The Order

“The Order” is based on Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt’s 1989 non-fiction book The Silent Brotherhood about the anti-government, white nationalist terrorist organization founded in the 1980s Pacific Northwest by Bob Mathews. In director Justin Kurtzel’s cinematic version, working from a screenplay by Zach Baylin, Mathews (Nicholas Hoult) is tracked by a fictional FBI agent, Terry Husk (Jude Law), while splintering from the Aryan Nation, recruiting fellow self-perceived white victims, and fundraising for his new order via armed robbery to incite a race war. There are occasional moments of genuinely chilling insight into this world, like Bob reading his child The Turner Diaries as a bedtime story, but it also feels as if Kurtzel is purposely skirting the edges of the organization, content to have a few lines of dialogue outline it in broad strokes but refusing to open the whole pandora’s box lest the movie itself be viewed as a manual. Instead, “The Order” falls back on well-staged if rote heist sequences, betraying it as a thriller more than a docudrama, underlined in Husk. 

Like his on-the-nose name, this character is pure cop movie stock, hoping to win back his estranged wife and see his daughter again, provided with a likeminded partner of sorts (Tye Sheridan) destined to die (spoiler alert). And yet, Law is something else, coloring in the hoary lines with rich aplomb, taking that wife/daughter subplot as seriously as a spiritually fried cop might, playing moment after moment with a weary smirk that seems to come from so deep within it invests a silent and unexpected profundity. He becomes a rich counterpoint to the boyish Hoult, his omnipresent white t-shirt chillingly echoing his bright blue eyes, never going over the top and by extension never intimating to the audience that he stands outside of what he’s playing. It put me in the mind of Bruce Springsteen assuming the point-of-view of a similar character in a song he cut the same year “The Order” is set, as a matter of fact, the song the people who don’t know all the words to “Born in the U.S.A.” probably never knew existed, the one so plainspokenly terrifying it still hasn’t been officially released and probably never will. 

A Real Pain

Benji Kaplan (Kieran Culkin) is a real pain. A perpetual stoner who tends to dress in whatever he woke up wearing, he’s as endearing as he is obnoxious, able to charm you even as he’s cutting in line right in front of you. He is the exact opposite, in other words, of his uptight cousin David (Jesse Eisenberg) whom we repeatedly see in two shots with Benji, agonizing, squirming, virtually dying before our very eyes every time Benji blows by the social contract. So, it only makes sense that Eisenberg, working in his simultaneous capacity as writer and director, follows the map set by storytellers immemorial and puts these two on the road together, like a Gen Y Del Griffith and Neal Page in “Planes, Trains and Automobiles.” Rather than trying to get home, however, Benji and David are going to their ancestral home of Poland, where their recently deceased grandmother lived and then fled after surviving the camps during WWII, as part of a small Jewish heritage tour group. 

That’s the real pain, in other words, Benji and David’s generational trauma and lingering grief, evoking the movie’s myriad double meanings. The notion of happiness and sadness co-existing, of how someone can be happy when there is so much sadness in the world, of why go around being sad when there is so much to happy about it, is not new, of course, but it is nevertheless remarkable how Eisenberg the writer buries these dueling notions into virtually every aspect of his witty script. Funny moments turn serious in a blink, and vice-versa, which makes “A Real Pain” so enjoyable to watch even as it emotionally trucks you. In one scene, the group travels first class by train, leading Benji to note the irony, that they’re Jews on a train in Poland, retreating to coach in protest, eventually joined by his cousin. But David falls asleep, and they miss their stop, forcing them to hop another train going the other way without tickets as Benji bluffs their way past the ticket agent…and into first class. The moment both takes the piss out of Benji’s righteous meltdown, and underlines it, a sidesplitting triumph in the name of their ancestors.

In that same sequence, however, when Benji flips out on the rest of his tour group for wanting to ride in first class luxury, Eisenberg’s script elides the possibility of a thoughtful debate on the topic by essentially just turning the rest of the gang into mechanical opposition. It exposes these additional characters, despite solid performances by all the actors, as mostly a way to help frame Benji and David. Even the professional epiphany experienced by the tour guide, James (Will Sharpe), is as much about showing Benji in the unlikely role of spiritual sherpa. This is not necessarily a flaw. It evokes how Benji eats up all the space around him, and underlines how Eisenberg’s interest lies specifically in the cousin dynamic. And though you might sometimes want a clearer idea of what’s happening in Benji’s head, this is intentional rather than a narrative oversight, filtering Benji through David’s point-of-view. That is its own double meaning, in a way, as Eisenberg the director cedes the movie to Culkin, echoing how David can’t help but love Benji despite all he puts him through. These elements coalesce in David’s lovingly critical monologue about his cousin at dinner. It is Eisenberg’s biggest moment, the camera drifting in for a close-up, but also one that’s entirely about the character played by his co-star. 

Moments like those are as much about the acting and the writing as the directing, but Eisenberg demonstrates real auteur chops too. During the group’s visit to Lublin, we see several simple shots of modern buildings, each one described by James in voiceover as one-time centerpieces of Jewish life, a plaintive evocation of how history is so often not just erased but trampled, taken and converted into something else. Eisenberg makes a trip to a Majdanek concentration camp come alive in a profound way by recounting the characters seeing a gas chamber in a series of shots where each of them walks into a close-up and turns toward the camera, almost as if they are lining up to take pictures at the DMV. Eventually taken in tandem with a reverse shot of the room itself, these stark images seem to open a portal across time, bringing them face-to-face with the unconscionable horror, if only for a second, unable to comprehend it even as they confront it. 

