Friday's Old Fashioned: McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)

Robert Altman’s revisionist western “McCabe & Mrs. Miller” has one of the greatest movie character introductions: a solitary figure virtually hidden beneath an enormous fur coast astride a horse in the Pacific Northwest circa 1902. When the figure finally reaches its destination of a rugged mining town, it dismounts and removes the coat. You expect, say, Tom Hardy as a neanderthal-like mountain man and instead, Warren Beatty emerges. He is John McCabe, wearing a suit, albeit a bit rumpled given the circumstances, and dons a derby hat, tipping it to a passerby, cutting the image of a displaced dapper gentleman. The town is named Presbyterian Church, but its central gathering place is the saloon, not the chapel, where McCabe promptly heads, throws a cloth over the table, as if seeking to class up the joint a little, and fires up a card game to start making some money. The saloon owner, Patrick Sheehand (René Auberjonois), approaches, asking if they go into business together by working out a cut of the proceeds, but McCabe begs off. The scene is infused with Altman’s patented style of overlapping dialogue, myriad conversations happening at once, and has the effect of establishing the town itself existing independently of McCabe while simultaneously imbuing the sense that McCabe exists always at center of his own universe.

His universe is thrown for a loop when he purchases three women and opens a brothel, one that only starts turning a profit, however, when the recently arrived Cockney madam Constance Miller (Julie Christie) convinces him to make her a partner and let her run the place since it’s clear his business acumen lags behind his braggadocio. Indeed, Beatty gives an exemplary performance of a man putting on airs who almost, but not quite, knows he is putting on airs and which pairs perfectly with Christie’s raw candor; there’s this thing she does with her face, occasionally twisting it into a kind of confounded grimace, not able to fathom this blustery half-imbecile before her. When they sit down for breakfast to hash out the details of their partnership, Mrs. Miller orders almost as much as Daniel Day-Lewis in “Phantom Thread,” though it’s not a come-on as it was in that 2017 movie but a throwing down, leaving McCabe to look on like a lost little boy. He might become attracted to her, and she to him, but when they eventually wind up in bed together, Altman’s camera drifts away from them and to Mrs. Miller’s dresser where he has put the cash to pay for her time, as funny and sardonic a shot as you’ll see. 

“McCabe & Mrs. Miller” is all business. Even the rumor that he McCabe a gunfighter of some renown known as Pudgy McCabe, which is eventually called into question, comes to feel mostly like a matter of branding. McCabe might claim to have poetry in him, but we don’t hear any of it. The world that Altman cultivates in the dim interiors and frequently harsh exteriors, a town with mud for streets and lumber stacked high is still in the process of building itself, is one that does not make room for poetry. Merely surviving day to day is the highest priority. That becomes an open question for McCabe when the powerful mining company with a hold on the town dispatches a couple representatives to try and buy out McCabe & Mrs. Miller’s successful operation. And though “The Art of the Deal” might not have been published until seven decades later, McCabe proves its ideas are timeless, spurning the initial entreaties as a negotiating tactic to get a bigger payout, only to peeve the negotiators and wind up with three men sent to kill him in lieu of any further bargaining. Art of the deal, indeed.

In another movie, this might be the moment when McCabe finds something within himself that he did not know he had to become a hero. That very notion is mocked by having McCabe meet with a politically ambitious lawyer (William Devane) who suggests taking the mining company to court, sticking it to large corporations and making McCabe a hero of small business owners everywhere, an idea that McCabe quite likes, even repeating it to Mrs. Miller. She looks at him like his days are numbered. He can’t stop what’s coming, though there will be no quick draw or ten paces, foreshadowed in one of the hired guns, a sadistic kid (Manfred Schulz), killing a goofy innocent (Keith Carradine) just to kill him. There is no gallantry here, just gutless desperation, and the ensuing shootout between McCabe and the three men is as funny as it is tragic with our nominal hero mislaying his shotgun and having it confiscated by a minister, of all people, stopping off for a beer and a bump midway through, scurrying around in the falling snow, and shooting people in the back. As it plays out, the Presbyterian church catches on fire, causing the town folk to rally together to save it, a sly juxtaposition to the gunfight that only emphasizes its meaningless. As the town is saved, McCabe winds up dead in the snow and Mrs. Miller winds up in a drug-induced stupor, just one more failed business venture, the American Dream brutally reconstituted as an opium haze. 

Happiness

Just as there is no secret to happiness in life, neither is there any one secret to conjuring happiness itself on the movie screen. Sometimes you only see happiness for a split second, like Jeff Bridges as The Dude in “The Big Lebowski” listening to CCR in his car and tapping in time on the roof, and sometimes it takes the whole movie to effuse it, as happens in Aaron Katz’s masterpiece “Cold Weather” when you realize in the last shot along with the character on the screen that happiness has been, as it is sometimes said, the whole journey up to this concluding destination. Sometimes happiness is summoned in a flash by an actor, as Ashley Judd summoned it in “The Locusts” when her character thanks Jeremy Davies’s character for a dance, and sometimes it is suffused on screen by the director, as it was by Michael Mann in “Miami Vice” when Colin Farrell and Gong Li are speedboating off to Cuba for mojitos and the wind is whipping in their hair, and Patti LaBelle and Moby are on the soundtrack, and Mann frames it so the sky and ocean seem to stretch out forever to bring to life that old idiom: the world is their oyster (or, their Cuban highball). And sometimes happiness on screen blurs with happiness off screen as it did in “To Have and Have Not” when Lauren Bacall’s Slim shows Humphrey Bogart’s Steve how to whistle and when he smiles, the fourth wall ineffably dissolves, and you can no longer tell the difference between Bogey and Steve. 

When I read that Brenda Fricker died on July 16th, aged 81, in her hometown of Dublin, I immediately went looking on YouTube for one scene in “So I Married an Axe Murderer.” It’s the scene when Charlie MacKenzie (Mike Myers) is going to see his parents, Stuart MacKenzie (Mike Myers, again) and May (Fricker), to watch a soccer match. It’s a Saturday night, and we know this because director Thomas Schlamme calls up The Bay City Rollers’ 1974 song with the sixth day of the week for its title. The number one hit is diegetic because we see Stuart moving in rhythm to it as he tends his Scottish Wall of Fame and because we see May grooving to it as she enters stage right and gets a beer from the mini-fridge and because then we see Stuart and May lock arms in a do-si-do. 

There is a feeling to a Saturday night that can’t really be put into words, or that I can’t really put into words, I should say, no matter how many times I have tried, though The Bay City Rollers, bless their hearts, captured it and in their do-si-doing to it, Fricker and Myers capture it too, a brief flash of absolute satisfaction with life. 

Mid-Year Middling Thriller Update

Longtime and extremely loyal frustrated followers of Cinema Romantico know that we begin each new year with a middling thriller-only movie preview. The problem, however, is that not all upcoming release information is yet available in January. Last year, the release of Kathryn Bigelow’s “A House of Dynamite” was not announced until June. And so, with unbearably scorching temperatures, wildfire smoke blotting the sky, dangerous lettuce on the loose, and virtually everything else in the United States being so bleak and stupid, we thought it might be a fine time to re-peruse the release list and see what additional middling thrillers we have to anticipate. 

