The Mastermind

“The Mastermind” begins with a point-of-view shot looking out from a painting at an art gallery in Framingham, Massachusetts that is being inspected by J.B. Mooney (Josh O’Connor). If it would seem to embody the whole point of the visual arts in the first place, to seek wonder and a deeper meaning of life by seeing something from a different perspective, well, that is not quite what’s happening with art school dropout J.B. As he peruses the paintings, writer/director Kelly Reichardt gradually reveals him not to be a connoisseur of art, so much, as a thief. With a conspicuously snoozing security guard in one gallery, J.B. opens a case and pilfers a toy soldier figurine, using his wife Terri (Alana Haim) and two young sons as cover in an easygoing getaway. This is not a one-off, however, but a test run as we see when he gathers “the guys” in his basement and to break down his quasi-masterplan for a much bigger heist of four works by the abstract painter Arthur Dove.

J.B. emits as supercilious air in this planning session as he does in a deft dinner table scene with his wife, mother Sarah (Hope Davis), and father (Bill Camp), the latter referencing an old acquaintance of his son who has done well by owning a company, wondering what he knows that J.B. doesn’t. J.B. responds that balancing books is an idiotic use of one’s time. Set in 1970, “The Mastermind” is perched on that precipice of 60s counterculture burning out, and that is how O’Connor plays this moment and all the others too, depleted of spirit, just sort of wearily existing within the confines of a mainstream culture. In just a few flourishes, Reichardt evokes Terri as the family glue, making dinner, paying the bills, ferrying the kids to school, the latter conveyed in a shot that strands J.B. watching them in the garage with the morning paper, standing there like an alien in his own life. In one profound moment of anti-profundity, after he has stolen the paintings, J.B. hangs one of them on his own wall, momentarily turning his home into an art gallery, observing it, as if attempting to interpret his own reason for this illegal act and coming up empty.

Like most of “The Mastermind,” the heist itself is overlaid with a cool, jazzy score functioning as dissonant mockery of the events onscreen. Nothing with the heist quite goes the way that J.B. has planned, from his kids unexpectedly having the day off from school to the latch on the back window of the car that takes way too long to undo, though the funniest detail, in fact, is that despite so much going wrong, the small crew still pulls it off, and that it only falls apart due to an event that takes place offscreen, drolly underscoring J.B.’s inability to account for everything. Indeed, when the local news files a report on the robbery, J.B.’s unsuspecting father notes that he’s not sure this heist was completely thought through, an unwitting admonishment of his son that stings more than the detectives who show up to finger J.B. as the quote-unquote mastermind.  

Christopher Blauvel’s cinematography evokes the faded, under-saturated look of the movies of the 70s, though is not in service of cheap nostalgia but to remind us of the era’s mood and to reflect the main character’s wan headspace. Indeed, as J.B. becomes fugitive, rather than the energy or pace picking up, the already leisurely “The Mastermind” slows down even more, and rather than effusing regret or even resignation, O’Connor effuses, well, nothing much at all, as if the world itself were an abstract concept. Throughout, Reichardt infuses news reports of the Vietnam War and shows protests in response to it, none of which leave an impression on J.B., and essentially cast his slow motion flee from justice not quite as dropping out of society, like the two friends (Gaby Hoffmann and John Magaro) with whom he briefly hides out have, but quiet quitting society instead. Yet society gets the last laugh with a denouement that would have worked as a silent comedy, ensnaring an unsuspecting J.B., punctuated by one last shot that is like the bleakest Looney Tune you have ever seen. Th-th-th-th-that’s all, folks!  

The Secret Agent

Set predominantly in 1977 Brazil, “The Secret Agent” begins with Armando (Wagner Moura), a fugitive from the country’s military dictatorship and going by the name Marcel, stopping at a rural gas station. He can’t help but notice a dead body lying beneath a piece of cardboard, flies buzzing overhead. The station attendant explains the person was shot dead by his colleague for attempting to steal some motor oil, and though he called the cops days ago, they have yet to arrive. Finally, they do, though not to deal with the dead body, to which they pay little attention, but to shake down Armando. It’s a sequence in which writer/director Kleber Mendonça Filho effectively introduces both his movie’s world and tone, at once deadly serious and darkly comic. And though the corpse bearing witness, so to speak, to this squeeze put me in mind of noted philosopher Harry Lime’s observation that the dead are happier dead, “The Secret Agent” hardly proves a grim slog in fatalism. It’s a historical political thriller but more than that, it’s an absolute thrill to watch, utterly alive and willing to meander its own narrative nooks and crannies rather than just stick to the main path, finding light in the darkest places, like the human leg inside the tiger shark that washes ashore. I’m not even going to tell you what happens with that human leg, you’ll never guess, unless you already know Brazilian folklore. 