Benji and David conclude their journey by breaking off from the tour group to visit their grandmother’s former home in Krasnystaw, as earnest a device for closure as it is contrived, as much for the characters themselves as the movie. Eisenberg, though, introduces this device to turn it on its head by drolly demonstrating how finality cannot be manufactured, and how the world indifferently moves on with or without us. Whether these two will eventually find closure, one cannot say, because “A Real Pain” deliberately leaves that question open-ended. I was stunned by how much the concluding shot made me think once again of “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” if Neal’s sudden awakening had never come and Del had been left sitting in that train station forever.

Blitz

It is 1940 in London and with Luftwaffe bombs raining from the sky, single mother Rita (Saoirse Ronan) puts her nine-year-old son George (Elliott Heffernan) on a train bound for the English countryside to keep him out of harm’s way. George, though, feeling abandoned, jumps from the moving train not long into the voyage and treks back to London by foot, recounted in a series of dramatic episodes amid Germany’s continual aerial bombardment. It’s the framework of an adventure story, but writer/director Steve McQueen essentially shines a white light on that that framework to reveal what truly lurks beneath the facade of so-called Blitz Spirit. The opening image of firemen attempting to corral an out-of-control firehose amid burning buildings suggests London is battling itself as much as The Blitz, while also foretelling a movie of fewer inspirational images than dark ones. George briefly falls in with a gang of thieves who loot the dead bodies in the bombed-out West End Café de Paris, a ghoulish sequence that might have roots in Dickens but also makes it feel for all the world like they are grave robbers who have mystically descended to the ocean floor the morning of April 16, 1912, raiding the bodies of the sunken Titanic. It’s the kind of image that might a haunt a nine-year-old boy for the rest of their life.

McQueen inverts adventure stories, but he also inverts Britain’s famed Blitz slogan Keep Calm and Carry On, the one telling its citizens to maintain a sense of normalcy in the face of the horrifying irregular. Ok, McQueen seems to say, if you want to see what a normal 1940 London looked like, I’ll show it to you. Indeed, you will notice straight away that Rita’s skin is white, and that George’s skin is black. His father, Grenadian immigrant father Marcus (CJ Beckford), is glimpsed only in flashback, deported after a confrontation with a pair of boorish white men, evoking the kind of bigotry typically scrubbed from movies about The Blitz lest it compromise the heroism. That we hardly get to know Marcus is deliberate, putting us in his son’s shoes, and just as George’s father vanishes, so does a briefly emergent father figure, Ife (Benjamin Clementine), a night watchman who briefly befriends the boy before perishing offscreen. Ife feels like McQueen’s version of the Magical Negro character, even giving a rousing speech to his fellow Londoners imploring them to transcend their racial bias. The speech, it’s too good to be true, and so is Ife, gone almost as soon as he arrives, like he’s just a figment of the imagination.

“Blitz” is not seen only through the George’s eyes but through Rita’s too. An aspiring singer, she is selected by the BBC to perform live on a wartime radio broadcast, belting out a ballad in the munitions factory where she works to help keep spirits up, and in this moment, she holds the whole room, the whole of Britain, in the palm of her hand. When she concludes, her co-worker rushes the microphone to demand the government open more air raid shelters, leading others on the arms manufacturing line, including Rita, to join the spur of the moment protest. If the former functions as the fantasy of everyone being in this together, the latter punctures that fantasy, a duality lived in Ronan’s commanding turn. In bright red lipstick and blue overalls, she virtually breathes Ruby Loftus Screwing a Breech-ring to life, turning her a wartime symbol into something more, patriotic and pissed off. 

It’s the kind of duality that the 11-year-old Heffernan cannot be expected to manage. And rather than using the camera to express the inner conflict undoubtedly brewing in George on account of his identity, McQueen often seems more content to just reaffirm the character’s oppression, such as in his encountering a collection of colonialist caricatures in an Empire Arcade display. In that way, however, Heffernan proves plenty effective. In his tight-lipped expression, he seems to virtually wear a lifelong scar, and so, rather than finding the wherewithal in the midst of such terror to survive, it’s as if George’s emotional strength stems from what he has already been made to endure.

The Last College Football Post of the Season

If it was a fun college football season, it was also a long one, not least because it essentially tacked on a whole extra month for the first go-round of the 12-team playoff which kicked off December 20th and ended January 20th. It didn’t feel anti-climactic, exactly, but it also felt less special because unlike New Year’s Days of yore, college football didn’t have last Monday all to itself. Sour grapes of one traditionalist aside, I’m sure it was plenty special to the Ohio State Buckeyes who won the inaugural expanded hootenanny and, by extension, college football’s national championship even after their talent-laden roster flirted with apathy the whole regular season. In any other year, the Buckeyes would have been out of the running, if not after their dramatic one-point defeat to Oregon in October than certainly after their epic spitting the bit against arch-rival Michigan in late November, a 13-10 choke job and their fourth straight loss to the hated team from up north that seemed to leave them mentally finished. Yet, in this new world of an NCAA Football Tournament (Winter Wildness?), where March bracketology buzzwords with gross white-collar connotations like resume become paramount, Ohio State’s body of work (bleh) was still good enough to gain entry and engendered the deepest, drollest of ironies. That is, they were in the place 121 other teams wished they were, that coaches would be placed on the hot seat for not getting to, and yet, because of that loss to Michigan, here was Buckeye coach Ryan Day in the playoff but on the hot seat himself with nothing less than a national championship or bust mandate. 