Mid-Year Middling Thriller Update

The Brink of War, August 14. A historical thriller for the dad in your life of Reagan and Gorbachev’s 1986 Reykjavík Summit might be notable to most for the casting of Jeff Daniels as the former and Jared Harris as the latter but is most notable to the blog that believes Hope Davis should be in everything for casting Hope Davis as Nancy Reagan. That casting decision is why we are willing to overlook writer and director Michael Russell Gunn having exclusively worked in television, cinema’s little brother, up until now and that truly frightening Netflix-like sheen to the cinematography. 

Onslaught, September 4. A middling thriller about an Army sniper (Adria Arjona) living in a trailer park defending her family against a titular onslaught of genetically engineered super soldiers should star Hope Davis too, of course, or at least Marisa Tomei, who should also be in everything, but the casting of Michael Biehn and Reginald VelJohnson gives this one a cheerfully retro feel, like it was made in the 80s but accidentally got left on a shelf somewhere. 

The Mongoose, October 30. Hey! Look at this! It’s a Liam Neeson middling thriller co-starring Marisa Tomei! Hollywood is finally starting to get it! The plot description on IMDb reads more like the first sentence of the screenplay and, honestly, I get it because, really, what else do you need to know than this: “A highly decorated combat vet, Ryan ‘Fang’ Flanagan, is fleeing a murder scene at 130 miles an hour in a Mustang Shelby cobra GT 65.” LET’S GOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!

The Fix, September 11. Another Liam Neeson joint, because why not? This sounds a lot like “Triple Frontier,” J.C. Chandor’s not-entirely successful ex-military operatives pull a heist movie from 2019 but trading the South American jungle for Afghanistan. The crucial difference is that Neeson is playing a character named Larry and for reasons I can’t quite articulate but utterly feel, nevertheless, Neeson as a Larry tickles my funny bone. He’s definitely less of a Larry and more of a ‘Fang.’

The Runner, September 2. “Phone Booth” for exercise junkies.

Motor City, July 24. The screenplay for this 1970s-set revenge thriller was apparently on Hollywood’s so-called Black List, screenplays liked around town not yet produced, but to me this seems more like one more piece for the Shailene Woodley Was Blacklisted evidence pile. 

By Any Means, September 4. Imagine if Mark Wahlberg said, “Get me my own version of ‘Mississippi Burning.’” A movie like that could be the thinking guy’s movie for guys who like movies, or it could be a disaster of epic proportions. 

Masterplan, October 16. If Stanley Tucci asked me to help him steal the Mona Lisa, I would probably say yes.

The Whisper Man, August 28. A middling thriller of a widowed crime novelist, his retired police detective dad, and the son of a serial killer with a cast of Robert DeNiro, Adam Scott, Michael Keaton, and Michelle Monaghan is, well, exactly what it sounds like: prestige last weekend of August fare.  

Penélope Cruz: not in Bunker.

Bunker TBD. Speaking of prestige middling thrillers, Penélope Cruz starring as a wife who takes umbrage with her husband (played by her real-life spouse Javier Bardem) building a survivalist bunker for a tech billionaire sounds like free agent LeBron James signing with the Charlotte Hornets. I wonder if the bunker will be more lavish than a Pe Emirates luxury first-class private suite? 

Above the Below / Above and Below. Upon reading about “Above the Below” (December 4), co-starring and co-directed by Idris Elba, in which three astronauts find themselves stranded at the bottom of the ocean after their space capsule crashes upon re-entry, I went looking for the trailer and found one instead for another 2026 middling thriller called “Above and Below” (July 29) in which two people are trapped beneath the ocean in a shark cage. Did I hallucinate? Are these two movies, in fact, the same and A.I. just caused one to accidentally morph into the other? I was going to make a joke that “Above and Below” might morph between now and then into “As Above, So Below” but that movie was already made in 2014. 

Carolina Caroline

The funny thing about confidence game movies is that because they tend to rely on familiar narrative devices and patterns, they effectively become confidence games themselves, persuading the audience to believe what they are seeing no matter how clichéd and obvious. James Foley’s “Confidence” (2003) was not especially good at such persuasion, save for one sequence ripped directly from David Mamet’s superior “House of Games” (1987). As I watched it, I thought, “this is like ‘House of Games,’” and yet, Rachel Weisz still got me to sign on the figurative dotted line. Adam Carter Rehmier’s “Carolina Caroline” is the latest confidence game movie as confidence game itself, though in this case, screenwriter William Thomas Harper IV has melded a confidence game movie with a lovers on the lam movie. If that renders the task doubly difficult, it makes the result all the more remarkable; just like Caroline herself, you might well spot the emotional swindle and then give yourself over to it anyway.

If Faye Dunaway’s Bonnie Parker was a bored waitress in small town Texas than Samara Weaving’s Caroline Daniels is a bored gas station attendant in small town Texas. Her life is altered, however, when Oliver Anderson (Kyle Gallner) walks in and hoodwinks her owner with a shortchange con. Caroline calls him on it, but only because his charismatic chutzpah sweeps her off her feet, and because she sees an opportunity not so much to leave her small town as go find the mother who abandoned her in South Carolina. Before long, she has left her genial dad (Jon Gries) behind for a life on the road in which she learns the confidence game ropes before graduating to bank robberies, wielding a weapon and getting the cash while Oliver drives the getaway car. Rehmeier typically conveys these scenes in montages scored to pop songs and just as Oliver dismisses free will as an illusion, that we are guided by neurons firing in our brains, I confess, when Rehmeier cued up Margo Cilker, or Sarah Shook, or Chris Stapleton, or Emmylou freaking Harris covering Bruce freaking Springsteen, I had to confess that neurons were being fired in my brain over which I had no control.

“Carolina Caroline” does not merely get by on its soundtrack, however, but also Weaver and Gallner’s chemistry, which defies description, a real you have to experience it to understand it sort of situation. It not only carries the movie through the fallow first half, but makes the back half when events take a turn for the worse hurt for real. Yet, at the same time, there is an undercurrent of nihilism that “Carolina Caroline” can’t quite square; if anything, Caroline’s eventual meeting with her mother works as an overly neat excuse for it. Oliver seems to have a nihilistic streak too, though “Carolina Caroline” never peels back the character’s mask enough to let us know. If Caroline can’t help but see him through the haze of romantic projection, that’s how “Carolina Caroline” ultimately chooses to see him too, meaning that with the capping confidence game the character and the movie unite in pulling the wool over their own eyes. 

Friday's Old Fashioned: Walker (1987)

Alex Cox’s fifth feature film “Walker” was beset by a rash of bad reviews, including two thumbs down from Siskel and Ebert with extreme prejudice. Even among the contemporary notices, though, there were occasional positive ones, like Vincent Canby of The New York Times complimenting Cox’s “nerve.” That’s a good way to put it. If hope is a dangerous thing to have in real life, then nerve is a dangerous thing to have in Hollywood, and after “Walker” was written off, so, too, was Cox, effectively blacklisted in La La Land for the rest of his career. He has intimated that it was a blessing in disguise, and I hope that was true, but boy, watching “Walker” for the first time almost 40 years later could not help but make me wonder what he might have been capable of had financial backing been easier to acquire. In telling the true story of one-time Nicaraguan president William Walker, Cox creates a truly hyper-surreal sort of aesthetic by not merely fudging the truth but often outright ignoring it, honoring the mid-19th century setting and not honoring it at all, commenting indirectly and unequivocally on President Reagan’s own Nicaraguan adventures, creating something that feels of its time, not of its time, and out of time, a Monte Hellman acid western reimagined as a historical biopic. Nerve is a good word but there’s another one: awesome. “Walker” is awesome.