Armando is a one-time university technology researcher from the northeastern Brazil city of Recife who ran afoul of a corrupt, powerful industrialist. We see this happen in flashback, a contentious meeting turned physical confrontation, stemming not even so much from Armando’s refusal to play the game as his standing by while his wife Fátima (Alice Carvalho) talks back, such a flouting of society’s hierarchies that it’s a death sentence. Indeed, Fátima winds up dead under mysterious circumstances, and in a present-day scene, when Armando and Fátima’s son, Fernando (Enzo Nunes), expresses how much he misses his mother, his dad explains that when they call up a memory of her, it’s like she’s alive again, right there with them. This observation is crucial, transforming that lone glimpse of Fátima in flashback into something so much more than mere backstory: an embodiment of the power of memory. And so, as “The Secret Agent” begins with Armando returning to Recife, it is in part to search for the birth certificate of his own mother, one of whom he has almost no memory, seeking to literally and figuratively reclaim it before it is lost forever.

That is not the only reason he has returned to Recife, summoned by revolutionaries who warn his life is in danger, hunted by assassins dispatched by the industrialist to settle their score once and for all, and helping him prepare to flee the country. He stays in an apartment complex run by the charismatic Dona Sebastien (Tânia Maria), a sympathizer to the cause, running an underground network of political refugees seeking the necessary papers to flee. She’s a landlord but she also briefly plays matchmaker, immediately seeking to pair Armando with Cláudia (Hermila Guedes), improbably and joyfully crossing “Casablanca” with “Melrose Place.” It underlines a sense of community in defiance of displacement and in one scene, all of Dona’s residents gather in the same room to tell their stories. Moura is magnificent here, as he is throughout, his air guarded but soulful, bringing to life the arduous nature of leading a double life, of suppressing who you are to stay alive. 

Armando’s intent, however, is not just to escape Brazil but to bring along Fernando, currently living with his grandfather, a movie theater projectionist. That occupation is not mere window dressing. “The Secret Agent” functions as a love letter to 70s cinema, not merely in the vintage camera equipment Filho has employed but in how movies themselves shrewdly intertwine with the larger narrative, moving pictures of a piece with the famed Carnival running concurrent with the movie’s present-day action, relief in the ritual. Indeed, some movies like to hammer home saccharine notions of the magic of the movies, but rarely have I seen a movie so intrinsically and spiritedly evince that old chestnut. Filho uses “Jaws,” which has only just come to Recife, to unify his themes of fear and memory, and via the tawdry exploits captured through a projection window during a screening of “The Omen,” he flippantly evokes the, uh, pleasure of moviegoing in the first place.

The neatest filmmaking trick that Filho pulls, however, is one that I am almost hesitant to divulge, so extraordinary is the recontextualization of everything when it happens, even if it is also simultaneously essential to making complete sense of “The Secret Agent.” If it mostly takes place in 1977, and occasionally flashes back, it also flashes forward to our current era in which we see university students unearth and listen to archived recordings of Armando recounting his saga for those old Recife revolutionaries. When the first flash-forward happens, it’s jarring in the best way possible, suddenly making you realized that what you have been watching up to that point is not, in fact, the present but the past. And if the intent of dictatorships, authoritarians, and any other aspirant oppressive regimes the world over is to erase and rewrite the past, this device evokes history and memory as the ultimate form of resistance, an idea punctuated by Moura’s unexpected dual role wrapping up the two-hours-and-forty-minutes with witty flair. The revolution lives on. 

