5 Moments That Made the Movies in 2014

A couple years ago my favorite film critic, David Thomson, put out a book titled “Moments That Made the Movies”, a compilation that focused, as you might surmise, on specific moments from specific films. In keeping with its spirit, the venerable web site Indiewire asked the incredibly esteemed Mr. Thomson to digress on the five moments that made the movies in 2013. It does not, however, appear that he took up the same task for 2014, which is where Cinema Romantico comes in.

To be sure, taking this torch from Mr. Thomson is an act of pure idiocy. I am essentially Nicholas Sparks to his Leo Tolstoy, and yet, like the fool I am, I must forge ahead, even as I suspect he’d look at my moments, his eyebrows raised quizzically, and query: “Those?”

5 Moments That Made the Movies in 2014

Morgan Freeman is legendarily a vocally resonant actor. He’s the go-to for voiceover gospel. He’s played the President, he’s played Nelson Mandela, he’s played God. Which is why when he’s prodded into stupefied stammering, you sit up and take notice. This occurs in “Lucy” when the titular character is getting all #science on him. The titular character is played by Scarlett Johansson. There is a lot of gobbledygook regarding Movie Stars these days; who they are, how they are defined, whether they exist. Well, put away your op-eds and, for God sakes, stuff a sock in those think pieces. Lauren Bacall became a Movie Star when she made the most cynical man in showbiz smile; Scarlett Johansson became a Movie Star when she turned the most melodious man in showbiz verbally inept.

“Somehow Doug feels that this stuff defines him.” That’s what the wife of Doug Brown, former chief engineer of the Deepwater Horizon, says in “The Great Invisible”, a riveting documentary chronicling the gulf oil spill. “The stuff” to which she refers is his Transocean and BP accouterments, kept in a box out in the garage that he has held onto since the 2010 disaster, even in the face of worker’s comp claims, post-traumatic stress and a suicide attempt. It’s revealed, in fact, terribly, that it was among these personal effects where he had planned on taking his own life. That which gives us life, threatens to snuff it out, an apt metaphor for the oil industry, and for this whole fucked up world.

It’s pretty much what you’d expect a foot chase in Wes Anderson Land to be – a gruff, affectation-afflicted Willem Dafoe ominously following a goateed Jeff Goldblum on a train through marvelous European locale that winds up at the Zwinger Museum in Dresden where the clip-clop of the each man’s respective shoes echoes across the screen. But then, when the chase concludes, a door closes on Goldblum’s hand, slicing off his fingers and staining the blood with snow. Those saying “The Grand Budapest Hotel” garnering so much Oscar nomination love when previous Anderson works had failed to move the Academy's needle are apparently missing the encroachment of reality - actual reality, however small the doses - on the auteur’s fussy, fantastical aesthetic, whether in the form of a Wes-ed version of WWII or, as in this blurb's example, legit violence. Those missing fingers might be remembered as the moment Wes Anderson stopped being twee and started getting real.

Tomas (Johannes Kuhnke) and Mats (Kristofer Hivju) have spent a day on the slopes at a pristine Swedish ski resort. They relax in the sun with chalices of malted beverage. A lithe lady, several years their junior, approaches them and explains to Mats that her friend thinks Tomas is, like, the most handsome dude in the resort. Tomas struts his metaphorical feathers, never mind that he’s married with a couple kids. He’s a MAN. Then the lady re-approaches. She explains it was a mistake. She explains her friend meant some other guy was handsome. Mats, for reasons known only to the mind of dudes, takes offense and rises. An argument ensues. A guy approaches to calm things down. A shoving match breaks out. And all the while Tomas sits there, confused, defeated, emasculated. In that moment “Force Majeure” shatters the male ego so abruptly and enormously it makes five Goldman Sachs bros faint every time it screens.

Since the boy at the center of “Boyhood” was always going to have to reach the precipice of Manhood by the end we have known full well for the preceding two-and-a-half hours that this moment would arrive. By “this moment” I mean the moment when the boy, or Mason Jr.’s, mother, played by Patricia Arquette, would have to come to terms with her son standing at the precipice of Manhood, ready to go off on his own, represented by his departing for college. She sits at the table. She listens to him talk as teenagers boy do. She’s barely registering what he’s saying. We’re barely registering what he’s saying. LOOK AT HER! She breaks down crying. How can she not?! Her life is flashing before her eyes! Right here! At this table! All of it! And then she says the most terrifying thing, the thing that would have made Jack Torrance put down his axe and get misty-eyed, the thing that would have made a depressed Alien curl up for a long winter’s nap. She says: “I just thought there would be more.” If the film is a “gimmick”, as so many have claimed, then let them wait 'til the passage of time renders final judgement, as it surely will....then they'll see how gimmicky it is.

