death-defying journey across Fury Road. Stowaway to Nowhere, this chapter is called, and as attackers swoop in and Joe’s crew drops like flies all around him, Furiosa is the rock that doesn’t roll in daringly making her way from beneath the war rig to the front seat, graduating from survivor to warrior. There is even more CGI creep here than “Fury Road,” but the composition remains first rate, the sequence as easy to understand as it is overpowering while the non-verbal communication between Furiosa and Joe registers every changing emotion. When the sequence suddenly ends and goes quiet, it takes a moment to gather yourself, as if you are Wile E. Coyote pulling yourself out from the under anvil that just went splat right on top of you. 

If initially Joe prevents Furiosa’s chance to hijack the tanker and point it toward The Green Place, his presence and their subsequent relationship becomes a bulwark against the vastness and loneliness of this world. And that relationship becomes a rejection of the creeping nihilism in a post-apocalyptic world. That is even truer in the denouement. When Furiosa finally confronts Dementus, it is an action scene transmogrified as a primal roar – and I mean that, a roar, the earthshaking sound design a manifestation of the observation that Furiosa is “the fifth rider of the apocalypse.” After this buildup, though, when Furiosa finally gets her say with Dementus, there is, at least for a while, a dog that caught the car sensation in so much as the elongated nature of the sequence seems to suggest that “Furiosa” itself doesn’t quite know what to do now. But that’s not true. It’s more like Furiosa herself doesn’t quite know what to do, suddenly confronted with something existential rather than emotional, and unexpectedly pointing a way toward life rather than death.

Friday's Old Fashioned: The French Connection (1971)

This coming Monday, June 10th, the city of Chicago will rename 5855 to 5920 North Ridge Avenue in the Edgewater neighborhood, near Senn High School, as Honorary William Friedkin Way.  

Neil deGrasse Tyson would have been 13 years old when “The French Connection” was released in 1971, and living in the Bronx, not the Bensonhurst neighborhood of Brooklyn where William Friedkin filmed his movie’s legendary car chase. Yet, I was tickled to recently learn that critics of the faux deGrasse Tyson style of film criticism pledging fealty to reality above else already existed. In April 1972, Friedkin received a letter from Bensonhurt resident Dr. Pearl Wiesen regarding “the contrivances in the name of dramatic license…apparent to us who knew the area.” Friedkin politely responded via his own letter:

“If I was making the film just for Bensonhurst, I would, perhaps, have erred on the side of the accuracy, but the film was made for a worldwide audience, most of which has never even heard of Bensonhurst. The key to a successful sequence like the chase is allusion. In this respect, it is not unlike magic. The lady doesn’t really get sawed in half, the rabbit doesn’t really appear out of thin air, and two trains on the Transit System seldom have such a collision. But what a dull chase it would have been had I stuck to what was probable....If the picture had been intended or presented as a documentary, an audience would have every right to feel cheated.” 

It’s amusing, of course, if not noble, at least from a certain point-of-view, but that last line ultimately feels even a little revealing. As Friedkin himself once noted, the key to “The French Connection” was realizing he could marry documentary techniques not just with a work of fiction but with a fictive action-thriller. In other words, the magic to which Friedkin refers is in “The French Connection” is frighteningly real. The esteemed Roger Ebert once proffered a variation on Friedkin’s observation, noting that if you want a movie to “all be plausible in hindsight, you’re probably disappointed when a magician doesn’t saw a real person in half and leave a severed corpse on the stage.” Considering Friedkin shot his chase scene without permits and on uncontrolled streets, it was maybe as close as we’ll come to that severed corpse. 

The 1971 Academy Award winner for Best Picture was based on a real-life heroin smuggling ring, though Friedkin and screenwriter Ernest Tidyman are not hung up on the details, preferring to reduce the movie down to its very essence: cops versus drug dealers. If it’s not a 104-minute movie entirely as a chase, it comes as close as might be possible, beginning with a chase and ending with a chase and crafting almost everything in-between as a game of cat and mouse between NYPD narcotics detectives Popeye Doyle (Gene Hackman) and Cloudy Russo (Roy Scheider) and their wily target Alain Charnier (Fernando Rey), referred to as a frog, merely one of several derogatory terms deployed by the cops marking them as decided anti-heroes. Friedkin utilized a whopping 89 locations, turning the accompanying portrait of early 70s NYC urban blight into something like an urban jungle, evincing an innate feeling of lawlessness underlining the borderline lawless methods of the detectives. Yet as out of control as the characters get, Friedkin’s filmmaking never does, demonstrating a crucial sense of space with his shots so that nothing ever becomes confusing, utilizing all manner of zooms to show where the perps and their pursuers are in relation to one another, a virtual ballet under grey skies on cement.  