A Four-Week-Late Oscar Take

It is evidence of my year-end frazzled state of mind that when Friend of the Blog Jaime asked me on New Year’s Eve what I made of the recent announcement that the Academy Awards would be leaving broadcast television in 2029 to stream exclusively on YouTube TV that I did not really have an answer because I had not really given it any consideration. I was frazzled, and just plain burned out, but also, when I first saw the news, I also just figuratively shrugged from an admitted air of inevitability. After all, we live in a world where cable and satellite television is becoming increasingly antiquated. The winners of both Outstanding Comedy Series and Outstanding Drama Series – “The Studio” and “The Pitt,” respectively – at last year’s Primetime Emmy Awards were streaming series, and if you wanted to watch the Bears/Packers NFL playoff game on Saturday night, you had to have Amazon Prime, or else. Indeed, not long after the Oscar news, media observers were already suggesting it was just a matter of time before the mother of all live events, the old AFL-NFL World Championship Game, goes streaming too. 

Jaime was optimistic about the news, and once I thought about it, and once I worked through my middle-aged, Gen-X, three-channel era angst, I felt optimistic too. The Oscars have spent at least a decade apologizing for themselves, to paraphrase The New Yorker’s perturbable Richard Brody, which is why they are always trying to reinvent the wheel, taking draconian measures to shorten the length of acceptance speeches, shunting various awards off air, eliminating the honorary awards altogether by giving them their own off-air ceremony, and adding various forms of unrelated razzle dazzle at the expense of celebrating the whole reason we are watching in the first place. It was the late William Goldman who was always went against the grain by arguing the Oscars were not too long but too short, that rather than just showing a smattering of brief clips of nominated movies, the telecast should show fuller clips and truly celebrate the nominees rather than pay mere lip service between commercials.

Goldman’s vision might just be possible by moving the telecast to streaming, providing them a chance for liberation, as Clayton Davis put it for Variety, noting that the YouTube TV deal includes not just the ceremony but the red-carpet coverage and even the Governors Ball afterwards. It suggests Oscar Sunday as something akin to Inauguration Day coverage, the whole shebang, giving viewers the opportunity to tune in and tune out and tune in and tune out, etc., eavesdropping on the whole big affair. Mark Harris, one of our pre-eminent Oscar-ologists, seemed cautiously hopeful on the New Twitter, writing that the best-case scenario was the Oscar show being true to itself, glory hallelujah, but the worst-case scenarios being a desperate attempt to, quote-unquote, youthify. What such youthifying would mean, he didn’t really say, probably because as an Old Person, like me, he doesn’t really know. Maybe it means an alternate Nickelodeon Slimetime Oscar-cast, or maybe it means an alternate cast for everybody hosted by Drinks With Broads, or maybe it means a parade of TikTok influencers. I mean, what were Billy Crystal’s old Oscar opening numbers if not proto-TikTok videos?

The Olympics were another ancient broadcast TV entity that resisted the digital world for ages and, on some level, as an old-timer Olympics enthusiast, I understood it. The appeal of the Games was partly monocultural, that when you sat down to watch it in primetime, you were watching along with the rest of the world, or at least, the rest of America. That is why the deliberate minimization of coverage, ironically, made it feel bigger, and I assume that NBC feared providing an all-access digital pass would render the event too diffuse. Instead, by moving coverage of every single event online to their streaming platform Peacock, the exact opposite has happened, rendering the Games what they always have been but viewers at home have never truly been able to fully comprehend: that is, a virtual sporting kaleidoscope. True, NBC has retained a traditional evening broadcast for anyone who might not choose to pay for Peacock, and I do not necessarily like the idea of the Oscars freezing out anyone who would rather not shill out for YouTube TV. But if streaming has made the Olympics feel bigger than ever before, my hope is that if the Oscars do this right, they will come to feel that way too. 

Cinema Romantico 2026 Movie Preview: THRILLERS ONLY

As the moniker suggests, Cinema Romantico’s annual THRILLERS ONLY movie preview is limited in scope by design. We are not attempting to steer you toward all the year’s most anticipated movies nor are we trying in any way to forecast what might be the year’s best in movies. And yet, if you consult last year’s THRILLERS ONLY list, you will discover that not only does it contain one of my favorite movies of the 2025 — Steven Soderbergh’s “Black Bag” — but my actual favorite movie of 2025. True, Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another” kinda transcends genre, which is why IMDb lists eight total genres in its entry, but those entries include thriller and political thriller and that counts. So, what movie in the 2026 THRILLERS ONLY preview might turn out to be this year’s version of Nikola Jokic, the 3x MPVP drafted 41st in 2014? You never know. 