Whether the Michigan game finally set them free, or just teed them off, the Buckeyes finally met their massive potential in the playoff by obliterating Tennessee in round one and then getting revenge by steamrolling Oregon in a Rose Bowl quarterfinal. And in the semifinal against Texas, defensive lineman Jack Sawyer steamrolled Longhorn quarterback Quinn Ewers on one electrifying, insane scoop and score play that turned a 21-14 game Texas on the verge of tying into a 28-14 win, the kind of play that leaves you laughing from sheer bewildered delight as it’s happening. In the championship against fellow Midwesterners Notre Dame, meanwhile, Ohio State appropriately demonstrated each half of its dual identity, roaring out to a 31-7 lead so emphatically it looked over early before getting stuck in the mud as the Fighting Irish clawed back to within 31-23. Fittingly, the Buckeyes sealed it by ignoring Day’s misguided tendency to cosplay Woody Hayes and act tough, as he did against Michigan, and air it out, a deep ball to stud freshman receiver Jeremiah Smith in one-on-one coverage that did not score a touchdown but earned a first down to set up a field goal to seal victory. The play was appropriately symbolic, suggesting they could essentially do whatever they wanted so long as they remembered they could essentially do whatever they wanted and not so on edge as to suddenly forget. 

Frankly, we could not have a better case study for the first NCAA Football Tournament victor than this Ohio State team. In this brave new world of so-called Name, Image, and Likeness, in which players can profit from their personal brand, meaning schools can pay them, few disbursed more NIL funds than the Buckeyes, a reported $20 million to sculpt the eventual champs. The expanded playoff might provide more access for more non-bluebloods, like Arizona State and Boise State, but perhaps it also ensures that in the end, the richest cream will just rise to the top. More than that, though, Ohio State’s ninth national championship will always be inseparable from its loss to Michigan. That is not to say their title comes with an asterisk; it is not hollow or illegitimate. But it does bear a certain spiritual ball and chain. Jack Sawyer said it in so many words: “I won’t ever get over that loss.” Does the championship outweigh it? That is for each player and coach to decide, and it probably does, or they will probably say it does, though deep down in places they don’t talk about at parties I also suspect that they will always wonder if that’s true. And if that means the tension between the game’s regional roots and national ambitions has not yet tilted entirely toward the latter, it’s victory enough.

Time will tell if this national title is victory enough for the ultra-successful yet much-maligned Ryan Day. Though he has not always made things easy on himself, Day has been in some cases been treated truly callously and is deserving of a victory lap of the whole state in the manner of a 19th-century Christmas, demanding to be let into homes flying OSU flags and requesting a celebratory Rhinegeist Truth IPA in each one. Even so, he will probably be the first to tell you that “(n)ext year it’ll all be forgotten,” to quote the immortal “Mean” Joe Greene after the Pittsburgh Steelers won their fourth Super Bowl in six years to cap the Steel Curtain dynasty. “It’ll be, ‘What have you done for me lately?’ A vicious, vicious cycle.” 

Acting!

Rob Gronkowski is a fine football player, a future Hall-of-Famer, but his acting, well, it’s a less hall of fame worthy if you go by his commercials for USAA co-starring Sam Elliott that I have been repeatedly forced to endure the last five months during college football games. It’s Oscar nomination day, a day when acting becomes paramount, or more precisely, good acting becomes paramount, and yet, rather than write about any of the nominees, as one traditionally might, I could not stop thinking about Gronkowski and Elliott and how those USAA ads succinctly summarize good acting and bad acting 30 or so seconds at a time.

Academy members like to reward performances where you can really see the performance, figuratively speaking, which is why actors in biopics, or actors putting themselves through some sort of palpable physical transformation, frequently earn nominations, and why Hollywood’s resident experts on acting as being, like, say, Sam Elliott, rarely do. But then, they are all professionals, and whether the acting is more ostentatious or unobtrusive, they have sanded away the rough edges. Gronkowski, on the other hand, is all rough edges; in each of these ads, you can see the performance, literally speaking. He knows he is on camera and overcompensates for it, like Jack Donaghy with two coffee cups, so that you can virtually see him thinking his lines as he says them, causing them all to come out stiff. And because he is concentrating so hard on his lines, he never relaxes his body, causing it to also be rendered stiff, both details amalgamating into an unfortunate embodiment of wooden acting. 

I don’t mean to drag Gronk, I really don’t, because he’s an amateur and he’s not really trying to do anything other than get paid for shilling something. It’s just, his poor acting becomes such a useful counterpoint to Elliott. Opposite the stilted Gronk, you will never more clearly see how effortless, how natural, Elliott is as an actor. Gronk is like seeing a suit that is still being tailored, a performance that is all pins and sewing tape, whereas in Elliott’s performance, all those pesky seams disappear. And if you say, well, Sam Elliott is just playing himself, hey, so’s Gronk, and he can’t do it, can he? 