“Walker” begins with its eponymous filibuster (Ed Harris), at least according to the 1850s version of the term, failing in his invasion attempt of Mexico, warning his men that they have no chance at an escape short of an act of God. At that, the wind picks up and a dust storm settles, allowing an avenue for escape, the very act of God Walker is hoping for, so funny as to be farcical even as it simultaneously invests in Walker a misplaced belief that God is on his side. In subsequent Sam Peckinpah-like scenes of gruesome violence, Walker walks through the bullets like someone walking between the raindrops, his imperviousness implying such ostensible divine favor. At the same time, Cox cuts that belief down to size in the most acerbic of manners. When Walker lectures his men on how to conduct themselves, he declares that cursing in public is forbidden, to which one of his men wonders in a deadpan line heard off camera, “Can we curse in private?” That’s how a lot of dialogue goes in “Walker”: so unexpectedly funny you take a beat to confirm in your mind what you just heard and then you laugh. 

Walker might seek to spread his ideology abroad but his financial backer, Cornelius Vanderbilt (Peter Boyle), has other ideas on his mind. He enlists Walker to invade Nicaragua to open a land route between oceans to spur trade and, of course, line his own coffers. Boyle plays Vanderbilt not as a captain of industry, nor even quite as a robber baron, but something else, like, say, a backwater version of Dom DeLuise as Emperor Nero in “History of the World, Part One,” evinced in what is undoubtedly among cinema’s greatest fart jokes. In another way, Boyle’s portrayal feels almost modern, like a 1980s tycoon has slipped the surly bonds of time, an anachronistic sensation that Cox makes more explicit with amusing little touches like the glimpse of a People Magazine where Walker is billed as Nicaragua’s “Gray-Eyed Man of Destiny” or the saxophone that sounds cut from “Jewel of the Nile” occasionally appearing on the soundtrack. History is not repeating itself, Cox seems to be saying, so much as such ideological urges are simply in our blood, brought home in a climactic speech in which Walker may as well be laying out the United States of America’s foreign policy for the next 200 years. 

If Walker has any kind of moral counterweight, it’s his deaf fiancé Ellen Martin (Marlee Matlin), who in keeping with the rest of the movie’s tone is not some patient saint but palpably repulsed by the company her husband to-be keeps. In one hysterical sequence, Walker translates her radical opinions for those who don’t know sign language by softening their tone, nothing less, really, than a literal evocation of the mealy-mouthed kind of centrism. She dies, though, not long after from cholera, leaving Walker with no one to temper his certitude, and as he invades Nicaragua and installs himself as President, it all goes to his head, eventually referring to himself in the third person just as he does in the recurring voiceovers that in Harris’s plainspoken tone juxtaposed against often blackly comic scenes suggest, I swear, Ted Striker’s narration in “Airplane!” Indeed, Ebert might have hated “Walker,” but his old adage about a performer being funniest when they don’t know they are wearing a funny hate proves true here – Harris plays Walker as someone wearing a funny hat who doesn’t realize it. He also plays him with little dimension or nuance, reducing the character to utter zealotry, in himself and his mission so that they are virtually one and the same, a terrifying living embodiment of manifest destiny.

In Memoriam: Sam Neill

Sam Neill’s name came first on the poster for “Jurassic Park” (1993), but he wasn’t really the star. No, the stars were the dinosaurs, and to a lesser extent, Jeff Goldblum and his off-kilter charisma, and so, even though he was at the center of the biggest blockbuster up ‘til then, Neill was the fulcrum, not the lever, to borrow a phrase of the esteemed Roger Ebert. Everybody remembers the scene where Goldblum’s Dr. Ian Malcolm takes Richard Attenborough’s dino resurrector John Hammond to task for scientific, if not philosophical, recklessness, but in that same scene, when Neill’s Dr. Alan Grant is asked for his thoughts, the actor assumes the air of a true scientist, cautious skeptic, like he’s waiting for Jurassic Park to be peer-reviewed. It was befitting of the Ireland-born, New Zealand-raised actor’s gentlemanly air and his steady career progression from stage to screen to Hollywood. After all, he auditioned for no less a role than James Bond post-Roger Moore and later admitted that he did not really want the part and was happy not to get it and starred in one of the preeminent dudes rock movies of all time, “The Hunt for Red October” (1990), as the most stoical sort of dude of all – the loyal lieutenant. Even in the (more than middling) hall of fame thriller “Dead Calm” (1989), in carrying his non-Nicole Kidman half of the movie almost entirely on his own, Neill gives a delicate internal performance that does not call all that much attention to itself. He always prioritized the movie. 

Not that Neill was just one thing. “I like playing villains and bad guys,” he told The Los Angeles Times during the press tour for “Jurassic Park,” “characters with moral ambiguity, because, in a way, they are easier to play.” His breakout role as the aptly named Smith in Roger Donaldson’s “Sleeping Dogs” (1977) was not a villain, per se, but in playing a character dropping out of a society on the brink only to be unwillingly pulled back in, Neill evinced something like ferocious indifference to the whole world around him. He brought great intensity to the lead role in John Carpenter’s “In the Mouth of Madness” (1995) and in his other 1993 movie, Jane Campion’s Best Picture-nominated “The Piano,” he served as a convincing antagonist. He got to play the bad guy in “Event Horizon” (1997), possessed by the eponymous evil spaceship, delivering the money line as God intended, a perversion of “Back to the Future’s” money line, like he was Doc Brown gone bye-bye. That movie was, uh, not nominated for Best Picture, critically reviled, as its mid-August release date suggests, but it made for one of the great movie-going experiences of my life, an employee-only midnight sneak at the multiplex where I worked that summer that felt as much like watching a college football game as a movie. It’s too bad we didn’t have air horns for Neill’s line.

As fun as it was, that wasn’t my favorite movie-going experience involving Neill. No, that one doubled as my favorite movie-going experience during my brief interlude of living in Phoenix. One Friday night, hot and unhappy as I generally was, I went and saw an Australian movie called “The Dish” (2000) based on nothing, really, but the poster and exited a couple hours later beaming from ear to ear. A comedy telling the true story of the Parkes radio telescope in New South Wales that wound up broadcasting the famed images of the Apollo 11 moon landing, Neill starred as the observatory’s chief, Cliff Buxton, giving a performance as warm as the cardigan sweater he is always sporting. It is an ensemble and he both blends in and binds it together, quietly carrying the weight of the death of his character’s wife and never raising his voice, until the one time he does, making it count. It occurs when the stiff-necked NASA man and one of Cliff’s Aussie colleagues butt heads in that way dudes do. “We are in the middle of the greatest feat ever attempted,” Cliff tells his colleague in calling him out. “What are you doing? Standing around bitching.” “The Dish” is a movie of so much goodwill and such little anger, and this lone angry moment, delivered by Neill in such a way to make it clear that he is angry about having to get angry at all, is a breathtaking rebuke not only of his colleague’s lack of goodwill but in a larger way, the cynicism and even nihilism that often feels so pervasive. Twenty-five years on, it still takes my breath away. 

Sam Neill died on Monday July 13th, 2026. He was 78. 

