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. 

The Lost Bus

In “The Lost Bus,” the worst wildfire in California’s history, 2018’s Camp Fire, which burned up 150,000 acres, caused 16 million in damage, and took 85 lives, is seen predominantly through the eyes of real-life school bus driver Kevin McKay who was enlisted to evacuate 22 students and their two teachers to safety. Director Paul Greengrass and his co-screenwriter Brad Inglesby load up their Kevin McKay (Matthew McConaughey) with all manner of personal problems, many of which were based on fact, like a sick son, and some which were not, like his work superior (Ashlie Atkinson) not being too keen on his job performance. I understand the dramatic impulse given a factual story that does not provide traditional tidy closure, but it can’t help feeling callous, creating a narrative hurdle for Kevin to cross, as if shepherding kids through an inferno is the only way he can prove his self-worth. It makes “The Lost Bus” feel like the sort of Hollywood disaster movie it often transcends. 

The real drama is strictly elemental, a battle against the elements, man v fire. Rather than a distant cloud of smoke, Greengrass does not recount the start of the fire, a faulty power line stemming from corporate malfeasance and spurred on by unrelenting dry conditions, through the point-of-view of a character but with the camera itself, showing that deadly wind whipping through trees, as if evoking the wildfire’s emergent pulse, not just bringing the blaze to life but making it feel terrifyingly alive. And though Greengrass keeps touching base with the firefighters and their increasingly futile efforts at containment, he smartly keeps his focus on the bus while also keeping any sense of exploitative action set pieces to a minimum. In doing so, the lost bus becomes a kind of allegory, akin to a skiff in a flood, of mankind overwhelmed in a losing battle against the escalating effects of climate change. At one point, rather than continuing to try and navigate their way out of the all-encompassing smoke, Kevin decides to just stop the bus when he realizes they seem to be in the one place where the fire isn’t, hoping to wait it out. But eventually, the fire finds them anyway. 

A House of Dynamite

As best I can recall, “A House of Dynamite” is the only Netflix movie I have ever seen in a movie theater first. And I was distressed to learn that even on the big screen, Kathryn Bigelow’s ticking clock nuclear thriller was coated in that same stale streaming sheen endemic to the small screen. It might have been appropriate, though, at least from my point of view, given that the doomsday movies I grew up with – “The Day After,” “Special Bulletin” – were all made for TV. Yet, even if “A House of Dynamite” can sometimes look like television, it never feels like television, infused with a couple crucial anti-plot touches in the form of an enigmatic inciting incident and ending. And while Bigelow’s screenplay co-written with Noah Oppenheim contains some clumsy dialogue, like a recurring line ripped from the godawful “Armageddon” (“This is insanity” - “No, this is reality”) and the weighty observation giving the film its title cited as being plucked from a podcast, god help us, she is not just visually mapping her narrative but creating a deliberately distressing emotional experience. 

“A House of Dynamite” begins with White House Situation Room Captain Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson) tending to a sick child, and Major Daniel Gonzalez (Anthony Ramos) at Alaska’s Fort Greely missile-defense complex taking a tense phone call, unnecessary dollops of character. The real power comes from simply watching Walker go to work, like she has a thousand times before, a breakfast order becoming a split-second window into her whole character, the necessity of staying on task and not wasting time, which becomes paramount when it becomes clear an unattributed intercontinental ballistic missile is not one more exercise but a real-world threat, headed for the United States, namely Chicago, as if my city hasn’t suffered enough in 2025. Everybody has trained for this, they are constantly reminded, but in carefully laying out the procedures born of that training, we are made to realize that even when every i is dotted and every t is crossed, the system is not necessarily infallible. 