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I have only been to Los Angeles once, and even then, just for a couple hours, and even then, I wasn’t really in Los Angeles, I was in Pasadena, northeast of downtown L.A. I’m a college football fan, and more than that, I’m a college football fan from the Midwest, and so I had come to pay homage to the Rose Bowl, my favorite sport’s mecca. It was late July, not New Year’s Day, but it was no less beautiful, and in a twist of fate, while taking a stroll around the now-century-old bowl-shaped stadium I ran into a couple Minnesota transplants out for their evening walk, and we shared stories. I snapped a photo on my disposable Kodak of my Ford Tempo in front of the Rose Bowl sign and I remember seeing a youth soccer game happening across the way. I don’t often stop and think about how my life might have turned out different, but in that brief moment, I did, wondering how my life might have looked had I grown up playing youth soccer in the shadow of the Rose Bowl rather than in the shadow of the Waukee, Iowa High School. Probably I would have just dropped out of the University of California, Los Angeles rather than the University of Iowa. 

It was only years later that I realized how my lone trip to Los Angeles was on account of a myth. I mean, yes, the Rose Bowl Stadium is real, and the San Gabriel Mountains, those are real too, and the Rose Bowl Game itself, that’s real, except maybe the 2021 version, but the Rose Bowl was always more than that, or maybe just something different than that, a utopian sort of vision. There is reason why the first national color TV broadcast was of the Tournament Roses Parade, and there is a reason why the first football game broadcast nationally in color was the Rose Bowl, “images of college football games beamed back to Midwesterners and Northeasterners drinking bad coffee in their freezing living rooms,” Spencer Hall once wrote. “Someone watching the immortal, glorious sunset against the San Gabriels had to look and think: Why am I here, and not there? The Rose Bowl wasn’t just the place teams went when they were very, very good. It was a little piece of a whole life anyone could have simply by having the will to go.” In the end, even the hallowed Rose Bowl is just one more way to peddle real estate. I fantasize about home ownership as much as I fantasize about an alternate life, but on those few occasions when I do, I imagine a California Bungalow.

It probably makes some sense, then, that my other hobby and/or passion would eventually emerge as movies, given they are nothing more, really, than mythical flickering images on a screen. Their spiritual epicenter is Los Angeles too, or Hollywood, anyway, and though what we see up on those glorious big screens are generally not real, they often involve real Los Angeles geography and locations, nonetheless. This is what Sarah Kendzior wrote about in her newsletter in the wake of the horrific Los Angeles wildfires, how she had never been to Pacific Palisades, but had seen it in “Carrie” and “Teen Wolf,” and how she had never been to Altadena, but she had seen it in “Beverly Hills 90210.” “To watch Los Angeles burn feels like losing America’s collective consciousness,” she wrote. “It’s the destruction of childhood escape, the annihilation of fake places remembered more vividly than real ones. It is grief by association.”

I wonder how Thom Andersen would feel about that. He’s the documentary director who helmed the landmark “Los Angeles Plays Itself” (2003) which he constructed almost exclusively from scenes of actual Los Angeles locations in movies, demonstrating how myriad myths and perceptions of L.A. are created and then challenging them one by one to excavate the real city underneath. The voiceover, both in its writing and Encke King recitation of it, skews cynical, even outright angry, and yet, in dissecting sacred cows like “Chinatown” and “L.A. Confidential,” it excoriates “cynicism (becoming) the dominant myth of our times,” how their portrayals of conspiracy and corruption might take dramatic license with real stories but but also imbued a sense of a city not worth saving. Andersen links the mosaic drama “Grand Canyon” with the futuristic neo-noir “Blade Runner” as Los Angeles-set movies in which “the social fabric is disintegrated” but with virtually no interest in “try(ing) to understand how it happened.” Those critiques evoke Defector’s Patrick Redford lamenting the apocalyptic language surrounding the Los Angeles wildfires as a “cynical...mode of thinking.” He writes: “If the fires are envoys of a force that is fundamentally beyond our comprehension, let alone control, what is the point of grappling with them or even understanding them?” 

A considerable number of Americans clearly do not want to grapple with nor understand these fires in any meaningful way. That’s why misinformation flooded the zone almost immediately, including eerie-“Chinatown” like conspiracy theories, and many on the right, from actual elected officials to their conservative media bootlickers, hardly tried to hide their glee over the city getting what was coming to them for committing the sin of liberalism. In “Los Angeles Plays Itself,” Andersen touches on Hollywood’s propensity for destroying Los Angeles, and while other cliches stick in his craw, this one, not so much. “Disaster movies remind us how foolish and helpless we really are and thus demonstrate our need for professionals and experts to save us from ourselves,” says King. If Andersen’s documentary can sometimes feel prophetic, here it feels just the opposite, shockingly naive. He also cites another famed prophet of Los Angeles, the late Mike Davis, who argued that the entire world seemed to take pleasure in the city being ruined over and over, again and again. Andersen sees it more as a case of “economic expediency...Hollywood destroys Los Angeles because it’s there,” but in all that thinly veiled contempt at a city burning, it was difficult not to think that David had it right all along. 

There is another disaster movie that “Los Angeles Plays Itself” does not discuss because it was released 12 years later. That was “San Andreas” in which the titular fault is discovered by Caltech seismologist Lawrence Hayes (Paul Giamatti) to be shifting, triggering earthquakes in San Francisco and Los Angeles. With little time to spare upon his realization, Hayes and students hack the media and go rogue on live TV to get the word out. In another piece for Defector, Diana Moskovtiz highlighted the crucial job performed by Los Angeles local media during the wildfires, providing pertinent, life-saving facts even as social media spluttered the opposite. Such media, as Moskovitz notes, is a public service and, by extension, “a key piece of our democracy.” But because it’s a key piece of our democracy, it’s also been bled dry by anti-democratic bad actors, and though government investing in media on a national level could help rectify the crisis, such investment is hard to imagine from a know nothing government that casts the media as an enemy. And one can only hope that when the next climate change-fueled disaster strikes, which will surely be sooner rather than later, real-life experts don’t have to literally hack the airwaves to get the word out.

