Friday's Old Fashioned: Out of Sight (1998)

In discussing “Jenny From the Block” for his 60 Songs explaining the 2000s podcast, host Rob Harvilla mentioned Jennifer Lopez’s, shall we say, less than forceful voice and its myriad detractors, including her diva rival, Mariah Carey. And the thing is, they’re both right, Harvilla and Mariah. After the episode, I listened to my personal favorite JLo track “Ain’t It Funny” and it’s true, Lopez’s voice is thin, holding up its end of the bargain and not much more. Ah, but voices are strange, fickle things, aren’t they, and where, say, a voice might shoot the lights out on a song like “Emotions” that same voice might barely rise to the occasion in a movie like “Glitter,” or like “The Christmas Melody,” God help us, just as a voice that might get swept away by a gust of wind on “Ain’t It Funny” can turn around and be so kinetic in something like “Out of Sight.”

Lopez is Karen Sisco, a U.S. Federal Marshal, who winds up locked in the trunk of her own car at Glades Correctional Institution in south Florida with bank robber Jack Foley (George Clooney) after he escapes with the help of his friend, the aptly named Buddy (Ving Rhames). It’s a meet cute by trunk light, and one shrewdly designed to put Karen and Jack in as close physical proximity as possible before moving them apart, tantalizing us as much as they tantalize each other, occasionally giving us glimpses of their chemistry, like him waving at her from across a hotel lobby, just for a second, so you can practically feel the static electricity in the air. Scott Frank’s screenplay, adapted from Elmore Leonard’s 1996 novel of the same name, might have a jigsaw design, but interestingly, it’s not trying to gin up surprise. Instead, it uses its mismatched time frames to illuminate backstory without having to resort to exposition while also enhancing the romantic tension to nigh unbelievable levels.

Yet, even if “Out of Sight” effectively maximizes its stars, it just as effectively builds out the world around them with a gallery of well-crafted and well-played supporting characters. As the chief heavy, Don Cheadle nimbly plays both halves of his alternating nicknames, Mad Dog and Snoopy, to be feared and not as big as his britches, while Steve Zahn as bungling thief Glenn Michaels invites improbable empathy while demonstrating so much comic haplessness in concocting the climactic heist of a wealthy tycoon (Albert Brooks) in Detroit. And though Lopez and Clooney share magnificent chemistry, they each have equally magnificent chemistry with, respectively, Dennis Farina as Karen’s dad and Rhames as Buddy, both actors help illuminating so much backstory and texture in just their airs. (Rhames has a fantastic bit of body language in the way he just munches on pieces a candy bar, delighting in the small pleasures of the incarcerated.)

Still, for all the fine supporting turns, “Out of Sight” remains the Lopez and Clooney show, building to a showstopping scene in a Detroit hotel bar where they finally meet again. Building off a jokey observation from the trunk, Jack wondering what might happen if they met under different circumstances and he offered to buy her a drink, this scene feels like fantasy. A fantasy to them, yes, but also to us, illustrating the silver screen’s ability to let us indulge the fantastical. The snow falling outside the window virtually literalizes the snow globe effect, the two embracing their chaotic “relationship,” and when they return to her room, Soderbergh briefly trades out the chillier hues of his Motor City scenes re-infuses the images with the warm colors of the Florida scenes. It doesn’t last, though, as “Out of Sight” punctures the fantasy in a conclusion that emotionally counts. 

Maybe because of how Soderbergh emerged through Sundance, we tend to think of him as an independent filmmaker, outside the mainstream, but in “Out of Sight” he also tapped his unlikely gift as a movie star whisperer. He helped Clooney ditch his head down-eyes up acting style, and the hair and makeup people helped him go away from the Caesar cut, unlocking his inner-movie star in a way the previous summer’s “Batman and Robin” could not. From the marvelously crafted opening scene, a gentlemanly bank robbery, he belongs on the big screen in a way he theretofore had not. In fact, Joe Chrest and Wayne Pere, playing ad guys who haplessly hit on Karen in the hotel bar before Jack appears, become a useful juxtaposition between posers and real thing, between showing off and self-confidence.

Retroactive 1998 Costume Design / Hairstyling of the Year: bangs, turtleneck, and popped black leather jacket collar that frame Jennifer Lopez’s face like the Movie Star she is.