(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 2026 Movie Preview: THRILLERS ONLY

The Rip. A Joe Carnahan blending of “Bad Boys” and “Knives Out” with Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. The only disappointment is that it releases to Netflix on January 16th rather than January 2nd to truly get 2026 started right. We give it...5 Runaway Juries

Blood in the Snow. A hit man falls for his client’s wife, who happens to be the target of the assassin's latest assignment. I mean, that sounds like a Hallmark hitman movie. We give it...4 Runaway Juries

How to Make a Killing. I feel like I’m beginning to sense the first waves of backlash toward the unremitting Glen Powell is a Star marketing campaign and you know what, I understand it. I do. But still, to me it’s a little like Lamar Jackson; I will never stop believing Lamar Jackson is going to win a Super Bowl and I will never stop believing Glen Powell is going to be a movie star. We give it...3 Runaway Juries

Cold Storage. Uh oh! This David Koepp-penned thriller was on last year’s list, meaning the release date was pushed back, never a good sign, and you know how this works; we have to dock it a Runaway Jury meaning we now give it...2 Runaway Juries. 

Shiver. This seemingly serious “Sharknado” was also on last year’s THRILLERS ONLY list except it was titled Beneath the Storm. They tried changing the name to throw us off the scent! Nice try! No Runaway Juries for you!

Dead Man’s Wire. Thrillers based on heavy real-life incidents like this one of the 1977 Tony Kiritsis hostage case, bring me pause, but Gus Van Sant is not a fly-by-night director, and I would like to believe he is up to something here. We give it...3 Runaway Juries

Verity. The trailer suggests Blumhouse Productions remaking John Candy’s “Delirious.” Ok! We give it...4 Runaway Juries

Send Help. “Cast Away” meets “Swimming with Sharks” starring an against-type Rachel McAdams makes me think of Mr. Lippman wondering why Elaine did not bring him Kramer’s pitch for the coffee table book about coffee tables: “you see, this is the kind of idea you should be coming in with.” We give it...5 Runaway Juries

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We interrupt our usually scheduled THRILLERS ONLY review to pit two pairs of upcoming thrillers against one another to determine who gets the coveted Runaway Jury.

Crime 101 versus How to Rob a Bank. Hmmmmmm the former has a helluva cast but it feels a little too much like it’s straining to be “Heat” while the latter has an eclectic cast with a story about documenting bank heists on social media that sounds like the kind of B-movie they would have made back in the day if back in the day had included the interweb. The Runaway Jury goes to...“How to Rob a Bank.”

Mutiny versus Shelter. This showdown doubles as Jason Statham versus Jason Statham. In the former, Statham has been framed for a crime he did not commit, is named Cole Reed, and appears per the trailer to escape an aircraft carrier as the movie begins. In the latter, Statham is an ex-assassin turned hermit, has the mononymous name of Mason, and has to fend off sinister parties who appear to invade the island where he is in exile. Boy oh boy, it’s close, but I have to give the Runaway Jury to “Shelter” because it sounds like someone pitched the toolshed scene in “Commando” but if the toolshed was a whole island. 

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This is Barack Obama, who is not Hope Davis, more’s the pity.

Greenland 2: Migration. I saw some rumor floating around that the 44th President was going to have a cameo in this one, but a cameo by the 44th President would not be better than Hope Davis co-starring which she did in the unexpectedly solid first “Greenland” and is one of many reasons why this movie did not require a sequel. We give it...1 Runaway Jury

In Cold Light. Hope Davis is also not in this thriller of an ex-criminal who gets pulled back into her old life, as criminals do, but Helen Hunt is, playing a crime boss. That’s inspired. We give it...3 Runaway Juries

Apex. “When an adrenaline junkie sets out to conquer a menacing river, she discovers that nature isn't the only thing out for blood.” That’s a 5 Runaway Jury synopsis if I’ve ever heard one.

Cliffhanger. I don’t know that we needed a 33-year later reboot of Sylvester Stallone’s “Cliffhanger,” even if it is being directed by modern-day middling thriller master Jaume Collet-Serra, but that does not really concern me. No, what concerns me is that in doing research on this new “Cliffhanger,” I stumbled upon an AI-generated trailer for a fake Cliffhanger 2 starring Sylvester Stallone and Dwayne Johnson, the latter with a voice that sounds like The Rock filtered through a T-800 Terminator talk box and this is our bright and glorious future? The fake Cliffhanger 2 trailer gets a 2025 Kennedy Center Honor. 