The Greatest Inaugural

William Henry Harrison’s 8,445-word inauguration speech in 1841 is still the longest of its kind, lasting almost two hours, a record sources have told me the 47th President of the United States would very much like to break, since that’s exclusively how he understands the world, through breaking records, even if he did not officially break them and even if the records in question weren’t records in the first place, only to be stymied by the fact that the 47th President of the United States, to quote David Roth, is essentially “a defective Teddy Ruxpin (who) can only hold like 175 words in his head at one time and is just kind of mushing the button that seems most appropriate for the situation over and over again”; you can’t really say strongly and tremendously enough times to get to 8,446 words. He’ll have to drone on for a long time about cultural marxists, and how Today on NBC was better with Deborah Norville, or something. Nevertheless, today the fine folks at Constitution.com graciously provided me a platform to take a controversial position – that William Henry Harrison’s inauguration speech was not just the longest of its kind but when you drill down, which admittedly requires a lot, it is also revealed as the best of its kind. My argument is not as long as Harrison’s address (ha ha!), but I did need more than a few paragraphs to marshal the necessary evidence. You can go here to read my argument in full.

In Memoriam: David Lynch

My favorite David Lynch movie is “The Straight Story” (1999), maybe because it’s set in Iowa, or at least, because it starts in Iowa, which happens to be where I’m from. It begins with aerial images of a cornfield, a grain elevator, a main street, quintessential small town Iowa Chamber of Commerce stuff but quintessential small town Iowa chamber of commerce stuff with a purpose. Because it’s the next shot, craning down toward a house, and then in closer on a window, evoking how Lynch gets under that conventional surface to see what’s really under there. Lynch’s work was often classified as strange, or weird, and so much was made of “The Straight Story’s” G-rating, as if Lynch, once famously described by Mel Brooks as “Jimmy Stewart from Mars” was finally just being Jimmy Stewart from Earth. But you can imagine Lynch reading a news clipping of the real-life Alvin Straight journeying 240 miles from Iowa and Wisconsin aboard a riding lawn mower to see his ailing brother and thinking, hey, that’s kinda weird. Because small town Iowans, I can tell you from experience, are a little weird and I say that with all the love in my heart. Richard Farnsworth as Alvin Straight embodied Midwestern stoicism, but he also hinted at the mysteries and passions humming underneath, the kind many might reflexively assume small town Iowans lack. “The Straight Story” ends not with a long conversation between the two brothers but them looking up at the stars in the sky instead and it makes me think of going home and sitting on the deck with my dad and looking up at the stars in the sky and knowing that in sometimes saying nothing you are able to still say it all. 

That ending might have been closer to Lynch than we realize. In interviews he often derided unnecessary conversation and adamantly refused to explain his movies which in their surrealist sensations often screamed out for explanations. I loved this about him. Indeed, somewhere along the way I realized that if a movie had a director’s Q&A afterwards, I never wanted to stay for it lest their explanation ruin my interpretation. Lynch, bless his heart, left it up to each and every one of us. He apparently directed a pilot episode for “Star Trek: The Next Generation” all the way back in 1984 that never saw the light of day because it was too, well, Lynch. It’s not so much the existence of this unaired pilot that intrigues me as it is Lynch being associated with “Star Trek” at all. Because if I wanted to try to describe the experience of watching Lynch movies, I might say it was the closest any of us were ever going to get to being dematerialized into pure energy in those moments between being beamed from one place to another by Scotty. What’s the “I’ve Told Ev’ry Little Star” scene in “Mulholland Drive” if not all the b.s. of the movie business suddenly giving way to the moment when a movie emotionally teleports you to another planet? But look at me, interpreting. Lynch’s movies could baffle me, and his movies could mesmerize me, and his movies could do both at once, and a few of his movies I just plum did not like even if more often than not his movies left me with something I would never forget. Any time I sit down to watch a Hallmark Christmas movie, and I watch more of them than I should, Crispin Glover in “Wild at Heart” is not far from my mind. 

I had been working at the Cobblestone 9 movie theater for about five months when “Lost Highway” was released. It was too arty for a multiplex, frankly, and therefore relegated to theater one, like a room, to quote Elaine Benes, “where they bring in POWs to show them propaganda films.” Even so, a few of the other concessionists and I would time our breaks to go up to theater one and leave our bodies for a few minutes by watching the scene where Robert Blake goes up to Bill Pullman at the party and tells Pullman to call him at his home where, sure enough, Blake answers the phone despite being right there in front of Pullman, as evocative of Lynch’s delightful, demented interdimensionality as anything. That was the movie, that was the scene, that made me want to go and find out what David Lynch was all about. In fact, upon learning he died yesterday at the age of 78, I was surprised that when I got home, I didn’t get a phone call from Lynch saying hey from wherever or whatever is on the other side. He wouldn’t have told me what it was like, of course. I’d have to wait and figure that out for myself. 