Omaha

“Omaha” begins with an unnamed dad (John Magaro) waking his nine-year-old daughter Ella (Molly Belle Wright) and her younger brother Charlie (Wyatt Solis) early one morning, asking them to round up the family dog, gather a few of their favorite things, and set off on a vaguely defined road trip. The title gives away the destination, of course, even if at the same time the title doesn’t explain half of it. This is evocative of director Cole Webley’s withholding approach, conveying information less through obvious exposition than behavior, context clues, and even camera placement. It’s often effective, and generally lets us understand what’s happening, even occasionally what the characters are feeling, though not, necessarily, what the characters feel once this journey comes to a head, an evasion that can’t help but drag otherwise good movie down.

Their beater of a family car frequently requires a push start, a la “Little Miss Sunshine,” though unlike the kind of comical valor of that movie’s recurring bit, the one in “Omaha” is more wearily matter of fact. Money is tight, evoked not just in the mention of food stamps but in Magaro’s air every time his character goes into his wallet; you feel the weight of what each dollar means. That is not to suggest “Omaha” is merely one more exercise in indie miserabilism. Though their road trip is not exactly a vacation, it is made to feel like a vacation, nevertheless. Sing-alongs to songs on the car radio, a visit to McDonald’s Playland, and a stop for gas station ice cream all evoke the kind of specific car-centric getaway that any middle-to-lower class kid might recognize and might recognize as being so much fun in that way of fun being what you make it no matter the financial constraints. The dad might be recently widowed, eliciting a sense of mourning, but the joy of these scenes still evokes a happy family. 

Throughout these road trip scenes, Webley also honors Ella and Charlie’s point of view without ever doing that thing that some filmmakers do with preadolescent characters and render them too much like little adults. What’s more, in straight-on shots of Ella in the front seat, Webley quietly communicates how Ella is aware their dad is not telling them everything just as shots of their dad from behind the headrest of his car seat communicate that he is, in fact, concealing something just as “Omaha” is concealing something from us. A movie does not necessarily owe us an explanation; often, deeper emotional power stems from such ambiguity. But the problem is less “Omaha” lacking an explanation, because its denouement suggests that such extreme measures might make one impossible anyway, than it is a refusal to let its characters express themselves about what happens. And in that refusal, Webley betrays the characters he clearly loves and ultimately renders “Omaha” incomplete rather than ambiguous. 

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Baron of Arizona (1950)

“The Baron of Arizona” does not technically begin on a dark and stormy night but it essentially begins on a dark and stormy night, a comically sly detail underlined in a magnificent close-up of Vincent Price in the rain emitting the distinct sense of a tall tale. Then again, Sam Fuller’s 1950 movie is based on the true story of James Reavis (Price) who in the late 1800s really did deploy a massive and massively detailed scheme involving fraudulent land claims to try and claim the Arizona Territory as his own. And sort of in the spirit of its main character, and despite a meager budget, “The Baron of Arizona” convinces as it moves the action from the American Southwest to Spain and back again, though its limited sense of action and substantial talky nature can sometimes weigh it down. Price plays this cruel manipulator with great panache, though he is less successful at convincing us of the character’s burgeoning love for the faux-Baroness (Ellen Drew) as the scheme gradually unravels. No, the real affection here is Fuller’s for his unlikely subject. A director famous for intense realism, this independently financed film feels like a sincere melodrama rather than a subversive one. By the end, and by taking liberties with the story, it’s as if the unlikely appreciation evinced by forgery expert Griff (Reed Hadley) toward his target mirrors the iconoclastic Fuller’s. Foreshadowing, or maybe just epitomizing, our national gift for greed and grift, the would-be baron tried to steal a whole freaking territory and for that, in the parlance of our times, you’ve gotta hand it to him. 

Pitching 90s Movies as Broadway Musicals

Linguist and Columbia professor John McWhorter noting in the run-up to America’s 250th anniversary for The New York Times that one of this country’s greatest inventions was the musical felt unfortunately ironic given that Michael Paulson reported the same month for the paper record that the musical was in trouble, just as he had reported the same thing in September of last year. The high cost of production and theater rental are just a couple of the reasons cited by Paulson for Broadway’s struggles, and this iffy status in the grand scheme goes a long way toward suggesting why there are fewer original musicals and more musicals based on movies; pre-existing intellectual property can provide a built-in audience. As such, an adaptation of 1987’s “The Lost Boys” was nominated at the most recent Tonys for Best Musical just as an adaptation of 1992’s “Death Becomes Her” was nominated the year before that; the musical adaptation of 2001’s “Moulin Rouge!” won in 2020/21 and is set to close at the end of this summer which no doubt will not help box office statistics. Adaptations of “La La Land” (2016) and “The Princess Bride” (1987) are reportedly in the works as is Lin-Manuel Miranda’s of Walter Hill’s 1979 thriller “The Warriors.” Whether this is good or bad, I can’t say; it seems more like sheer necessity. And if it is, I thought, well, why not try to help? What am I here for in my (un)official capacity as pretend producer if not to proffer fake pitches? And since the 90s are back, I also thought, well there is our intellectual property – the decade itself! Here then are a smattering of possible 90s movies to transform into surefire Broadway musical hits! You’re welcome. (I apologize.)

Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael. I think this comedy-drama failed because it wasn’t a musical in the first place; that title just sounds like a musical.

Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead. Ditto. They remade this 1991 comedy in 2024 to no great effect and that’s because it was always supposed to be a musical: just imagine the title song.

There’s Something About Mary. I mean, this is set up for music and lyrics by Jonathan Richman, right?

Quick Change. And if Jonathan Richman would prefer something completely (relatively) new, then let’s pitch him a musical of “Quick Change” because Richman writing music and lyrics for a sort of stuck-in-place musical about three bank robbers who can’t get out of New York sounds up his alley too.

Bowfinger. This 1999 comedy should have been a bigger hit and maybe we can make it one on stage by reimagining a motley crew of Hollywood outsiders filming a movie around an unwitting movie star as a motley crew of Broadway outsiders staging a musical around a star of the stage. How would such a thing even be possible? Eh, we’ll work that out later. And while I am tempted to say the unwitting Broadway star could be Brian Stokes Mitchell as himself, let’s instead finally give David Alan Grier his role of a lifetime.

The Pelican Brief. It’s high time we bring John Grisham to The Great White Way. 

Pacific Heights. A thriller in which a psychotic tenant who won’t leave is transformed into an uproarious comedy, as it was always meant to be, about how nobody can afford to buy a home.

The Fugitive. A “Miss Saigon”-ish tragedy in which Dr. Richard Kimble and U.S. Marshal Sam Gerard realize they are soulmates. 

Enemy of the State. A “Jersey Boys”-like romp told from the perspective of so many youthful NSA agents as they begin to question the nature of the surveillance state.

Clear and Present Danger. A “Camelot”-inspired retelling of the Jack Ryan legend and his utopian Central Intelligence Agency. 

A Simple Plan. “As sure as the night is long / a simple plan goes wrong.”

Empire Records. Is it possible to make an anti-jukebox musical jukebox musical? Let’s find out!

The Big Lebowski. Boy, would I love to see Donny’s version of “Mister Cellophane.”

Clerks. A musical set entirely in the Quick Stop sung by amateurs with improvised choreography.