Clooney’s self-confidence manifests as relaxation, presaging his roles in the “Ocean’s” movies, but Lopez’s onscreen self-confidence manifests as a rock-solid physical presence in scenes where her character is in peril and in others, as a quiet inner strength. Even when it’s clear that Karen is smitten with this handsome bank robber, Lopez never tamps down those traits. Both Lopez and the movie are conscious, after all, that Karen is a woman in a man’s world, managing an overprotective father, suffering a condescending superior, fending off so many blowhards, like those ad guys. Another movie might have had Jack tell them off, but Karen handles them herself, first politely, then with no uncertain exasperation. “Beat it, Andy,” she says, finally, and emphatically, though without Lopez raising her voice, her breathiness like a bass drum, a line reading as cutting as it is comical. Mariah couldn’t have said it that way.

Sacramento

“Sacramento” begins in Los Angeles where dad-to-be Glenn (Michael Cera) puts the finishing touches on what will be his first child’s crib. Overcome with anxiety, he decides the crib isn’t sturdy enough, rips it apart, and dumps the splintered remains outside. He’s not ready to be a dad, in other words, and which his wife Rosie (Kristen Stewart) knows, encouraging him not just to go hang out with his rash friend Rickey (Michael Angarano), who first appears hiding in a tree outside their home, seeking an element of surprise in his saying hello, but to take a spur of the moment road trip with him to California’s capital city to help him grieve by spreading his father’s ashes. After all, a road trip is the only cure for such male blues, a rather conventional hook belying a rather conventional arc that Angarano, who directed, still evinces with enough flair and wit to render it enjoyable. 

In Rickey’s air, it is as obvious to the audience as it is to Glenn that this trip really isn’t about his father’s ashes, and thankfully Angarano, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Chris Smith, doesn’t endeavor to conceal this truth too long. When the director reveals this truth to the audience, it’s through a slapstick scene at a gas station in which Rickey stuffs dirt in a tennis ball can in the guise of ashes, building to a solid comic capper where an unwitting Glenn kicks away one of the tennis balls, demonstrating Angarano’s penchant throughout for visual physical comedy. And though he does tend to let his soundtrack do too much of the emotional work, I liked Angarano’s choice of Smog’s “Hit the Ground Running” laid over a scene in which the two friends/not-friends end up comically/not-so-comically acting out their passive aggressions in a fighting ring in lieu of going to therapy.

As “Sacramento” closes in on Rickey’s real reason for bringing Glenn there, it can start to feel like a left coast version of last year’s “A Real Pain” but with fatherhood as the subject rather than heritage. That’s not to suggest it’s derivative, just that there are striking similarities between the characters, and just as in “A Real Pain,” Jesse Eisenberg as director let his acting co-star Keiran Culkin walk away with the picture so, too, is Angarano content to center his picture as Cera’s. And though the script might have stood to round out Glenn a little more, especially where his job is concerned, Cera brings the character fully to life, nevertheless, bordering on unlikable without tipping over into unsympathetic.

As good as Cera is, though, Stewart quietly, effortlessly walks away with “Sacramento” despite limited screen time. If one more tale of immature dudes finding the wherewithal to mount up and become men leaves you nonplussed, honestly, I understand, and the truth is, “Sacramento” isn’t entirely helped by its ending glossing over some tough questions with montages. Neither, though, does “Sacramento” abandon its female characters in the way that Rickey and Glenn do. As Rickey’s old flame Tallie, who appears at the beginning and then again toward the end, Maya Erskine makes the movie itself and its deliberate semi-aimlessness focus as much as Rickey himself. Her character, though, is also more well-drawn than Stewart’s and so it’s an extra testament to the latter that she still makes Rosie feel lived-in. Written as almost heroically patient, Stewart smartly lets quiet exasperation still seep through, bringing the character’s dressing down of Glenn that she shouldn’t have to take care of him like a second infant to life. 

Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere

When Bruce Springsteen (Jeremy Allen White) tells his manager Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong) to tell the record company that he wants no press for his latest album, “Nebraska,” he says it’s not so much because he doesn’t want to explain the record as he couldn’t even explain the record in the first place. It’s a good window into the all-acoustic, out of step 1982-released “Nebraska” itself but it’s an equally good window into writer/director Scott Cooper’s difficult task in adapting Warren Zanes’s book about the album’s recording: how do you make a movie about a making a record the artist can’t explain? And it’s why I admired Cooper for eschewing the standard biopic template, not telling the Boss’s story from the beginning but seeking to capture a moment in time, one in which an on-the-cusp-of-superstardom Bruce Springsteen forged one of his most revered records while in the throes of considerable emotional and mental struggles. The problem is, even if “Deliver Me from Nowhere” wants to put us in that headspace, it can’t. 