Mercy. As a seeming mix of “Minority Report” and “Judge Dredd,” this one seems like a timely message about the perils of AI. Too timely, in fact (see above); I don’t want anything to do with it. We give it...Zero Runaway Juries

No, not this Deep Water.

Not this Deep Water either.

Ah, that’s it.

Deep Water. Speaking of “Cliffhanger,” here we seem to have something like “The Grey” reimagined in the water with sharks directed by the director of “Cliffhanger.” We give it...3 Runaway Juries

The Sheep Detectives. You’re telling me the sheep are the ones doing the investigating when their shepherd is killed? And that one of the sheep is voiced by national treasure Julia Louis-Dreyfus? I mean, forget Runaway Juries; I give this the Elaine Gets Rabies Jury Prize. 

Remain. Gosh, man, I don’t know, M. Night Shyamalan and Nicholas Sparks teaming up could yield some bizarre collaborative energy or it could open an interdimensional gate allowing some hostile Sumerian deity entry to our world. Can’t risk it. We give it...Zero Runaway Juries

 

Normal. Most of moviegoing America is salivating over Christopher Nolan’s forthcoming adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey, and fair enough, but I’m hungering for Bob Odenkirk as a smalltown sheriff named Ulyesses who discovers his small town is not as, ahem, normal as it seems. We give it...5 Runaway Juries

My 2025 Mixtape

As always, I have eschewed sharing my favorite songs of the year via Spotify Wrapped not least because I do not even have Spotify. And good thing too! It turns out that in 2025 the musical streaming service implemented a feature to determine each user’s listening age by scrutinizing the five-year span of music with which they most engaged. It’s how people I knew were deemed to have listening ages in their 60s and in their 90s and how Charli XCX, vanguard of modern pop music, apparently had a listening age of 75. Almost every song on my year-end mixtape, on the other hand, is from 2025. And even if you take the other two and when they were released and/or recorded and do some quick arithmetic, my listening age turns out to be approximately three-and-a-half. Granted, my mixtape includes music from baby boomers, millennials, and a member of Gen X. And yes, if my favorite album of the year was not Lady Gaga’s “Mayhem” (one of my five thousand favorite memories of going to Venice in the fall was seeing the Venetian mom in the Conad grocery singing along with “Abracadabra”on the store sound system to her infant in her stroller) then it was Bruce Springsteen’s heretofore unreleased “Streets of Philadelphia” Sessions from 1994, so not exactly cutting edge, never mind unpredictable. And no, this mixtape does not take into account just how much Stevie Nicks and Fleetwood Mac I listened to this year. Not that it matters. Because regardless of Spotify’s data mining operation, remember, listening age is only a state of mind.

Here were my favorite songs of 2025. (Except where embedded, click on the title of the song to listen.)

My 2025 Mixtape

Clams Casino, Brian Dunne. The anti-enshittification anthem we need. 

Say Goodbye, Tell No One, Kathleen Edwards. The rare six-minute rock song that soars so high it still somehow only feels like a three-minute rock song.

Glasgow, The Mekons. As ever, the legendary British post-punk band’s new record pulses with righteous fury (the opening cut is called “The Western Design,” for God’s sake) and this love letter to a place that comes across hard to love is what most hit this American square in the gut. 

Afterlife, Sharon Van Etten. Do I believe in an afterlife? Damn, man, I don’t know, I really don’t, and rather than bringing clarity, being alive for almost 50 years now has only left me more uncertain. And that’s why I found Van Etten’s big screen treatment of this track with her Attachment Theory band so moving; she isn’t sure either, but damn, man, she wants to believe. And getting to hear her sing it live at The Salt Shed in May, where she evinced more of an earnest goth presence than I had anticipated, made me feel that desire to believe even more. 

Maybe I Don’t Know You, Bruce Springsteen. In a year that has been so improbable, as Vin Scully once said, the impossible has happened – that is, Bruce Springsteen himself is once again responsible for the best Bruce Springsteen Song of the Year. (I wrote a lot more about this one here.)