Walker is not the only prominent character in “A House of Dynamite”; there is also Deputy National Security Advisor Jake Baerington (Gabriel Basso) trying to determine the responsible aggressor, General Anthony Brady (Tracy Letts), senior officer at the U.S. Strategic Command, focusing on potential retaliation, and, of course, the President of the United States (Idris Elba), forced to make the ultimate call. Rather than crosscutting between them, however, Bigelow and Oppenheim choose to present “A House of Dynamite” as a triptych. Just as the missile is about to make an impact, Bigelow flashes back twice more to see the same scenario play out from other vantage points. It has a peculiar effect, cutting tension that might have been more preeminent had it presented these events simultaneously, and not really providing alternate viewpoints as a typical Rashomon effect might suggest. What it does, though, is play with and eventually subvert our Hollywood-coded expectations that there must be a solution to this apocalyptic problem. If Walker didn’t solve it, then Brady will, and if Brady doesn’t, then Potus will…but will he?

     
Bigelow keeps her locales limited, never even providing us an establishing shot of Chicago, just a dot on a map. This is akin to “Dr. Strangelove,” which stuck to just a few sets to evoke a small number of increasingly mad men holding the fate of the world in their hands, though in “A House of Dynamite,” it underscores how the people enlisted to help protect our fate might themselves be just like us: helpless. Unlike the former, the latter is not a comedy, and Bigelow’s handheld camerawork emphasizes drama and suspense, but there is emergent bleak humor too. Letts is essentially playing “Dr. Strangelove’s” Buck C. Turgidson straight, and though we are conditioned to expect POTUS to rise to the occasion, Elba’s harried air and the way he slumps in his seat in his Presidential Limo both suggest someone shrinking from it. A phone call to his wife as he labors to make a call about a counterstrike becomes a pointed evocation of how this is all up to him, which might be the movie’s single most terrifying moment if you consider, as Bigelow no doubt intends us to, it in light of the real POTUS. 

Embedded throughout “A House of Dynamite” is the struggle to determine the party responsible for firing the missile in the first place, an ambiguity that foreshadows an equally ambiguous ending. That ambiguity, however, is no cop-out but on purpose. In the great post-Cold War thriller “Crimson Tide, Denzel Washington’s Naval lieutenant commander observes that in the nuclear age, the true enemy is war itself. In the end, Bigelow doesn’t say it; she shows it.

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Indian Runner (1991)

In preparation for the release today of the Bruce Springsteen biopic about recording his 1982 album “Nebraska,” I rewatched “The Indian Runner,” Sean Penn’s 1991 directorial debut inspired by a song from that same album. The song was “Highway Patrolman,” telling the story of two brothers, Joe and Frankie Roberts (respectively, David Morse and Viggo Mortensen in the movie), the former a calm family man and a state trooper, the latter a hothead prone to violence, putting a macabre spin on the chestnut Family First by charting how their relationship comes to a head. The song itself is starkly presented, just Springsteen and his guitar and harmonica, a touch of mandolin, but Penn lays “The Indian Runner” on thick with frequent bouts of ominous slow motion and scads of portentous symbolism that strive and fail to create something mythic. (He also tags the movie with a quote to ensure we don’t miss the conclusion’s point, demonstrating a lack of trust in the viewer that grinds my gears.) Penn honors the details of the verses but also fleshes them out, adding characters, a mother (Sandy Dennis) and father (Charles Bronson) for the brothers and a wife (Patricia Arquette) for Frankie, adding an extra layer of irony to Springsteen’s key observation that a man who turns his back on his family “ain’t no good.” 

On the other hand, Penn eschews trying to visually translate the chorus, the one about Joe and Frankie taking turns dancing with Joe’s future wife Maria (Valeria Golino in the film) “as the band played Night of the Johnstown Flood.” It’s as beautiful a lyric as Springsteen ever composed, and maybe Penn knew he couldn’t do it justice, but it also speaks to what’s missing from “The Indian Runner”: just the tiniest crack of light. It is a morose experience, perhaps reflective of a writer/director it is said once smoked four packs a day. Brief montages of happiness feel forced, ostensible beatific images of Joe and his family skew oddly mournful, and though Bronson’s powerful performance as Mr. Roberts initially seems to suggest a hard-won peace with the world, that peace proves a lie.