Disclosure Day

“Disclosure Day” begins in media res with a point-of-view shot of a professional wrestler in the ring getting a boot to the face. It’s quite the wakeup call, dropping us directly into 79-year-old director Steven Spielberg’s 37th feature film with nary a warning and foreshadowing a sci fi-thriller that never takes a moment to let us get our bearings, just as some of its key characters never really have time to get their bearings, and then never really stops going, virtually two hours and twenty-five minutes of rising action in which the concluding line functions as the climax. That line, though, taken in tandem with the opening shot also suggests a wakeup call as a sort of Spielbergian version of Wake Up, Sheeple! There’s an alien conspiracy theory at the heart of David Koepp’s screenplay, true, but Spielberg has never really been about rolling in the mud where most conspiracy theories reside and more about lifting us up. “Disclosure Day” does not suggest that the truth is out there so much as the truth in here, in you and me, in all of us, and has been for a long time, as if he has ineffably transmuted the long-buried alien tripods of H.G. Wells’s “War of the Worlds” into dormant machines, to quote the esteemed Roger Ebert, for generating empathy. 

The truth is inside Dr. Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), a cybersecurity expert for a nefarious corporation in cahoots with the department of defense called Wardex, who absconds with numerous computer files demonstrating not just the existence of extra-terrestrial life but a 79-year cover-up. He’s a whistleblower, in other words, aiming to get the files to several other Wardex defectors, including Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo), who is adamant about broadcasting the images rather than uploading them. Kellner, however, is doggedly pursued by Wardex’s CEO Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), a creepier version of Tommy Lee Jones’s Agent K in “Men in Black” in so much as he contends that mankind can only get on with their happy lives if they don’t know the whole truth. It’s as fascinating question as the one posed by Kellner’s semi-inadvertent co-conspirator and pious girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson) about whether the revelation will trigger a societal crisis of faith. “Disclosure Day,” however, is not interested in truly debating these points but rather paying them lip service by lining them up as a few philosophical bowling pins to just knock them right back down.

Like Kellner, Spielberg has already made up his mind, and the filmmaker has always believed in some larger force, not God, necessarily, but a higher belief that something in the cosmos is meant to unify us in the face of our earthly strife. That strife is evoked in “Disclosure Day” through an impending nuclear strike involving North Korea, an idea that Spielberg is content to let linger on the periphery rather than truly foregrounding it. The larger cosmic mystery, meanwhile, takes root both in Daniel’s emergent backstory and how it ties to the emergent backstory of the other main character, Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), a Kansas City meteorologist who suddenly finds herself endowed with psychic abilities and unwittingly speaking what proves to be alien dialect on live television, drawing the attention of both Wardex and its defectors as Hugo sees her as nothing less than a sign he has been waiting for to tell the world that we are not alone.

Blunt’s performance is a marvel. As written, her character skews broad, a perky weather girl who wants to be taken seriously becoming a spokesperson for the whole universe. In a sense, all the moving parts of Koepp’s screenplay bloom in Margaret and Blunt binds them all together without going over the top, evincing in equal measure fear and a sense of innate responsibility as someone swept along by forces they don’t understand. In that way, she’s an impeccable surrogate for the audience. Her character is trusting that all this will lock into place just as we are trusting that all this will lock into place, and that is how “Disclosure Day” engenders suspense as much as its expertly staged chase sequences. Every time we see Hugo he appears to be on a soundstage with some sort of set being put into place behind him, quietly implanting the idea in the back of our mind that once this set is ready, the final piece of the narrative puzzle will click. 

Hugo’s soundstage and what it ultimately engenders comes with a deeper meaning. “Disclosure Day” does not render its own artifice as explicitly as, say, Wes Anderson’s “Asteroid City” but in gathering all his characters at a soundstage where Hugo functions as nothing less than a director nods at his artifice, nevertheless, while also illustrating his six-decade career as an artist who has always believed in the power of the moving image to unite us. Spielberg might be pulling bits from so many previous movies, from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” to “Minority Report,” from “E.T.” to “War of the Worlds,” but the movie that his 37th one most echoes turns out to be the 36th: “The Fabelmans.” “Disclosure Day” is not just Spielberg replaying the hits but drawing together all the themes that have fascinated him his whole career. If the aliens feel almost beside the point by the time the movie ends, it is because they are the vehicle not only for Spielberg’s plea for empathy but a full-fledged act of self-expression. 

Friday's Old Fashioned for 4th of July: From Here to Eternity (1953)

“Robert E. Lee Prewitt,” says Lorene (Donna Reed) as “From Here to Eternity” draws to a close. “Isn’t that a silly old name?” She is referring to the chief character of the 1953 winner for Best Picture, and though the name is, indeed, sort of silly, it is also revealing. Derived from Middle English and Old French, the surname Prewitt means brave, which is how America’s national anthem summarizes its general population, while the character’s given name Robert E. Lee encapsulates this country’s contradictions and complications, truth and lies, the story it tells about itself and how that story is constantly being revised. The making of the movie adaptation of James Jones’s celebrated 1951 novel of military life on Oahu leading up to Pearl Harbor encapsulated those contradictions too as director Fred Zinneman, writer Daniel Taradash, and producer Buddy Adler softened the book’s coarse language and less politically correct details even while painting itself in enough shades of grey to anger the U.S. Military for not being complimentary enough. The immortal essayist Joan Didion loved Jones’s novel and wrote about how in visiting America’s geographical end to Manifest Destiny, the Hawaiian Islands, in 1977 that she was less taken by seeing its beaches than Schofield Barracks, the army base where “From Here to Eternity” is set. In speaking with then-current service members, Didion came away thinking that much had changed and not much had changed at all, and that “the Army was nothing more or less than life itself.”

Robert E. Lee Prewitt (Montgomery Clift) is the proof. Zinneman’s approach might have been overly polished, and occasionally too literal (the turning of a calendar to December 7, 1941) but in truth, his camera did not really need anything other than Montgomery Clift’s visage to evince “From Here to Eternity’s” myriad dimensions; virtually smoldering in close-ups, Clift wears defiance and vulnerability at once. A hard-headed individualist, Prewitt arrives at Schofield Barracks as the movie opens having taken a buck to private when he is replaced as company bugler in his previous outfit by what he views as an inferior musician. His new company commander, Dana “Dynamite” Holmes (Philip Ober), only wants him for the boxing team, which he refuses to join on account of having previously blinded a man in the ring, given the so-called treatment by his fellow soldiers as brutal, callous incentivization to get in the ring but refusing to waver. “A man loves a thing,” this individualist explains of his devotion to the collectivist Army, “that don’t mean it’s gotta love him back,” which may as well encapsulate a great many Americans and their relationship to this nation. In a sense, Prewitt reflects both his First Seargent Milton Warden (Burt Lancaster), a career soldier who both is and is not content at putting out everyone else’s fires, and his best pal, fellow private Maggio (Frank Sinatra), a hothead who walks off duty when his weekend pass is revoked.

It is through Maggio that Prewitt meets Lorene. In the book, she’s a prostitute, in the movie, she’s a hostess, though that delineation is thinly veiled, and I suspect it is why both then and now that despite winning an Oscar for her performance, Reed is often cited as being miscast. Donna Reed became a certain American housewife archetype while the real Donna Muellenberger, as she was born, was something else altogether, and those dueling notions and the more complex sense of self that Reed nee Muellenberger possessed are why she was, in fact, perfectly cast. Why, Lorene is not even Lorene, she’s Alma Burke, and she works at the New Congress Club to save up enough money to go back to the mainland and lead she what deems a proper life: a proper marriage to the proper man with the proper children with a membership at the country club. The monologue in which she explains this is Reed’s best moment – you can virtually see her putting on a mask in real time, a mask of the person that American society expects her to be. 