Color of Night, James McMurtry. Getting old, my dad likes to say in quoting Jimmy Buffett, is not for sissies, and in this track, the reliably incisive singer/songwriter brings it to life not through melancholy rumination nor anthemic defiance but a kind of middle ground, a knowing let’s-get-on-with-it semi-embrace.

Gateleg, Fust. If it’s possible to make a down-to-earth alt-country epic, this is it. As if Springsteen hailed from North Carolina instead of New Jersey.

It’ll Do, Hailey Whitters. My Iowa homegirl released something akin to a concept album based around her native state, but it was this not-necessarily-related Nashville banger that stuck with me most. I love how it’s an homage to 90s boot scootin’ boogies but not at all retro (“this song ain’t got no fiddle / but it’s still got that sizzle”); if they had played this on KJJY, Iowa’s Country Station, back in the mid-90s at the pizza place where I worked, I might have gotten into country music sooner.

Not Safe for Work

d£aler, Lola Young. A pop song written in blood. My favorite song of the year.

Call Me, Anna of the North. Per the Interweb, Norway’s Anna of the North, née Anna Lotterud, is 36, born in 1989, and so she would, indeed, have a memory of telling objects of her affection to call her. And I can’t say I have ever heard a pop song that has so utterly embodied both the seeming offhand lightness of that phrase and how in reality it is always more fraught than a soul can bear. 

How Bad Do U Want Me, Lady Gaga. Yes, Gaga won an Oscar for “Shallow” from “A Star Is Born,” and sure, she was also nominated for an Oscar for “Hold My Hand” from “Top Gun: Maverick,” but “How Bad Do U Want Me” is her greatest contribution to the American cinema songbook in so much as it is the theme song to the great 80s Marisa Tomei romantic comedy that was never made.

Enjoy Your Life, Romy. I only learned of this 2023 dance floor ode to joie de vivre when I saw the versatile UK artist perform it while opening for Kylie Minogue in April and I cannot think of a better bookend to our opening cut nor a finer message to take into the fresh hell of 2026. 

The Way We Were

When I finally saw “Cookie’s Fortune” several years after its 1999 release, I loved it, and it has since settled as my favorite Robert Altman movie and one of my favorite movies in general. And given that it was set on and around Easter, I wanted to make it an annual viewing the same weekend as the celebration of What’s-His-Name’s What-Have-Ya. Trouble was, the “Cookie’s Fortune” DVD was not readily available for purchase in any of the typical haunts for such things back in the mid-aughts. Blockbuster, though, had just instituted a rent-to-buy policy wherein by renting a DVD and keeping it past the grace period, the rental would automatically change to a purchase. So, that Easter, I went to the old Blockbuster Video store at Lincoln & School, rented “Cookie’s Fortune” and never returned it, converting it into my very own copy. A few years ago, I noticed “Cookie’s Fortune” was screening on Netflix, but almost as soon as it was, it wasn’t anymore and currently isn’t streaming anywhere. When I watched Altman’s low-key comedy this past Easter, it was on my old Blockbuster DVD, praise What’s-His-Name. I kick myself every day that I never rented “Ruby in Paradise” to buy it.

My first experience with collecting physical media was, in fact, my dad collecting it by recording old movies to our brand-new Betamax VCR in the mid-80s. “Casablanca,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “Chariots of Fire,” “Star Trek II: the Wrath of Kahn,” “Captain Blood,” Adventures of Robin Hood,” on and on, I watched all of them for the first time on those Betamax tapes. So, physical media collections have in some sense always meant discovery to me, no different than perusing a used bookstore. Eventually, though, when I got older and acquired spending money and discovered Suncoast at Valley West Mall, I begin collecting VHS tapes, which metamorphosed into DVDs, and then into Blu-rays. It wasn’t a big collection, as these things sometimes go, just a few small shelves, a gathering of taste, though my taste has changed over the years, and as it has, I have wound up with some DVDs on the shelf that I wish weren’t there, paralyzed to buying more, a shelf stuck in stasis, half what I want to show the world, half not. Recently, though, I’ve been wondering if I should ditch what I no longer want, reorganize and rebuild.