Watch the scene from “Lost Highway” here

Red One

“Red One” might have received a theatrical run, grossing $185 million worldwide, but distributed as it was through Amazon Prime, it still feels like a streaming movie in spirit, the nadir of the genre whereas Monday’s reviewed “Carry-On” was the apex. Director Jake Kasdan’s action-comedy equates Santa Claus (J.K. Simmons) with the President – Red One is Kris Kringle’s codename – and when he is kidnapped by some evildoers seeking to cancel Christmas, the leader of North Pole security (Dwayne Johnson) and the world’s greatest hacker (Chris Evans) team up for an unlikely rescue mission. Initially it suggests “Air Force One” crossed with “The Night the Reindeer Died,” the spoof movie trailer that opened the Christmas Carol-inspired comedy “Scrooged,” a high enough concept, frankly, only to go higher by borrowing all manner of folkloric holiday characters to try and weave a comic book-like tapestry that causes a two-hour movie to feel even longer and sink under the weight of its own faux clever bloat. 

Johnson, for once, isn’t self-admiringly in on the joke, espousing such belief in Callum’s gift-giving mission in one scene that I thought of the old Statler Brothers song “I Believe in Santa’s Cause,” but a movie so cynical has no idea what do with such earnestness. The devil-may-care charm of Evans, meanwhile, goes wasted once again while the subplot in which his character’s son frets over his dad missing Christmas eventually just settles as that same hoary subplot as opposed to a send-up of it. And rather than a real Christmas classic that families might sit down to watch together each holiday season, “Red One” proves a new-fangled background Christmas classic, destined each December to be on but not watched, noisy wallpaper while parents are wrapping presents, or while kids are watching videos on their tablets, ultimately taking the form of its cacophonous but forgettable CGI-laden action scenes, sound and fury signifying nothing.

Carry-On

“Carry-On” refers to a hard-shell suitcase containing malevolent cargo that an unnamed Traveler (Jason Bateman) blackmails TSA agent Ethan Kopek (Taron Egerton) to let through an LAX baggage scanner, leading to a day-long struggle between the two as Ethan frantically works to keep the unwitting airport and his newly pregnant girlfriend Nora (Sofia Carson) safe. It probably sounds like something you have seen before, and that’s because you have, with director Jaume Collet-Serra and writer TJ Fixman effectively functioning as movie mashup deejays, drawing from “The Rock,” “White House Down,” “Airport,” and the first three “Die Hards,” to cultivate a pastiche. Ah, but in its taut direction, reversal-laden writing, and stable of knowing performances, “Carry-On” is a pastiche with pizazz, a Netflix peak, not designed to last beyond the moment in which you stream it but delightful in that window when you do. 

Borrowing not just the Christmas Eve setting of “Die Hard” but its unrushed set-up, it’s almost startling how much time “Carry-On” takes to rev up. True, there is a time-honored slam-bang opening to rope in anyone casually clicking through streaming options, but once we meet Ethan and Nora on their way to work, Collet-Serra allows us to settle in. In fact, it takes so much time to detail the career opportunities of a TSA agent, while simultaneously sort of sticking up for the TSA as a misunderstood benevolent entity, that it skirts the fine line of propaganda. But it also means that when the script pays off Ethan’s relationship with his skeptical boss (Dean Norris) and his friendship with TSA officer Jason (Sinqua Walls), they emotionally count in a way most movies of this ilk can’t manage.

It’s Jason who gives up his post scanning baggage to let Ethan prove his worth and inadvertently put his pal in harm’s way when Traveler begins communicating with Ethan by earbud, telling him what to do and not to do, threatening Nora on whom the villain’s associate (Theo Rossi) always has eyes. It might strain credulity how often Ethan abandons his post to keep myriad balls in the air as Traveler’s demands increase, but it’s never not entertaining, the way the screenplay continually restacks the deck and puts Ethan back to square one. Egerton excels in the role by not playing so much an everyman as a nobody, a desperate guy totally out of his depth, in full flail, and living the irony that in showing initiative now he has to show more than he ever dreamed.

That desperation is palpable in other places too. There comes a point in Fixman’s screenplay where conveniences become paramount to maintaining forward momentum and keeping characters alive who by all rights probably should have bit the big one by now. And though Collet-Serra and his trio of editors help with relentless forward momentum, it’s also the performances, Egerton, certainly, but also Rossi and especially Danielle Deadwyler in the otherwise underwritten part of LAPD detective Elena Cole who in their escalating exasperation manage to sell the one-more-thing-ness with maximum pith. The only time “Carry-On” really gets out over its skis is an action-packed car crash in which Elena wrestles for control of the vehicle. Thrilling in a vacuum, it’s also scored to “Last Christmas,” meaning it’s the one moment “Carry-On” breaks and winks. Not cool.

Bateman does not wink. In roles like “Up in the Air,” or “Air,” he brings a smug, deadpan air, and here, he recalibrates that air ever so slightly. He’s not just playing a guy one step ahead of Ethan schematically, but spiritually. “I know this guy,” Traveler says, seizing on his perception of Ethan’s lack of initiative, and it’s what Bateman seizes on too, recognizing he is not merely playing the chief heavy but the ghost of Christmas past, present, and future in one, taunting, teasing, but also inadvertently urging Ethan to discover his true self.

Possible Complete Unknown Headlines

The Bob Dylan biopic directed by James Mangold who directed “Walk the Line” (2005) which half-killed the musician biopic was released on December 25th. Its title, “A Complete Unknown,” was, of course, pulled from the Dylan song “Like a Rolling Stone,” and many of reviews of “A Complete Unknown” have, inevitably, turned their headlines into strained puns of Dylan songs and song lyrics. “‘A Complete Unknown’ leaves Dylan’s mystery blowing in the wind,” says The Washington Post, and “Don’t Think Twice,” says Rolling Stone, “Timothée Chalamet’s Bob Dylan Biopic Is Alright.” Sheesh. I think we can do a little bit better than that.