Though the relentless forward momentum of the chase suggests there is little time for character to emerge, it is noteworthy just how effectively Friedkin combines character details with the procedural elements, like a zoom from a French restaurant where the villains eat to a staked-out Popeye across the street, taking one sip of coffee and then dumping it on the ground, his liquid swill juxtaposed against their lavish feast. And Freidkin sets a familiar scene of Popeye’s superior seeking to shut down his investigation alongside the Henry Hudson Parkway where a violent crash has occurred. Brief images of bloody bodies crossed with Popeye’s almost bloodthirsty selfishness lays it all bare.

His renegade nature, though, is never harsher than the car chase in which Popeye tracks his would-be assassin on a runaway elevated train by car just below the train track. It has to be the greatest car chase in movie history, all personal predilections aside, for how it is not in any way about effects or thrills but existing as a virtual extension of Popeye. Scheider does not have as much to work with in terms of character yet deftly creates an indelible one, nonetheless, assuming an almost zombie-eyed state for some scenes, pulled along in the fanatical wake of his partner, brought to vivid life by Hackman, making the most of every single available moment. In one small but indelible scene where Cloudy finds Popeye handcuffed to his bed, Hackman modifies his famed chuckle to unlock unexpected depth, or lack thereof, more accurately, rendering his character as dumb as a box of rocks. Popeye subsumes his partner, the police force, and in the car chase, even the city. When he commandeers a vehicle to go after the train, a Neil deGrasse Tyson, or a Dr. Pearl Weisen might wonder what happened to that vehicle’s owner, bleakly if comically left twisting in the wind. But that doesn’t matter because Popeye doesn’t care.

My 5 Favorite Scenes from Baseball Movies

A couple weeks ago on his blog, er, Substack, Joe Posnanski fielded a question from a brilliant reader, as he deems them, asking after his five favorite scenes from baseball movies. Posnanski, however, let his own brilliant reader’s five favorite scenes from baseball movies – one from “Field of Dreams,” one from “The Natural,” one from “League of their Own,” two from “Eight Men Out” – settle the matter and gave his five favorite baseball references from the celebrated FX show “The Bear,” including the scene from the lost 90s indie holiday movie “Fishes” where baseball cards are discussed and some guys are literally remembered. One of the guys, it should be noted, was Jay Buhner, meaning both “The Bear” and “Seinfeld” include references to Jay Buhner, apparently the hallmark of a truly great TV show. Anyway. Posnanski said the rest of his brilliant readers could hash out their favorite baseball scenes in the comments, and though I suppose I pay to read his blog, er, Substack for that privilege, I don’t do really do comment sections, and besides, I’ve got my own blog, I thought, I could just do my five favorite baseball scenes here. Ergo, a list that I feel confident AI could not have hatched.   

My 5 Favorite Scenes from Baseball Movies

5. Bull Durham. It might be more of a moment, really, than a scene, but Kevin Costner’s introduction as Minor League journeyman Crash Davis is iconic, not merely one of the best character intros in movie genre but in movies in general, bringing to life an arcane bit of baseball terminology in the most colorfully droll way possible. 

4. Field of Dreams. This is not a baseball scene, but it is a scene in a baseball movie, which as far as I am concerned, still counts. And whatever you think of the pie in the sky belief system, deliberately hokey storytelling, or the left-handed Shoeless Joe Jackson batting right-handed, as events concerning book banning in my native state have demonstrated, that scene in the high school gymnasium where Amy Madigan indulges her inner-60s radical is essentially a documentary.

3. Sugar. On the other hand, Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck’s “Sugar,” which has emerged over the years as my favorite baseball movie, is also partially set in rural Iowa where a Dominican baseball product named Miguel “Sugar” Santos (Algenis Perez Soto) comes to play in the minor leagues. There is a recurring joke in which he orders French toast because he does not know how to order anything else, like eggs, because he can’t specify what kind of egg. So, the server (Marla Finn) brings him a plate with all the egg options and explains what each one is, a recurring joke transforming into an olive branch. In my considerable experience, the phrase Iowa nice is not as overall in accordance with reality as its proponents would suggest, but neither is it entirely mythological, and this moment taken in tandem with the previous one demonstrates the flip side to Iowa. 

2. Major League. A winning team is fun, that goes without saying, but as I have aged and become fonder of regular season baseball’s feeling and rhythm than the postseason’s, I have also become more intrigued by losing baseball teams, the ones that have to muster up just enough to slog through August and September when they are 25 games out of first place. And so more than Rick Vaughn (Charlie Sheen) getting the climactic strikeout post “Wild Thing” walkout, the sequence that I have always loved most in David S. Ward’s 1989 comedy is Rick Vaughn’s first appearance on the mound in which he walks the bases loaded on 12 pitches, surrenders a grand slam, plunks a guy, and triggers a brawl. It is a virtual comic symphony courtesy of editor Dennis M. Hill in which each cut maximizes the humor and Bob Uecker ties the whole thing together by riffing on the local announcer’s duty to try and maintain a little optimism in the face of certain defeat.