This thought occurred to me while reading Marc Tracy’s July New York Times piece about the resurgence of collecting physical media. This is not collecting physical media for collecting’s sake, necessarily, but as a bulwark against the fickle nature of the various streaming platforms and their inventory. What is and is not available changes month to month, and if it’s more profitable not to make chunks of your catalogue accessible to watch, God knows, profit always wins. The perturbable Richard Brody of The New Yorker was already writing about this subject two years ago, arguing that in our current climate of contempt for the old, collecting movies on physical media becomes an act of defiance, effectively turning us into individual preservationists, no different, really, than, say, David Bradley, who famously maintained a bunker in Hollywood of old film prints, a one-man archive.

On his Good Eye: Movies and Baseball Substack in 2024, Noah Gittell also tied this physical media resurgence to the notion of ephemerality. He wasn’t so sure, however, that such preservation was right, noting “that before the 1980s, films that ran their course in theaters were rarely seen again.” If you went to see “Star Wars” five times, as the young Eddie Adams from Torrance did in “Boogie Nights,” it’s because there was no way to see it once its theatrical run concluded. Unlike books, or music, movies were “wild,” as David Thomson put it for Harper’s in 2015, and “went away.” Yet, even if the Library of Congress did not begin preserving films until 1988, as Gittell notes, it’s also true, as Thomson points out, that the Copyright Act of 1909 and its subsequent amendments were in part intended to help put such preservation into practice. That was not pursued for quite a while, however, meaning that an untold number of movies from the artform’s early days were lost forever, no small thing. Motion pictures are part of our shared history, as preservationist champion Grandmaster Marty Scorsese has been arguing for years, “a record of ourselves in time, documented and interpreted.” 

The moviegoing experience might be ephemeral, “light(ing) up walls, flicker(ing), and go(ing) out,” as Susan Sontage wrote in On Photography, but the camera itself goes to show that movies themselves are not, preserving images by recording them, originally on film stock, something to hold “between (your) fingers,” as Thomson wrote, “something alive, the material of a story.” When I saw my favorite movie “Last of the Mohicans” at the Music Box Theatre in 2021, it was on a 35mm print rescued by the Chicago 35mm Society. To see and hear the crackle of film of my favorite movie, I didn’t feel like I was just watching it but that I was in the room with it, that the movie itself was alive and present in a way a digital copy can never quite manage. Film prints, though, are fragile, which is what makes film preservation so crucial, and from the long line resulting from a scratch on the celluloid that ran down the screen for the length of one reel, I thought about how fortunate we all were that this print had inflicted no further damage, at least not yet.

Ephemerality is at the core of “A Week’s Vacation,” the 1980 French movie that I watched the Saturday of Easter weekend when I went looking for a new movie on The Criterion Channel. On the verge of a nervous breakdown, schoolteacher Laurence is prescribed a week’s holiday to rest, and recharge, and sort herself out emotionally and mentally. But rather than yield some big picture payoff, her problems not only prove not entirely solvable but in the grand scheme of things, insignificant, as she herself is, as if life itself is just a week’s vacation from wherever we started and wherever we’re going. If it was weirdly comforting, it was unsettling too. And when I was explaining “A Week’s Vacation” to My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife not long after, she expressed interest in watching it, though I when I tried pulling it up on The Criterion Channel, it was gone. I admired the irony, even if I yearned for a Blockbuster to go and rent it and never return it. 

In Memoriam: Rob Reiner

Hollywood filmmaker Rob Reiner and his wife Michele Singer Reiner were found stabbed to death in their Los Angeles home on Sunday. He was 78. The couple’s 32-year-old son Nick has since been charged with their murder. It feels impossible to process something so sad, stunning, and ghastly except to say that life is pain and anyone who says differently is selling something. I’m quoting a movie there, of course, Rob Reiner’s own “The Princess Bride” (1987). In doing so, I do not mean to be cruel or trivializing but to demonstrate how for so many of us, quotes from Rob Reiner movies are how we make sense of the world; like his dad Carl’s best friend Mel Brooks, Reiner was a western philosopher filtered through a Catskill comic’s microphone. I don’t know how many times I have contextualized some euphoric or intense experience in my mind by thinking, such and such went to eleven. Why just last Saturday afternoon My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife, as she often does when discussing current events, underscored a point by declaring “money talks and bullshit walks.” The first time I told My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife that my favorite kind of pie was pecan, she immediately replied in her finest Billy Crystal, “I would be proud to partake of your pecan pie.” It was one of my many early indicators that our love might just be like a storybook story.