Frankie’s father has essentially written his son off as a lost cause and you can understand why. He’s a real nasty piece of work, played by Mortensen as such, giving even his few moments of grace the feel of a sly-grinned con. He’s virtually impossible to like and that’s the point: Penn wants to put us in the headspace of Joe, to grapple with the struggle of offering love and protection to someone so unworthy of it. I appreciate that approach, but there is an appreciable lack of tension between the brothers and no genuine sense of their deep roots that renders this central relationship inert. I can’t imagine Penn didn’t see the two sides of himself in Joe and Frankie and meant it as a manifestation of such, and it’s why the whole time I was watching, even if 1991 technology might have made it impossible, I wished Penn would have gone full Michael B. Jordan x 2 in “Sinners” and just played both parts himself. That might have made for something special. 

The Ultimate In-Flight Movie

Friend of the Blog Derek recently concluded an epic traveling adventure across the eastern hemisphere with his family, including a stop in La Serenissima where My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife and I just spent eight days. Thinking like the crack film blogger he is, Derek utilized so many plane rides to ruminate on an essential topic: in-flight movies. It’s a topic Cinema Romantico briefly addressed a few years ago when filmmaker John Magary expressed outrage on social media upon seeing so many people watching “Jungle Cruise” on a flight. It seemed a strange argument to make, however, given that a plane, as Derek noted, is not an atmosphere conducive to watching a movie at full attention. Derek explored this idea by re-examining his various year-end rankings to see how many movies he watched on planes factored in, and whether watching them on a plane necessitated a rewatch. His post, however, got me thinking about in-flight movies in a broader manner. In the last decade, I have traveled a lot, and I have watched a lot of in-flight movies, and I have developed some ideas about what makes the ultimate plane movie.

The truth is, I am not wholly against watching more serious-minded cinema in the air. Indeed, a transatlantic flight can be the perfect place to catch up on movies I have missed during the year. That’s how I wound up watching “Materialists” on my recent flight to Venice, or “I Saw the TV Glow” on my flight last year to Tokyo. Even on a plane, I can give such a movie my full attention to form an honest and informed critique. Trouble is, I can only maintain that necessary attention for the length of one movie, occasionally two, and once I feel my attention wane, knowing my analysis will be compromised, new movies on my must-see list are re-relegated to the mental queue. 

That I am generally only able to concentrate for one serious-minded film a flight, however, goes to show that they cannot really be the paragon of the in-flight viewing experience. More often than not, a flight is not an optimal experience itself, depending upon the size of your seat, the measure of leg room, the amount of turbulence, whether the person in front of you chooses to recline the whole flight, not to mention the headphone jack might be on the fritz, as it was on my return flight from Venice. If on land, I’m generally looking for a movie to challenge me, or surprise me, in the air, I tend to look for something else. 

A good movie is always a good movie, and a bad movie is always a bad movie, but at 35,000 feet, well, a bad movie is not necessarily so bad it’s good, as the saying goes, but often plays better, or at least a little bit different, like how the low pressure at cruising altitude brings out a better taste in tomato juice. The Amy Adams rom com “Leap Year” was wretched, but following its mechanical rom com formula on my way back home from the Big Island of Hawaii in 2010 felt as relaxing as a geography nut might find following the in-flight map. The subpar Meg Ryan-directed/starring rom com “What Happens Later” did not work at all and yet worked as well as it ever could wedged into a middle seat on a Dreamliner somewhere over the Pacific on my way to Japan.

That gets us closer to what makes the ultimate in-flight movie. One that fits the mood of an airplane, or maybe more accurately, helps soothe the mood an airplane creates the longer the flight goes. And no movie soothes like a movie you have already seen and liked and/or loved. It’s why toward the end of a long flight I often like to watch the first hour or so of Bradley Cooper’s “A Star is Born,” so long as it’s available, because Lady Gaga is my balm for everything. “Mission: Impossible – Fallout” makes no sense on a teeny-weeny seatback screen, in a manner of speaking, but watching it on my flight home from Berlin in 2019 would have sent me soaring among the clouds were I not already literally above them.