“Deliver Me from Nowhere” begins with Springsteen ending his latest tour and hunkering down in a temporary New Jersey home where he plans to demo some new material on a four-track cassette recorder with guitar tech Mike Batlan (Paul Walter Hauser) functioning as makeshift producer and Bruce’s bedroom functioning as makeshift studio. “I want it to sound like I’m in the room by himself,” he notes, hinting at an isolation from the world around him born at least part from his depression. These are abstract concepts, however, to show on screen and rather than unlock his imagination, Cooper resorts to humdrum biopic convention like black and white flashbacks to Springsteen’s mentally ill father (Stephen Graham) and inventing a diner waitress girlfriend, Faye (Odessa Young), with whom the singer-songwriter can’t bring himself to connect. That uninspired approach with the screenplay trickles down to the direction, reducing White’s turn to nothing, really, but a series of disconnected emotionally constipated poses in which the actor strains to show us something but just winds up signifying nothing. And White never looks worse than when he’s opposite Hauser, the former’s effortful acting standing in harsh contrast to the latter’s effortlessness. 

Though much of “Deliver Me from Nowhere” ostensibly turns on Springsteen’s creative process, Cooper fatally fails in bringing that creative process to life. Springsteen famously culled his album’s title track from the plot of Terrence Malick’s “Badlands,” and though we see the character watching the movie on late-night TV, there is no sense of why it moved him, or how it connected to what he was feeling, just as one scene of him revising the lyrics from the third person to the first is an unsatisfactory literalization of putting himself into the song without conveying why he thought it so personal. What’s more, there is no sense of his awakening social and political consciousness, one that gave rise to “Born in the U.S.A.,” which we see come to life in the studio in the movie’s most thrilling sequence, because Cooper infuses virtually no sense of the larger world and how the songs written during this period were an echo of it. “Deliver Me from Nowhere” might lead you to believe that song was just a telling of Paul Schrader’s bar band screenplay with the same title, a script we see Landau give to Springsteen, though that is not even a little bit true. 

Odd as it might sound, the only real glimpse of the outside world is when we see Bruce listening to Foreigner’s 1981 hit “Urgent” on his car radio. I enjoyed it simply for seeing Bruce Springsteen listening to Foreigner but in its own unexpected way, it also puts into perspective the pop culture climate into which he wanted to release “Nebraska,” the seeming folly of such a choice. In making it, Landau and his team have to move some measure of mountain and earth to follow through, but unlike 2019’s electrifying “Her Smell,” “Deliver Me from Nowhere” does not evoke the herculean struggle of handling a tempestuous artist, not least because it can’t help but soften Springsteen’s tempestuous edges, as if afraid of offending its subject. On “Nebraska,” Springsteen got down to where his spirit met his bone, but “Deliver Me from Nowhere” doesn’t even get close. 

Friday's Old Fashioned: Brewster McCloud (1970)

“Brewster McCloud” was the result of a familiar Hollywood scenario in which a filmmaker (Robert Altman) hits it so big (M.A.S.H.) that he receives carte blanche from the moneybags-that-be with his next movie. Even by those standards, though, the maverick Altman swung for the fences. Indeed, the original screenplay by Doran William Cannon, heavily revised by the director, was set in New York but moved to Houston, much of it taking place in and around the Astrodome, the so-called Eighth Wonder of the World, a monument to an American kind of excess destined to eventually go bust. “Brewster McCloud” begins with a bang, concludes with a bigger bang, and in-between exists as a wild, wandering satire of a country it can’t quite bring itself to believe in, maybe portending the 70s, maybe just responding to what was in the air. In opens with a deliberate Frank Debrin-ish recitation of the National Anthem by Daphne Heap, who is played by Margaret Hamilton, who was The Wicked Witch of the West, which Altman makes explicit by putting her in ruby slippers, giving way to a performance by the Merry Clayton of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the Black national anthem, and reminding us how good our national anthem could be, never mind our country.

Is it any wonder the eponymous Brewster McCloud (Bud Cort) has taken to a fallout shelter beneath the Astrodome where, aided by something like a revisionist Clarence Odbody, a guardian angel (Sally Kellerman) who seems to have lost her wings, he goes about building his own mechanical wings to take flight like a bird and escape all this mess. Costumed in a red and white striped shirt that evokes Where’s Waldo, Brewster never quite entirely takes flight as a true character himself. He often recedes into the background of a movie in which he’s nominally in the foreground, with Cort’s deliberately standoffish air never taking hold of the screen like Shelley DuVall as his unlikely kinda, sorta love interest, demonstrating in her inaugural onscreen role that she just seemed to arrive onscreen intact in her one-of-a-kind eccentric air.