Lorene’s hope that Prewitt will be the one to help her fulfill the American Dream is undone, however, when Maggio is killed in the brig by the sadistic stockade Sergeant Fatso Judson (Ernest Borgnine) and Prewitt avenges his friend by killing Fatso, leaving him wounded and on the lam, friendship and honor bleeding into standard-issue American masculine idiocy. Lorene hides him at home, and Warden protects him during roll call, holding out hope he might return, demonstrating his own unexpected complications just as his affair with his commanding officer’s wife (Deborah Kerr) does too. Ah, but the problems of one, two, three, four, five people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world and that proves true when the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor and “From Here to Eternity” both unironically and ironically brings to life Mr. X’s observation from JFK that the “organizing principle of any society, Mr. Garrison, is for war.” Even Prewitt is galvanized, in a manner of speaking, inverting the notion of dying for your country by dying for his country in the dumbest way possible by trying to sneak back to the barracks against all logic and getting shot and killed by his own men. That, however, is not how “From Here to Eternity” ends. No, it ends with Lorene telling a make-believe story reframing Prewitt’s idiotic death as an act of genuine valor and reminding us that if you tell a story about who or what something is enough times, you might just start to believe it. 

250 Years Burning Down the Road

I remember the exact moment when it dawned on me for the first time that I would probably not live to see the United States of America’s Tricentennial. It was my sixth-grade class with Miss Carlson, and not my fourth-grade class with the same Miss Carlson, because it was fifth grade in-between when I formed my lifelong fascination with the American War of Independence and related Founding Fathers history. And when we touched on our country’s 200th anniversary of signing the Declaration of Independence, Miss Carlson humorously noted that because everyone in the classroom was born a year or two after July 4, 1976, we would need to live to be roughly 99 years old to see the tricentennial. Everyone laughed, but I was heartbroken. I could not even conceive of 2076 in my mind at that point, but I knew it was far away and my odds of getting there were long. No, the semiquincentennial was going to have to be it for me. Little did I know that 2026 would be the year the great-great-great-great-great-grandson of King George III would appear in the district named for George Washington to subtly remind the light-of-brain 47th American President of his being a chief executive of a constitutional democracy, not a king. The British army probably did not play The World Turned Upside Down at Yorktown, the 1781 battle sealing the whole American Revolution deal, just as nobody played it after King Charles III spoke to Congress, but you could hear its figurative echo.

Of course, the older I got and the more history I read, the more I realized that missing the American Bicentennial was no tragedy. Despite something approximating its best efforts, the celebration could never expunge the pungent fumes of Watergate and Vietnam; if anything, Gerald Ford pardoning his Presidential predecessor to move on, as they say, probably only made the stench worse. What’s more, in a real what’s old is new sort of situation, the Bicentennial being used to sell so much commemorative schlock echoes our current President hawking his own Freedom 250™ crap. Perhaps our country has always been about crass commercialism as much as constitutionalism. The big exposition of 1876 meant to celebrate the American Centennial, meanwhile, was as much a for-profit trade show as much as anything, and while the Civil War was technically in the rearview mirror, Jim Crow was just ramping up. (It might be ramping up again.) The sesquicentennial in 1926 was deemed America’s Greatest Flop. All this got me to thinking about my favorite July Fourths. I liked the one where my parents threw a party and my dad’s best friend brought his ice cream maker; I liked the one where a couple of my friends and I went and saw “Terminator 3” in lieu of fireworks; I liked the one where My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife and I went to a small carnitas place where the air conditioning barely worked and then we watched A Capitol Fourth on PBS and went to bed early. Maybe the less momentous the 4th of July, the more memorable.

Just as the founders erected figurative guardrails to hold the country together, I find myself wondering if the Divine Providence namechecked in our declaration incorporates bad feelings if not outright existential threats to ensure our biggest national celebratory milestones are mindful rather than mindless. Yet, even if we accept this premise, it seems like Divine Providence laid it on a little thick for 250. After all, our nation’s capital was specifically designed by Pierre L’Enfant to evoke constitutional democracy and yet our know-nothing President has spent the run-up to the semiquincentennial running roughshod over Washington D.C. He trashed the White House ellipse for a bloody spectacle as glorification of his massive ego and reduced its east wing to rubble to construct a ballroom less about security than blighting the people’s house for eternity. (At least all the tacky gold accents the President is supergluing himself to walls inside 1600 Pennsylvania Ave will probably just fall off themselves.) He has put his name and face on every building he can, trying to make the nation state synonymous with himself, commandeered the National Mall for a pitiful semiquincentennial fair that is glorious only in the pudding where his brain should be, and sought to plant 47 trees in Lafayette Park to remake the nationally protected public space named for America’s greatest friend in liberty in his own image. He has brayed about constructing a 250-foot arch which he undoubtedly believes will be his own gold-accented pyramid to earn his way to the afterlife while his attempts to transform the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool into the MGM Grand Pool Complex in Las Vegas by draining it and painting the bottom so-called American Flag Blue instead turned the whole thing Hi-C Ecto Cooler green and became the ultimate reflection of his T*ump-brand tyranny, self-perceived infallibility, blatant grift, and awe-inspiring incompetence colliding to manifest uproarious, infuriating, depressing unintentional comedy and conspiracy theories. The Iran War and the reflecting pool are hardly the same, but also, you can see how the former would have been something conducted by the person responsible for the latter. He repeatedly claims to be a builder, but his greatest gift is for destruction. 

As the President went about laying waste, Bruce Springsteen exercised his constitutional right to protest about it by taking to the road in April and May for the Land of Hope and Dreams American Tour (slogan: No Kings), including the United Center in Chicago in late April where I saw him. Wearing a black vest over a white button-town and black tie and indulging in several between-song monologues expressing his belief in core American values, he cut the image of a revivalist preacher whose text was the Constitution rather than the Bible. His air was less spirited than solemn, however, and frankly, the music and the way he structured his setlist said what needed to be said all on its own. He made his anti-ICE protest anthem “Streets of Minneapolis” a centerpiece, but objectively, it paled when put side-by-side with his earlier work, putting into perspective how his own songbook was already built for this moment. That howl of desperation for “The Promised Land” never hit so hard, the contradictions of “No Surrender” were never so poignant, and a full band “Ghost of Tom Joad” in which Bruce let co-star Tom Morello cook on guitar was electrifying, not so much summoning the specter of the eponymous “Grapes of Wrath” character as reminding us he was still there, in Minneapolis and in Memphis and in Chicago. He was probably at the reflecting pool, too, maybe played by Will Ferrell instead of Henry Fonda, incredulous, but there. “Wherever there’s a national guardsman, ma, yawning with nothing to do, I’ll be there.”

Nothing hit harder than “Wrecking Ball.” Springsteen has composed quite a few politically motivated songs in the new century, though none have proven more durable as a 21st century American national anthem than “Wrecking Ball.” Written in the fall of 2009 when he and The E Street Band played a five-night stand to close Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey ahead of its demolition the ensuing year, the eventual title track of his 2012 album anthropomorphizes an 80,000-seat concrete edifice as it defiantly stares down its own imminent destruction. It sounds impossible, such a song working at all, and even with a powerhouse performance by The E Street Band, the subject matter can make for some clunky lines. But Springsteen is a keen songwriter and he knows that the reverence Americans tend to feel for certain sports stadiums allows the song to work as a broader allegory of recalcitrant institutions and the implacable forces that would seek to destroy them, and that even if they succeed, a deeper and stronger spirit prevails. Indeed, “Wrecking Ball” is not elegiac but jubilant, evinced in its f major chord and in the climactic solo call and response of “hard times come and hard times go” five times fast giving life to that endless American ebb and flow, punctuated by taunting the wrecking ball to bring it on, suggesting that whatever you can destroy, we can rebuild, achieving something I am positive only Bruce Springsteen could: effecting Alexis de Tocqueville’s famed observation that American democracy’s special sauce is “being able to repair the faults (it) may commit” as a rock and roll anthem told from the perspective of a football stadium. 