Coming home from Italian COVID jail in 2021, my father-in-law nobly upgraded me to business class and knowing this was my one chance to be free of coach, I took full advantage to my delight and detriment by having pre-flight champagne, a pre-dinner Campari and soda, goose for dinner itself, a post-dinner espresso, a ginger ale in an actual glass, a bottled beer even though by that point I was beginning to feel the effects of my living large because when (no longer) in Rome, all of which made my stomach feel so upset that midway through my rewatch of the original “West Side Story” to prep for the Spielberg remake I decided to switch to “Music and Lyrics.” I didn’t feel better physically, but I felt better mentally. Put that on the poster: at 35,000 feet, “Music and Lyrics” is better than “West Side Story!”

Still, nothing in the annals of cinema has ever soothed me more than a Humphrey Bogart/Lauren Bacall movie; I just never expect them to appear on planes. Yet, for our flight to and from Tokyo last year, all their classics were available. I watched “The Big Sleep” going and “Key Largo” coming and, well, here’s the thing: I don’t really sleep on planes. I might want to, but I can’t, not even that time in business class when I discovered the bewildering wonder of a seat that would literally remake itself into a bed. (As Elaine Benes once said, “Do you realize the people up here are getting cookies?!”) Yet, in watching “Key Largo,” at some point, without even realizing it, I drifted off. And though we might typically issue a ticket to a movie that sedates, well, as established, in the air, the rules are different. And I can pay no higher compliment to an in-flight movie than to say, it put me to sleep. Bogie and Bacall really are magic. 

The Naked Gun

Though we live in an age of reboots and sequels, “The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!” (1988), genuinely one of the greatest movies ever made, was one that seemed sacrosanct. What compelled director Akiva Shaffer to give it another go, I don’t know; maybe he thought resurrecting a fallow franchise that sadly fizzled out in 1994 with the suitably subtitled “The Final Insult” would be the perfect way to give a beaten-down world a laugh. If so, he succeeds in abundance by a creating a self-aware police procedural parody in the same vein as his Team ZAZ forefathers. Self-aware, but not really revisionist. This is not “The Naked Gun” commenting on the “The Naked Gun”; this is just “The Naked Gun” (2025). And though it does also employ an actor mostly known for being serious in service of straight-faced comedy, Liam Neeson, he is perhaps the one way in which Shaffer’s version most deviates from its predecessor.

Neeson is Frank Drebin Jr., son to Leslie Nielson’s Frank Drebin Sr., who like his father, becomes involved with a femme fatale (Pamela Anderson, a real hoot) and finds himself on the trail of a dastardly technocrat (Danny Huston) who wants to save humanity by transforming it into survival of the fittest. That plot sounds more akin to “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” frankly, which is maybe why that old TV series is referenced, not that “The Naked Gun” has anything to do with the plot. The storyline is strung to hang jokes on and Shaffer and his two co-writing cohorts Dan Gregor and Doug Mand succeed in so much as far more jokes land than miss, dead space and straight parodies of other movies proves minimal, at least one joke made me laugh so hard I cried, and most importantly, it never runs out of steam, not even through the closing credits. Even so, only on occasion does it evoke the wild spirit of the original, like in a snowman-starring montage, or in concert with Neeson’s performance.

Nielson was a buffoon in so much as he was a straight man in a whole world gone crazy. Neeson is a straight man, too, but he infuses the part with more simmering rage than Nielson’s mere bewilderment. Indeed, Neeson does not have the way with malapropisms and puns that his predecessor did; those tend to fall flat. But he manifests this hysterical kind of aggression and resentment, and this “Naked Gun” is at its best when yoking its gags to Neeson’s air. Indeed, skepticism of the police has always been buried in these movies, like it or not, and Shaffer brings it up in the mix. Drebin Jr. is often driving into pedestrians just like his dad, but Shaffer eschews the rule of thumb that comedy is best in long shot to show such comical hit and runs in close-up, rendering the character less oblivious than indifferent. Best of all is a sequence seen mostly through a bodycam that does not feature Drebin Jr. intoning “I am the law!” like so many renegade movie cops before him but instead brilliantly lives it.