Countdown to the Oscars: Film Location Awards

It’s been almost ten years since I arrived in Chicago and set off into the wilds of downtown for a job interview and emerged from the office building cozied up between a few much more towering edifices and looked up and did a double take and mentally gasped and internally cried: “OH MY GOD! THAT’S THE ‘ADVENTURES IN BABYSITTING’ BUILDING! AM I GOING TO WORK NEXT TO THE ‘ADVENTURES IN BABYSITTING’ BUILDING?!” For several years, I very much did, and as a zealot of the film de cinema, the rush never really dissipated for me.

Film locations, in other words, are all around me. Yet it’s not simply the “Adventures in Babysitting” building nor the Cameron Frye painting at the Art Institute (which totally has its own name, FYI) or the Jewelers Building where Batman stood aloft looking down over a twinkling Gotham that looked so much more dazzling than when it was Pittsburgh or that other city somewhere on the east coast. No, there are so many more, so many you might never suspect, so many that are so small but so crucial. Locations like the Black Rock, the bar just a couple blocks down from me where bits and pieces of “Drinking Buddies” was filmed, or The Double Door, where “High Fidelity” ended and where I was less than a week ago, or the St. Vincent de Paul Parish where Kelly Macdonald in my beloved “The Merry Gentleman” visited and which I pass by, oh, say, twice a month during my favorite walk in the city.

It was my friend and film blogger and/or filmmaker extraordinaire Alex Withrow of And So It Begins... who brought to my attention the existence of the Location Managers Guild of America (LMGA) and, even better, the LMGA Awards, scheduled this year on March 7 at The Wallis Beverly Hills. Film Location awards! Of course! It makes so much sense! Let’s say “Birdman” wins Best Picture. You will, whether consciously or not, remember the St. James Theater as much as the bird costume. Sure, you’ll remember the visual effects of “Interstellar” but also lingering in the back of your mind will be the locales of Alberta, Canada.

The LMGA recognizes Outstanding Feature Film and Outstanding Achievement By A Location Professional and Outstanding Film Commission and, heck, despite only having had an awards show for two years they have a Lifetime Achievement Award! The vaunted Eva Monley Award, bestowed last year upon Alexander Payne, no doubt for this. We here at Cinema Romantico felt there was no choice but to hop on the bandwagon.

1st Annual Cinema Romantico Film Location Awards

Night Moves. Aidan Sleeper, Location Manager. It’s not simply the radiant foliage of Oregon standing at attention throughout but the barn functioning as a sort of eco-friendly Studio 54 where club-hoppers drink out of mason jars and listen to fiddles as well as the bouts of pro-environmental pissed off poetry that director Kelly Reichardt captures whether in the fleeting image of apocalyptic timber or a white collar home with a fake waterfall in the backyard whose real-life owner must not have realized Ms. Reichardt employed it to give said owner the middle finger.

Only Lovers Left Alive. Chris-Teena Constas (Detroit). The Tangier locations as managed by Mohamed Benhmamane are spectacular in their own right, no doubt, but what Jarmusch’s vampire film does for the Motor City is beyond reproach, eliciting a vibrant apocalyptic air through its locales, a nostalgia that makes it seem like modern America’s version of a fallen Rome. Maybe the ruined Michigan Theater was an obvious choice, maybe not, but, God help me, that sequence’s romantic doom is taken up to eleven because of its setting.

Beneath the Harvest Sky. Josh LaJoie, Location Manager. Admittedly part of this stems from my own whimsy. Though “Beneath the Harvest Sky” was filmed in Maine’s Aroostook County, nudging up right alongside the Canadian border, its look and feel is nonetheless akin to the rural Midwest, and that always arouses fondness in my oft-homesick mentality. The opening shot features kids tossing rocks at a ramshackle water tower because what else do they have to do? That water tower is more beautiful than any iron latticework on the Champ de Mars.

Boyhood. Peter Atherton, Robbie Friedman, Steve White, Jose Luis Hernandez, Location Managers. For Antone’s alone. What other place could so perfectly capture a father's heart-to-heart with his son in advance of the son on the precipice of becoming “a man”?

A Few Other 2014 Movie Shots I Love

I always write a lengthy diatribe about my favorite movie shot of the year (see: yesterday) but thought I might go one further this time around and pay homage to (rip off) my friend Ryan McNeil at The Matinee who annually puts up a hella awesome post in which he submits a few of his favorite movie shots of the year with no additional commentary. So here are a few of my favorite movie shots of the year with no additional commentary.