The outpouring of grief in the wake of Reiner’s death stems from him being, as they say, a real mensch. A social liberal activist, he put his money where his mouth so often was, doing as much as anyone to help overturn California’s Prop 8 gay marriage ban in 2010. That was genuine winter soldier stuff in the image of Tom Paine. I often wondered if his increasing focus on political activism gradually caused the quality of his artistic output to run dry, but if such noble altruism was the tradeoff, that is a tradeoff worth making. Regardless, he was an accomplished actor, director, and producer who cut a whole swath of America on his way to success. He was born in the Bronx, went to high school in Beverly Hills, attended film school at UCLA, and cut his teeth apprenticing at a playhouse in New Hope, Pennsylvania. He came to prominence on the seminal 1970s television show “All in the Family,” winning two Emmy Awards along the way, before establishing himself as a Hollywood movie director in the 80s and helping found the independent film and television company Castle Rock. “Seinfeld,” to my mind the greatest TV show of all time, was made under its umbrella, and it avoided cancellation in its early days in no small part to Reiner going to the mattresses for it. Like I said, a mensch. 

Reiner made his first movie in 1984, right around the time I started going to and watching movies, and so like many people my age, he is synonymous with my first silver screen memories. Born in 1947, Reiner was a baby boomer, and his movies did not always have Gen-X sensibilities, necessarily, but they became our cultural touchstones, nevertheless. “The Princess Bride” was our version of a fairytale in so much as it was such a seamless blend of earnestness and irony that you could not tell where one ended and the other began. “Stand by Me” (1986) was the first movie My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife ever bought, back when buying a movie on VHS ran you roughly the same as a decent Bluetooth speaker. As a director, Reiner did not have a distinct style so much as a sturdy efficiency in the mold of classic Hollywood, underlining his ability to jump between genres. “Each film is completely different from the others,” wrote Roger Ebert in reviewing Reiner’s “When Harry Met Sally...” (1989), “each one is successful on its own terms.” A master craftsman of mid-budget, middle class, sheerly watchable movies, I have long deemed “A Few Good Men” (1992) as the ultimate TNT Movie, easily digestible, unfailingly entertaining. His craft was so impeccable that even the heavily improvised “This Is Spinal Tap” (1984) felt intentional every step of the way.

It was also his debut and like Guns N’ Roses and “Appetite for Destruction,” on his first try behind the camera, Reiner made his masterpiece. That is not to besmirch his ensuing work, merely to emphasize the immense groundbreaking quality of his debut, “This Is Spinal Tap” (1984).  Effectively the first comedic mockumentary, it remains the exemplar of the genre, and though pinpointing the funniest movie ever made is an exercise in futility, let’s just say, “This Is Spinal Tap” has a strong case, hilarious in every way, musically, visually, and verbally. Chronicling a fading English heavy metal band called Spinal Tap (Michale McKean, Christopher Guest, and Harry Shearer), we see them through the eyes of Reiner’s documentary filmmaker Marty DiBergi, explaining he was drawn to the group as a subject because of its “unusual loudness,” a line he says in consummate deadpan. As an actor, Reiner could be an outsized presence onscreen, as he was in “Sleepless in Seattle” (1993), and “The Wolf of Wall Street” (2013), but in “This Is Spinal Tap” he did not go to eleven, more like a one or a two, his stone-faced performance tying the whole movie together. He takes Spinal Tap as seriously as they take themselves which is what makes it loving rather than patronizing.

Oddly enough, this past Saturday evening, a few hours after My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife had quoted Bobbi Flekman for the ten-thousandth time, we noticed “This Is Spinal Tap” was showing on HBO. Once we turned it on, we could not turn it off. And I was reminded that in a movie comprised almost entirely of side-splitting line readings, Reiner has a line reading that is the most side-splitting of all. It occurs when DiBergi asks Shearer’s Spinal Tap bassist Derek Smalls if playing rock and roll keeps him in a state of arrested development, to which Smalls opines that it is more akin to visiting a national park and seeing a moose that has been preserved. DiBergi repeats Smalls’s own observation back to him: “When you’re playing you feel like a preserved moose onstage?” Reiner’s comically flat line reading might as well be an encapsulation of life itself, the genuine struggle to find clarity where there is none.