Possible Complete Unknown Headlines 

It Ain’t This Movie, Babe 

It’s Alright, Ma, It’s a Movie, and a Movie Only

I Dreamed I Saw Weird: the Al Yankovic Story

Overexposed, commercialized, handle Chalamet with care

I ain’t gonna work on Disney’s farm no more

Business is a business and it’s a movie most foul 

Send this movie out for some pillars and Cecil B. DeMille

Golden Globes: A Formal Assessment

“I want to start by saying this whole angled camera thing is very weird,” Seth Rogen said at this Sunday’s Golden Globes when appearing midway through the telecast with Catherine O’Hara to present Best Female Actor - Limited/Anthology Series/TV Movie, gratefully giving voice to what everyone was thinking, certainly what My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife and I were thinking watching along at home about the bizarre close-ups in which all the presenters were too close to the camera while also stranded in something approximating the middle of the room with many of the attendees glimpsed in the background. “It’s inelegant, it’s strange, this whole half of the room can see my bald spot.” Charlie Chaplin, who knew a thing or two about a moving camera, observed that life is a tragedy in close-up and a comedy in a long shot and hey, here were the dumb ol’ Globes living it and having no idea they were living it. Simply amazing. 

On the other hand, they did sort of create some comedy in long shot, albeit unintentionally, as the weird camera angles allowed us to occasionally get glimpses of Ralph Fiennes at the “Conclave” table in the background suffering through these interminable and awkward attempts at humor in front of him, an actor in real time trying to decide between continuing to engage with full award campaign mode and shine it on or just crack and start crying. “I can’t take it anymore!” I imagined him screaming, going full Shakespeare. “It’s not worth it!” That was compelling, at least, and all for naught since Fiennes didn’t win Best Dramatic Actor anyway, losing out to Adrien Brody for “The Brutalist,” which maybe makes Brody the Oscar front-runner, or maybe not, who on earth knows, because the Globes are often not a bellwether. I mean, “Wicked” won for something called Cinematic and Box Office Achievement and I don’t even know what that means. That it made more money than the other nominees? It sounds like one of those movie awards that Alvy Singer jokes about in “Annie Hall.” (“It’s about damn time,” Vin Diesel said as he introduced the award, I guess forgetting that more than a few box office blockbusters have won the Golden Globe for Best Dramatic Picture along the way.) I don’t even want to research it. Where was I?

See Stanley Tucci toss back a glass of fizz in real time. This is what the people want.

The camera angles. I was going to say, this was just proof that enshittification has come for awards shows too, which can’t just stick to the camera angles that have worked for eons, how every ostensible improvement in our lives is the exact opposite, but nobody wants to hear that, least of all My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife, who hears this every day and is probably rolling her eyes right now. And anyway, I must call myself out; it’s not true! CBS made one discernible improvement to their Globes telecast! As if hearkening back to their coverage of the NCAA basketball tournament of yore, when they would throw it to commercials or come back from commercials by deploying a quad box so that we could see games taking place in all four regions, CBS used a quad box for the Globes each time they went to commercial so we could see interactions between celebrities in four different places rather than one, a la the poor image above taken of my television set. As I’ve repeated ad nauseum, this is what we want from Hollywood’s Holiday Office Party – celebrities! Altcasts are all the rage these days, especially for sports, showing big games through all manner of different perspectives, and for next year’s Globes, CBS needs to get into the alt-cast business by running a concurrent broadcast on another channel, or online, where cameras are trained on individual tables and we can watch the entire show by watching, say, the “Only Murders in the Building” table. Imagine watching Martin Short watch the Golden Globes. It’s the awards show final frontier. 

(All Golden Globes winners are listed anywhere else on the internet.)

Cinema Romantico 2025 Movie Preview: THRILLERS ONLY

The consensus seems to view January as the worst month. I’ve always considered August the worst month, the dog days of summer dragging on, but then, I prefer winter to summer. And truth is, January has much to hold against it. No matter how many people try to frame it as a new beginning, the older you get, the more you realize our calendar is just a Gregorian construct and time is a flat circle. No wonder that the first month of the year, like the eighth, is a movie dumping ground for so many middling thrillers, like “Back in Action” (Jan. 17 on Netflix), which was supposed to be Cameron Diaz’s own triumphant new beginning but reports paint as a false start. On the other hand, how would one want to ease into the dreadful new year with anything other than some middling thrillers? I still have a lot of 2024 movies to catch up with, but what excites me is not “The Brutalist” nor “Nosferatu” but [makes sign of Lauren Bacall’s beret in “The Big Sleep”] “Flight Risk” (Jan. 24 in theaters). No matter who directed it, no matter who it stars, I confess, every time that trailer has appeared during a college football bowl game, it has made me feel warm and fuzzy and given me something to anticipate. Here are some others to look forward to, or not, as we once again preview the upcoming year in movies through the lens of thrillers only.

(Releases are, of course, ranked on the Runaway Jury Scale, measuring each new thriller’s potential for glorious middlingness, 1 being the lowest and 5 the highest.) 