Then again, in the parallel sequences of an unnamed professor (René Auberjonois) rattling on and on about birds, these monologues essentially describing the behavior of Brewster, it’s a little like he’s in a National Geographic special, a specimen being observed. And he’s a specimen stranded in a world of ignoramuses, racists, and elites. Altman doesn’t let us simply work that out for ourselves; he makes it as pointed as possible, highlighted in how he calls these, shall we say, deplorables out by having bird poop repeatedly fall on them from above, ravens as sort of spiritual hecklers, calling strikes and balls on the playing God phonies below.

The denouement, though, in which Brewster does take to the air with his artificial wings is limited to the Astrodome’s interior, meaning that despite the initial free-feeling nature of the scene, undergirded with inspiring music, he’s still a caged bird. Even then, I wasn’t quite ready for the utterly dark turn this moment takes, joy giving way to agony giving way to horror. And if I wasn’t quite ready for it, I was even less ready for how the utterly dark turn took another turn right back into joy, albeit a brutally ironic kind of joy, deriding breaking the fourth wall to essentially invite us into the horror, a beautifully bewildering coda. It’s nothing new, of course, both before and after “Brewster McCloud,” to equate our society with a bloodthirsty circus crowd but rarely have I seen it conveyed with such manic rage. 

Americana

“Americana” is one of those there’s-a-movie-in-there-somewhere movies. Its interlocking narratives of various characters seeking a valuable Native American artifact in rural South Dakota hints at a darkly comic revisionist cowboys and Indians western though writer/director Tony Test can never quite finesse it into anything so substantial. His tone often veers, a campy crime drama striving for barbed satire, or a B-movie straining to be an A-list movie with something to say, just never quite sure how to say it, building to a big multi-character shootout in which gunfire becomes a wannabe spackle for all those tonal holes. Tost was the show runner of the second season of “Poker Face,” but while that show also tries out different tones from episode to episode, Natasha Lyonne’s unique air helps meld it together. And though Sydney Sweeney is featured on the “Americana” poster, she is merely one part of an ensemble, and her character, like the others, is defined more by a gimmick than an inner life. She has a stutter, and Lefty (Paul Walter Hauser) is a righty, and a young boy (Gavin Maddox Bergman) claims he’s in the reincarnation of Sitting Bull, the last one a set-up with no punchline. The ever-impressive Hauser gives the one performance that seems most at home, believably rendering a big-hearted sap who can’t help walking straight into a spiderweb, which is where everyone in the real-life cast ends up, like it or not.

Caught Stealing

Whether you love them, hate them, or have mixed feelings about him, Darren Aronofsky creates genuine cinematic experiences. Those experiences, however, tend to be intense; sometimes they even put their finger in your eye. There’s nothing wrong with that, and I have relished as many Aronofsky experiences as I have abhorred, but it’s also nice to see that in “Caught Stealing,” for the first time he seems to be making a movie for no higher purpose than the hell of it. That’s not to suggest this comedy neo-noir is lighthearted; far from it. You still must steel yourself to endure some vicious violence, vivid projectile vomit, and a recurring car crash brutally rendered. But. If you choose to engage his wavelength, you might just find yourself walking away from “Caught Stealing” not saying, “I admired it,” but “I enjoyed that.”

The title refers to Lower East Side bartender Hank Thompson’s (Austin Butler) being a one-time highly regarded baseball prospect before a high-speed one-car crash ended his dreams of playing in the show, but also references Aronofsky himself, essentially making it clear he means “Caught Stealing” as pastiche. The emergent underworld odyssey of Hank nods to Martin Scorsese’s “After Hours,” rendered explicit in that movie’s star Griffin Dunne appearing in “Caught Stealing” as Hank’s boss, and the late 90s setting evokes not just Quentin Tarantino but so many Quentin Tarantino rip-offs, a soundtrack of pop hits and a litany of big names in small parts, right down to the concluding cameo that feel as spot-on as it does superfluous. “Caught Stealing,” though, proves more than merely some glossy replicant by bringing its main character to genuine life. 

To this point in his career, Butler has generally opted for a stylized approach to acting, but in “Caught Stealing” he shifts into a remarkably successful naturalistic register. He exudes a benevolence, and a righteous moral center, despite the character’s tendency toward being his own worst enemy. It’s what makes it so believable that his paramedic girlfriend Yvonne (Zoë Kravitz) would be so drawn to him. Butler and Kravitz, in fact, have some of the year’s most electrifying chemistry, two people who feel truly in love and excited by the other’s presence, and Aronofsky does not rush past it but revels in it, embodying one of the oldest, truest reasons we go to the movies, to see beautiful people carousing onscreen. And this is why when the script moves Yvonne aside, there is disappointment but also resonance; it hurts; it counts. 