Boyhood

Perhaps the most astonishing element of the astonishing “Boyhood”, a virtually unprecedented project in which director Richard Linklater filmed the same actors over a twelve year period in an effort to truly convey the rhythms and effects of an entire upbringing, is its utter conventionality. When such laudatory ambition is a film’s calling card, it typically signals an unheard of narrative slant or filmmaking innovation, but aside from a number of simply elegant frames intended to capture the fundamentally picturesque - like a sunset in Texas, or a camping trip pseudo-sing along – the visual style is unshowy, and the narrative is almost aggressively formulaic. Yet without saying much new at all, “Boyhood” manages to convey an enlightening cinematic experience that feels entirely original. 

The film essentially opens with our protagonist of the title, Mason Jr. (Ellar Coltrane), laying in the grass in his native Texas, staring up at the sky, his head, as he is quickly told afterwards, in the clouds. It is a poetical opening perfectly juxtaposing with the weight of quietly crushing reality to follow. He and his sister Samantha (Lorelei Linklater, the auteur’s daughter), a few years older, are the children of a struggling single mother (Patricia Arquette), who returns to school to carve out a better future and gets involved with a string of men whose quality seems beneath her true-to-life nobility. Their father, Mason Sr. (Ethan Hawke), is requisitely absentee, beginning in Alaska (is that where all confused men flee?) and returning home to be with his kids, but without necessarily wanting responsibility's weight. This traditionally untraditional family’s ups and downs and middles are then chronicled, with little to no surprise. But surprises are not the point. “Boyhood”, observational without becoming a docudrama, is about existence. Not existence as in “why are we here?”, though that question is addressed with its own sort of everyman philosophy, but in existing, in how our lives are marked by the passage of time.

By its very nature, “Boyhood” is episodic. Beginning in the past – 2002 to be precise – and then moving forward, the film functions as a time capsule – indulging in the dated sites of oversized tabletop computers and Harry Potter book signings. Yet in spite of these elements and many others, the film resists an annoying overt and jokey insistence on them. They merely are. When Mason Sr. later in the film laments he learns about his kids’ life on Facebook, it’s incredible how natural it feels. At one point in time, it isn't; then, it is.

But by its very nature the film also requires time-jumping, not just in years but in months and days, and it yields one of the film's few flaws as crucial texture necessary for arc and characterization is jettisoned. In particular, Arquette’s post-Mason Sr. spouses both devolve into alcoholics, the first a monster and the second more inwardly enraged. These tangents wreak of cliché (and the Oscar-nominated French short from last year, “Just Before Losing Everything”, is a more affecting dramatization of a family fleeing an abusive spouse) but it’s difficult to gauge the characters’ precise metamorphoses into drunken louts when the majority of these transformations are required on account of running time to happen off screen. Then again, that lack of specifics – or, more appropriately, the loss of those specifics, is unwittingly a strength. So many specifics get lost in the accumulating dust of years gone by, and if the kids and their mother remember the alcoholic outbursts, maybe they don’t quite remember what brought them about.

Ellar Coltrane was six when filming started and eighteen when it ended, mirroring his role, and so we actually see Coltrane – er, Mason Jr. – navigate the pitfalls of going through puberty on camera. His youthful long hair is chopped away (reluctantly) for a buzz cut and then grown back out. He changes his style, his clothes, his attitude. His voice registers different octaves. And it’s not just Coltrane. It’s Linklater. “When you go through all of those awkward things that happen to us in adolescence and post-adolescence,” the singer/songwriter Jenny Lewis recently said in an interview, “to experience that in front of the camera and in front of other people is really uncomfortable.” And here are Coltrane and Linklater, having those experiences in front of the camera and in front of us. And it’s not just them. It’s Patricia Arquette, and her willingness to let her physical shifts be documented is the epitome of that word which is “supposed” to be avoided in film reviews at all costs – namely, brave. It’s brave because this is Hollywood and in Hollywood even the slightest sign of an actress aging can find her unceremoniously dumped into the “Not” column of a hideous “Hot or Not?” list.

And the though the film's title is “Boyhood”, the subtitle may well be Parenthood, because Linklater explores the maturation process not merely for children but for adults. Arquette’s mom struggles with insecurity even as she experiences professional success, and Hawke’s dad becomes a singular illustration of a life as a work in progress. Hawke, in fact, sneakily gives the best performance in the film, and one of the best performances I can recall of a semi-deadbeat dad, a man-child, to use the parlance of our movie times, but obliterating the archetype in the process, breaking off into something wholly authentic. It is subtly layered, deceptively complex, a man growing by feet and inches rather than leaps and bounds, but the change he makes by the end is real, and it is made all the more affecting because the actor conveys how difficult it was to come by and how far he still has to go – how far we (you, me, all of us) have to go.

“Boyhood” runs for two hours and forty-four minutes, a seeming eternity when it starts, gone in the blink of an eye when it ends. It would appear to demand re-visitation, yet part of me feels that to re-visit it would compromise the film's very spirit for we merely re-visit the past in our mind. What’s gone is gone. We shed our skins. We forge ahead.