1. The Naked Gun. Uh oh. Real existential question here. Is “The Naked Gun” a baseball movie, or is it merely a movie that ends with a baseball sequence? Well, if the Major League Baseball Network is any guide, which re-runs “The Naked Gun,” like, every weekend, then it absolutely is. Besides, I would argue the concluding baseball sequence is so overpowering that in real time it remolds “The Naked Gun” into a baseball movie, sort of like how Taylor Swift remolded every Kansas City Chief game last year into a platform for her own stardom. If humor is truth then the climax of “The Naked Gun” proves it, getting to the truth of baseball in a way no callow drama ever could by ribbing on things as small as spitting and TV’s penchant for filling booths with too many talking heads and as big as insistence on regimental pageantry (see above), umpires who make themselves the star of the show, and good old fashioned American bloodlust by way of a brawl (if not also a few sports bloopers), its status as America’s Pastime enlarged by having it all play out in front of Queen Elizabeth II (Jeannette Charles), take it or leave it, Your Majesty.

LaRoy, Texas

Shane Atkinson’s semi-comic neo-noir “LaRoy, Texas” opens with Harry (Dylan Baker) picking up a hitchhiker whose car has broken down on some desolate highway. At first, Harry is reluctant to stop, then apprehensive once he does, and once the hitchhiker gets in the car, he exudes a menacing air. This is what we expect, of course, and this is why the sequence is designed to test our expectations, as the whole thing flips, and the opposite turns out to be true. Harry is a crucial character in the ensuing movie, but this comes across like a standalone prologue, nonetheless, introducing “LaRoy, Texas’s” overriding idea that appearances can be deceiving. A hoary chestnut, true, and “LaRoy, Texas” is not here to reinvent Lone Star barbecue, sort of semi-reimagining The Coen Brothers’ “No Country for Old Men” as “No Country for Schmucks,” or something. It’s never to the level of that movie, but often enjoyable enough in its own right, a murder mystery in which the mystery is essentially right in the open, turning it into something else, a question of character, though for that one, “LaRoy, Texas” doesn’t quite have an answer.

Harry has come to LaRoy to kill a local businessman in exchange for a few thousand dollars. Through a misunderstanding, meek hardware store owner Ray (John Magaro) gets offered the job instead and takes it even if he is so unqualified for the task that upon buying a gun, he finds himself clarifying that he needs a short one. Frequently costumed in a standard-issue hardware store polo and played by Magaro with drooped posture and a voice as perpetual whine, he wants to prove he’s not the schmo he is assumed to be by everyone, including his own wife, Stacy-Lynn (Megan Stevenson), a one-time beauty queen who is cheating on him with his own brother (Matthew Del Negro). If it seems questionable that a former beauty queen might end up married to Ray, “LaRoy, Texas” smartly saves that explanation for late, reducing it to one line that is a gut punch, re-calibrating everything Ray thought he know. Even more crucially, that one line evokes how people just sort of sit on difficult truths, content to keep them emotionally buried.

Stacy-Lynn also dreams of opening a hair salon, and so Ray sees the cash offered from the case of mistaken identity as a conduit to financing her business and saving his marriage, desperation comingling with foolishness. It’s a ridiculous thought on his half, of course, and Atkinson treats it that way, portraying Ray tailing his target from place to place in pitifully comic terms, like a dog chasing a car, and once he comes face to face with his target, not really having any idea what to do. A struggle ensues and he kills the businessman more from self-defense than on purpose, completing the job on accident, essentially, but also leaving behind a photo of his wife, inadvertently getting her charged with the killing. And all the while, Harry hovers on the periphery, like Anton Chigurh of “No Country for Old Men” if Anton Chigurh looked like an insurance adjustor.

Ray’s unwanted and overeager co-detective is Skip (Steve Zahn), dressing in a bolo tie and cowboy hat for the job he technically has, private detective, even though he hardly qualifies as one, as intent on proving his credentials as Ray is at proving he’s not a pushover. Their emergent friendship is the movie’s best element, personified in a ham-handed interrogation scene in which Skip keeps dunking their interrogee’s head in a toilet, causing him to pass out, and then needing Ray, the only one of the two who knows CPR, to resuscitate him. It’s also evocative of how “LaRoy, Texas” blurs comedy and tragedy to the breaking point; after all, Ray is, in effect, attempting to solve a murder he committed, the wrongfully accused trope turned on its head. Ultimately, though, “LaRoy, Texas” cannot quite decide which one it truly is, comedy or tragedy, its character the butt of a cosmic joke or someone sealing his own fate, and rather than run out of gas, it just kind of comes to a fork in the road, shrugs, and sits down in the middle.