“Wrecking Ball’s” message of “hold(ing) tight to your anger and (not falling) to your fear” can admittedly sound of its time, the wake of the 2008 Financial Crisis and the early days of the Obama administration, when fanciful words like hope and change were in the air. Those eventually ran up against the hard but necessary realities of political compromise but more than that, the 44th President never seemed to see, or maybe just never could bring himself to believe the dark forces that were conspiring against his rosy vision. And yet, at the recent opening of his presidential library, he struck the same optimistic tone that first made him famous, in a way evoking why so many young people are obsessed these days with the twenty-tens. It felt better. Of course, such nostalgia can feel naive, and so did President Obama’s optimism, frankly, in advance of Freedom 250™. That sort of tension, though, between belief and a lack of it, animated our founding, and has been animating us ever since, and has animated Bruce Springsteen’s music too, whether or not people have allowed themselves to hear it. He has written constantly about the dark side of America, and at the same time, he has never stopped believing in it, the famed arc of justice always at a standstill, as it was on April 29th at the United Center. He said his piece about current affairs, but he structured his setlist to let a little light back in when things got dark. He held tight to his anger; he refused to fall to his fear. 

Famously, the 555-foot Washington Monument was designed by Robert Mills not to instill a sense of triumph but uplift, the emphasis of its verticality carrying your eyes up toward the sky as if appealing to our better angels. In recent times, however, with the apathy, obsequiousness, and whole-hearted shamelessness that has settled over not just our politics but civic life, it has been hard not to feel as if our better angels have taken their harps and gone home. If I have not always believed in the country itself, I have always believed in the idea of this country, though after so much of the citizenry’s collective shrugging off of January 6th as no big deal, I confess, I have never struggled to maintain belief so much. Does an idea cease to be enough when the ensuing course of action drifts so far from it? A funny thing happened, though, when My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife and I recently returned her hometown of Washington D.C. We were coming back from dinner in Alexandria in a car and I realized that from certain vantage points, all the construction, cranes, and fencing that currently blot the capital’s landscape disappeared and left only a view of the Washington Monument, an impervious, immovable testament to its namesake’s intrinsic example that no one man is greater than the country. And for those few moments I did not hear the echoes of The World Turned Upside Down but of Bruce Springsteen, daring our wannabe fascist of a President to bring on his wrecking ball.

 

Friday's Old Fashioned: Getting Even (1986)

The 1986 action-thriller “Getting Even” is a moving picture testament to that moment in time when Dallas, Texas captured the imagination of and evoked a swaggering attitude endemic of Me Decade America. It was co-produced by Mike Liddle and Al Hill Jr., the latter the grandson of H.L. Hunt and heir to the Hunt Oil Company, meaning “Getting Even” was infused with oil money and something like an opportunity to transform Big D into a movie town. Indeed, it was filmed not only on location in Dallas but by utilizing Dallas equipment and locations to which the producers had access, as director Dwight H. Little explained in an interview with The Flashback Files. What’s more, Little has said he was hired as director specifically because he was non-union. That’s hilarious, evoking a certain kind of wildcatting spirit and goes a long way toward describing what “Getting Even” is: effectively a B-movie made with an A-movie attitude. And though I can’t speak to how it looked or played in a theater on February 28, 1986, alongside “Pretty in Pink,” of course, just how it came across 40 years later on VHS rip uploaded to YouTube, I gotta say, I was smitten, and which is why I give it my full-throated endorsement. Get even with modern Hollywood by skipping the theater this summer to stay home and watch “Getting Even” on YouTube! 

In keeping with its era-specificity, “Getting Even” opens in Afghanistan where a one-time soldier turned soldier of fortune, Tag Taggar (Edward Albert), is pilfering lethal Russian nerve gas to transport back to Big D for analysis. It does not take long, however, for a wealthy rancher with a grudge against Yankees, King Kenderson (Joe Don Baker), to pilfer the nerve gas for himself, threatening to unleash it unless Tag coughs up an exorbitant ransom. Though the poster makes Tag look like Remo Williams, the characterization and Albert’s performance are anything but, more like a suave Robert Goulet filtered through Timothy Dalton’s James Bond. This is ironic given that Baker played the villain Timothy Dalton’s 1987 Bond movie “The Living Daylights,” though in “Getting Even” he lays his Lone Star heritage on thick, even as that heritage simultaneously makes for another of the movie’s weird ironies. Kenderson’s mission statement might literally be explicated as not messing with Texas, yet by threatening Dallas with the stolen gas, is he not, himself, in fact, messing with Texas?

Meh, who cares. The plot is but a thread on which to hang “Getting Even’s” myriad action scenes and running but a brisk 90 minutes, Little keeps those scenes coming at a good pace while utilizing so many action-thriller sound effects of grunts, screams, and machine gun fire to make for a hog-killin’ time. A car chase concludes on the Texas State Fairgrounds and involves a bad guy climbing the old Comet rollercoaster with the Dallas skyline as a backdrop, a delightful manifestation of Roger Ebert’s Climbing Killer theory, just as Tag deactivating a bomb at the top of Reunion Tower while King blasts away at him from a nearby hovering helicopter makes for a merry embodiment of Roger Ebert’s digital readout on the ticking time bomb cliché while also encapsulating the daredevil nature of 80s action moviemaking. “They were flying that (helicopter) thirty feet away from the tower,” Little told Flashback Files. “You could never shoot something like that today, not in a million years.” Yet, even as it frequently goes big, “Getting Even” is equally good at thinking small, like a sequence in which Tag is roped by some evil rodeo henchmen; I laughed out loud during that scene and I mean that as a compliment. Even better is the moment when Tag’s team runs a simulation of estimated casualties should the nerve gas be released. A helicopter hovering next to Reunion Tower is a whimsical reminder of the era, but so, too, are the dread-inducing graphics on a 1986 desktop computer. 

Some Drivel On...Trapped

It was sheer coincidence that I happened to watch “Trapped” (2002) not long after watching “Apex” (reviewed Monday), two one-word titled Charlize Theron thrillers 24 years apart, providing an inadvertent if revealing window into the ebb and flow of the Hollywood middling thriller. In the former, Theron and Stuart Townsend star as Karen and Will Jennings, mother and father to young Abigail (Dakota Fanning) who is abducted by a trio of kidnappers (Kevin Bacon, Courtney Love, and Pruitt Taylor Vince) that holds her for ransom. It suggests Joel Schumacher’s “Trespass” (2011) not just in its overtones of a home invasion thriller but more crucially, in its totally bonkers energy, epitomized in director Luis Mandoki’s overheated aesthetic and screenwriter Greg Iles’s commitment to kooky sensationalism much more than convincing characters. The kidnappers are set up as shrewd and thorough, only to come across as anything but, not that gaps in logic mean much. “You are here for the smoked meat,” the server said to My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife when we went to Schwarz’s Deli in Montreal and if you watch “Trapped,” you are here for Courtney Love’s screw-is-loose performance, the You-Cannot-Be-Serious twist, and Will being introduced flying a seaplane all so he can land a seaplane on a highway during the car chase climax. I did not believe this climax, of course, but I did not believe it in the way one cannot believe, say, a Knicks 29-point comeback in Game 4 of the NBA Finals. And so, while “Apex” was made in the indifference-inducing house style of Netflix, “Trapped” at least piques a perverse sense of curiosity that makes you want to watch if for no other reason than to wonder, “What’s this movie on about then?”  