“Caught Stealing” is set in motion by Hank being left in the care of his punk next-door neighbor Russ’s (Matt Smith) cat when he needs to jump back across the pond for a family emergency. It doesn’t take long, though, for Russian mobsters to come looking for Russ, and Hasidic gangsters too, not to mention an NYPD narcotics detective, all of whom are searching for a key of which Hank belatedly realizes he has been left in possession. If the cat had been a black one, this might have signified Hank being caught under the cloud of bad luck, given how all the people in his close orbit suffer as he tries to finagle a way out of this jam. But the feline is a grey Siberian forest cat, and the script is careful to make clear that while Hank catches a truly bad break, he is equally guilty of bringing harm to the people closest to him via his own poor decision-making, all tied back to the car crash. And that’s why Aronofsky returning to the car crash again and again in flashback is not excessive but apt, demonstrating the cycle he is stuck in, and only through another car crash does he realize he can finally break that cycle and set himself free. 

Friday's Old Fashioned: Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993)

“Manhattan Murder Mystery” begins with a thunderous overture in the form of Bobby Short’s 1973 recording of Cole Porter’s “I Happen to Like New York” as the camera sweeps overhead with panoramic views of the glittering city skyline at night. Carol Lipton (Diane Keaton) might like New York, or have liked it once, but she seems less enamored as the movie opens, palpably suffering through a New York Rangers hockey game at Madison Square Garden to which she has been dragged by her husband Larry (Woody Allen). Is it any wonder when they return home to their apartment and their down-the-hall neighbors Paul and Lillian House (Jerry Adler and Lynn Cohen, respectively) invite them over some late-night coffee, she jumps at the chance despite her spouse’s protestations? When Lillian asks Carol if she works, she replies that she used to, at an ad agency, but that was many years ago. This comment is never followed up on, but it doesn’t need to be. Her age is never said, but she and Larry have a son in college and Keaton was 47 at the time of “Manhattan Murder Mystery’s” release and there is a palpable middle-age drift in Keaton’s line reading of “many years ago,” one that communicates how Carol’s life did not slip off track, necessarily, but started to coast. When Mrs. House turns up dead, ascribed to a mysterious heart condition, Carol becomes convinced a murder has been committed and sets out to solve it.

In many ways, “Manhattan Murder Mystery” feels familiar, but that’s part of the point. “Paddington” and “Paddington 2” director Paul King might have encouraged his cast to pull inspiration from writer/director Allen’s 1993 comedy, but Allen’s 1993 comedy is pulling inspiration from the noirs of the 40s and 50s. “Too much ‘Double Indemnity,’” Larry cautions when Carol spitballs insurance as Mr. House’s possible motive. In truth, “Manhattan Murder Mystery” is nowhere near as tightly plotted as that masterpiece. There are contrivances galore and myriad gaps in logic and the conclusion, itself an ode to “The Lady from Shanghai,” is a bit underwhelming. Not that it matters. Allen is more focused on comedy than precise narrative coherence, yielding at least one true classic bit, the falsification of a phone call, the scene that to which “Paddington 2” paid gleeful homage. Even more than that, though, “Manhattan Murder Mystery” succeeds via the chemistry and energy of its leads, reteaming for the first time since the 70s, though unlike “Annie Hall” in which Allen’s character led the narrative, Keaton’s leads this one, a refreshing and crucial change of pace.

In his New Yorker obituary for Keaton, Hilton Als noted that what made their collaborations so successful was that “Keaton never gives us the feeling that she actually hears or understands what Allen is saying.” This was never truer than in “Manhattan Murder Mystery,” so much that Allen wrote it into the text, a hilarious sequence in which Larry declares that he forbids Carol from breaking into the House’s apartment in the middle of the night. She breaks in anyway. “Is that what you do when I’m forbidding?” he rhetorically, haplessly asks. Though Larry is spurred to win his wife back over, motivated in part by their mutual friend Ted (Alan Alda, perfect), recently divorced and nursing a longtime crush on Carol, the chief excitement is in watching Carol unlock a newfound sense of joy. At one point, she remarks that she feels “dizzy with freedom,” and Keaton brings that sentiment to life, undergirded in the handheld camerawork. In most movies, the camera drives the action, but in “Manhattan Murder Mystery,” the camera hastening around corners and down halls and across streets always feels as if it’s hustling to keep up with her.