Cinema Romantico 2025 Movie Preview: THRILLERS ONLY

Carry-On. This Netflix action-thriller mash-up was officially released in December, but it’s probable you have yet to see it. I have seen it, and I’ll write a review at some point, and though, full disclaimer, I watched during a bout with Christmas Covid (fun!), meaning while my head was impossibly congested and I was hopped up on cold medicine and soused on ginger tea, I might have enjoyed it more than “Conclave.” We give it...5 Runaway Juries

Flight Risk. See Above. We give it...5 Runaway Juries

Fight or Flight. Another one on a plane with the added benefit of starring Josh Hartnett who continues his unlikely transformation into a quadragenarian middling thriller star. Could his next one co-star Clea DuVall? We give it...3 Runaway Juries

Hurry Up Tomorrow. This is apparently a thriller based on the upcoming album of the same name by The Weeknd. So, is it like if Bob Dylan’s “Renaldo and Clara” had been a spy thriller? And would that have made “Renaldo and Clara” better or worse? We give it...1 Runaway Jury

Inheritance. Rather than the hereditary succession to some sort of substantial financial portfolio, like “Inheritance” (2020), or “The Inheritance” (2024), the inheritance here is spy craft. That’s how we do! We give it...3 Runaway Juries

The Amateur. Instead of just having a particular set of skills, a la Liam Neeson, Rami Malek must train to acquire those particular skills...and only get that training upon blackmail. Innovative! We give it...3 Runaway Juries

Cold Storage. Speaking of Liam Neeson, here he seems to be starring in some kind of lightly veiled COVID-19 conspiracy thriller...except it’s based on a novel published in 2019. A novel by David Koepp, the accomplished screenwriter who is member of the Middling Thriller Hall of Fame. Splits the difference. We give it...3 Runaway Juries

Bring Them Down. An Irish thriller in which a shepherd gets into a whozeewhatzit over some dead sheep sounds like it should star Liam Neeson but stars Barry Keoghan instead and also sounds like the trashier version of “Rams (2016),” not “Rams (2020),” which I mean as a compliment, mostly. We give it...3 Runaway Juries

Beneath the Storm. This just sounds like “Sharknado” with Djimon Hounsou. If they’re going to let Djimon Hounsou finally cut loose and embrace his inner-comedian, I give it...3 Runaway Juries; if they’re just going to try and make a solemn “Sharknado,” I give it...Zero Runaway Juries.

From the World of John Wick: Ballerina. The old Continental Basketball Association should have branded itself this way – From the World of the NBA: the CBA. We give it...3 Quad City Thunder

Mission: Impossible – Final Reckoning. “Dead Reckoning Part One” didn’t seem to make as big a splash as it should have, maybe because at some people point just become bored by excellence, like with the Kansas City Chiefs. Even so, I’m no less excited for this one than I was for the previous one, or “Fallout” before it, even as I hope this really is the final reckoning, at least for the Christopher McQuarrie versions. Like Tom Cruise sitting atop the Burj Khalifa, why not go out on top? We give it...5 Runaway Juries

If you judge a movie by its cover, we have a possible Best Picture winner on our hands.

Black Bag. Is a Steven Soderbergh riff on a middling thriller Store Brand Soderbergh or a middle-shelf wine that tastes top-shelf? Either one, honestly, this is 5 Runaway Juries.

Working Man. “Levon Cade left his profession behind to live a simple life of working construction and spending time with his daughter. However, when his boss's daughter vanishes, he's called upon to use the skills that made him a legendary figure in the shadowy world of black ops.” That synopsis seems ripe for every working critic’s standby This Could Have Been Written By A.I. joke but nope, it was just co-written by Sylvester Stallone. We give it...2 1/2 Runaway Juries

Alarum. This one wasn’t written by Sylvester Stallone, but it stars Sylvester Stallone because one way or another he’s gonna let you know this old guy’s still got it. We give it...2 Runaway Juries

Now You See Me 3. We’re still making these? We give it...Zero Runaway Juries

Den of Thieves 2: Pantera. Will “Den of Thieves 3” be “Den of Thieves 3: Slayer?” [Crickets.] We give it...Zero Runaway Juries

The Running Man. It has Glen Powell, I get it, as they say, and yet, a remake of an 80s dystopian thriller during the second reign of His Imbecility makes it feel like Jack Donaghy should be involved. We give it...1 Runaway Jury

Not In the Grey, but it could be.

In the Grey. Guy Ritchie’s latest thriller has been postponed from its original January release, so maybe it won’t even see the light of day in 2025, but it’s still worth mentioning for starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Henry Cavill as a pair of extraction specialists and how I like to imagine this instead as a 1955 Martin and Lewis joint.  

Cleaner. This sounds like if “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” were a mainstream thriller rather than action-packed agitprop meaning I feel like it’s destined to make people looking for a mere middling thriller angry and people looking for “How to Blow Up a Pipeline 2” even angrier. We give it...1 Runaway Jury

Untitled Paul Thomas Anderson Event Movie. This IMDb phrasing makes PTA’s next joint sound like a disaster movie released in June, which would be incredible, honestly, all the PTA players in some variation of “The Towering Inferno,” though word on Hollywood Blvd is that it might be a thriller, or at least, thriller-adjacent, which would be incredible in its own right. I don’t necessarily believe it, but still, it’s fun to imagine the guy who engineered the best movie car chase of 2021 in “Licorice Pizza” with only one car (and no gas!) making a true blue thriller. In the event that it is, we give it...5 TK-421 hi-fi stereo systems