Apex

“Apex” begins with an adrenaline junkie couple, Sasha (Charlize Theron) and Tommy (Eric Bana), at a risk-taking crossroads inside a tent suspended in mid-air alongside a sheer vertical rock face. She wants to keep climbing despite the bad weather while he is starting to wonder if maybe she needs to stop seeking quite so many thrills and frankly, it’s remarkable just how much these two wily acting vets sell this scene. Yet, even if its purpose is partly to induce terrifying vertigo with a shot looking out the tent, these introductory narrative moves of Baltasar Kormákur’s straight-to-Netflix-streaming action-thriller are so cozy and reassuring that it’s like slipping into a warm bath. Do I need to tell you that Sasha is riddled with guilt when Tommy perishes on the rock face? Flash ahead five months and Sasha is traversing a remote Australian National Park where, a ranger warns, numerous people have gone missing. Sure enough, the genial local Ben (Taron Egerton) who helps her fend off a few loutish red herrings turns out to be a cannibalistic psycho. Game on! What ensues suggests an outback horror-thriller, like “Wake in Fright,” crossed with “Surviving the Game,” as Ben gives Sasha a head start in the wilderness and then gives chase. For his part, Egerton plays Ben like a simmering kettle, really letting his insanity escalate before unleashing. Theron, on the other hand, while evincing as much resolve as desperation, is done a disservice by a script that does not explore nor even so much as just momentarily wonder whether this diabolical version of the most dangerous game reactivates in her a macabre rush of adrenaline. It speaks to a lack of deeper emotional layer or even a true sense of surprise, no matter how intense the stunts might be, meaning “Apex” ultimately is a thriller that just regresses to the middling mean.

Friday's Old Fashioned: When Time Ran Out... (1980)

Paul Newman and Jacqueline Bisset react to special effects.

“When Time Ran Out…” is an appropriate title given that it effectively marked the end of producer Irwin Allen’s brief run in the 1970s as Hollywood’s master of disaster with “The Poseidon Adventure” and “The Towering Inferno.” Neither were any great shakes, but they were virtual barnburners next to this low-energy abomination that Leonard Matlin cheekily termed When Ideas Run Out. Maybe, but director James Goldstone’s bomb started as a re-telling of the 1902 Mount Pelée disaster, only for Allen somewhere along the line to call off a dramatization of real events, perhaps deeming them too real. He opted instead for a fictional narrative about a pair of luxury hotel owners, Shelby Gilmore (William Holden) and Bob Spangler (James Franciscus), on a Pacific island who ignore the impending threat of a long-dormant volcano that erupts and threatens to wipe out everything with slow-moving lava that sort of melds the future 1997 volcano movie double shot of “Dante’s Peak” and “Volcano” together. 

Shelby also wants to marry his secretary, Kay (Jacqueline Bisset), but Kay is still in love with Hank (Paul Newman), an oil rigger on the same island who in the course of drilling uncovers the volcano’s resuscitation. This is one of many soap opera threads inserted by screenwriters Carl Foreman and Sterling Silliphant that are not only half-baked but barely there, just coming and going, likely owing to the different cuts of the movie, no doubt the studio desperately trying to hack this turkey down. You can occasionally see glimmers of how “When Time Ran Out…” might have worked as a big piece of stinky cheese. The moment when Hank and Kay rekindle their love doubles as the moment when the volcano erupts. What should be waggish melodrama, however, is undermined by the shoddy special effects, stranding Newman and Bisset in laughable effects-less reaction shots. Such bad effects apparently stemmed from the movie’s budget being slashed in the middle of production when costs ran too high, leaving them with matte paintings and models that must have looked ludicrous on the big screen. What’s worse, despite slashing the run time, “When Time Ran Out…” feels endless, owing to a peculiar lack of urgency in the scenes that do remain.

That Newman ended up in “When Time Ran Out…” owed to his deciding to fulfill his contract to Warner Bros. despite earned skepticism over the script. As Matt Zoller Seitz once noted, Jeff Goldblum’s performance in “The Lost World: Jurassic Park” was something like a running commentary on the dumbness of the movie itself. Newman, however, did not have that kind of meta gear, and so he’s left to helplessly look out the side of helicopters and jeeps at the lava to be added later. As such, he innately merges with his character, two men at the mercy of corporate bigwigs, just trying to survive.

Watched on a Plane: Titanic

This is another in Cinema Romantico’s sporadic series of reviews of movies watched on planes.

In our current era, the big screen has ceded the stage to the small screen, a point brought home with great clarity on a recent flight when I noticed a woman one row ahead me was watching “Titanic” on her seatback screen. More than that, though, occasionally, she would take a picture with her phone of “Titanic” on her seatback screen. It was awe-inspiring. It would be like taking a picture of Mount Everest through the spotting scope. Then again, there is something to be said for watching “Titanic” on a 10-inch screen rather than a 52x20 one, at least, if you are watching it over someone’s shoulder. After all, what has been the preeminent the critique of “Titanic” lo these 29 years? The dialogue, of course, the clunky, sappy, wretched dialogue. And fair enough. Even I, staunch “Titanic” defender and lover, will cede that point. Yet, watching it sans dialogue only put into perspective the visual nature of James Cameron’s storytelling, the expert composition of Cameron and his co-editors Conrad Buff IV and Richard A. Harris, eliciting emotion and conveying information in equal measure. When I broke down my favorite scene some years ago shot-by-shot, I came away thinking that with some tailoring and tweaking, Cameron might have made “Titanic” as a silent movie, and after watching it over someone’s shoulder on a plane, I believe it even more. I mean, Billy Zane was acting like he was in a silent movie anyway. 

Still. The dialogue. There is no scene as poorly written as the one in which Rose and Jack first meet at the back of the ship where she is threatening to jump. The verbiage there is so woebegone and wooden that you can virtually see Winslet and DiCaprio stiffening in real time, trying to find ways to say it, not quite being able to. As fate would have it, however, while watching over the other passenger’s shoulder, I was simultaneously listening on my headphones to Bruce Springsteen’s 1993 MTV Plugged album and almost the instant that scene started, so did The Boss’s “If I Should Fall Behind.” It wasn’t Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” while watching “The Wizard of Oz,” or anything, an eerie synchronization of the events onscreen, but the words did echo the visual cues that Cameron is setting up for later. Indeed, just as the visual cues foreshadow later events, so does Springsteen’s key observation – “If as we’re walking a hand should slip free / I’ll wait for you / And should I fall behind / wait for me” – eerily foreshadow “Titanic’s” heartrending conclusion. I realized this because due to a lot of taxiing, a lot of sitting on the tarmac, and a lot of the pilot trying to line up the door with the jet bridge, our flight literally took the 3 hours and 15 minutes of James Cameron’s movie. As I finally deplaned, I was already wondering what “Avatar” might look like scored to “Human Touch.”