Where We Are

In casting Kenneth Colley (1937 - 2025) as Captain cum Admiral Piett in “The Empire Strikes Back,” director Irvin Kershner apparently indicated he wanted someone who could have terrified the F*hrer of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party for the part. But the role didn’t really appear to be written that way and it was not how Colley played it. Colley played him first as an underling eager to make an impression and then as a superior who realizes only too late that he’s stepped in it. It’s in the third movie (Original Trilogy Division), “Return of the Jedi,” however, where Colley really left a mark, playing his first scene as an Imperial middle manager who has become experienced in having to suck it up whenever Lord Vader gets one of his inklings. It’s quite a feat, essentially turning Piett into the Galactic Empire version of the nameless subservient nodding dude in the scene in Mike Judge’s white collar comedy classic “Office Space” where the arrival of the dreaded consultants is announced, and for a moment, effectively turning the baddest man in the galaxy into an imbecilic CEO. The way Colley says “As you wish, my Lord” translates to “This fuckin’ guy.”

This occurred to me on Monday while watching clips of the White House press conference at which King Big Brain I announced the federal government would be taking control of the District of Columbia police in addition to deploying National Guard troops to regulate the nation’s capital which, at least in the pudding of his brain, may as well be the subway car in “Adventures in Babysitting”  24-7. The whole thing was insulting, made up under phony pretenses (like Chicago, where I live, and which was also threatened during this press conference, whatever genuine crime problem DC may or may not have and how to best address it is of no actual interest to the President), echoing his un-American strongman ethos and potentially laying the groundwork for even greater federal abuse, making me want to say to the people who still, even now, a decade into this, spin some version of the “Even I don’t agree with everything the President says or does but...,” in the manner of Jerry on “Seinfeld” consulting with Kramer after the latter has been accused of being The Smog Strangler and doesn’t seem all that bent out of shape: “Do you realize what’s going on here?” But maybe the one moment of the whole grotesque carnival that stood out most was when His Imbecility mentioned all the “bloodthirsty criminals” and “drugged-out maniacs” and “how we’re not going to let it happen anymore.” And then he half-turned to Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel, whose eyes as always made it look like he was watching “The Parallax View” recruitment test, standing directly behind him and rhetorically asked “Right?” Bondi and Patel sort of snapped to attention as if they had not even been paying attention to Dear Leader’s typical mealy mouthed mumbling and as the shit-fed bootlickers they are, nodded right on cue, improbably manifesting in real life Admiral Piett as Nodding Guy in “Office Space.” 

Ain’t that (present-day) America?

Escape From All This

Good question.

Though any pronouncement by the 47th President that comes without legislative text, as the invaluable Jane Coaston once noted, should be read in the voice of a college football coach saying, “We’re really going to emphasize smashmouth football,” meaning it’s just hot air emitted from the blowhole of a sweaty, self-impressed man, well, still, when His Imbecility mentions the industry that is the nominal subject of this blog, the staff is compelled to weigh in. And that’s what he did last Sunday evening, or last Monday morning, May 5th, posting at 1:18 AM as generally sane people do via his Ice Cream Social app that other countries seeking to draw filmmakers and movie studios away from America was a threat to national security and that he would “begin the process of instituting a 100% tariff on any and all Movies coming into our Country that are produced in Foreign Lands.”

As it happens, His Imbecility also indirectly weighed in this blog’s other nominal subject (college football) a couple weeks before when he took to his Ice Cream Social app midway through the precipitous soap opera slide of Colorado quarterback Shedeur Sanders from surefire first round selection to fifth round afterthought in the NFL Draft to command that Sanders “should be ‘picked’ IMMEDIATELY by a team that wants to WIN.” (Perhaps the President missed the game where Sanders lost by 18 points to the 2024 Bad Boy Mowers Pinstripe Bowl champions?) What did that have to do with the tariff on coffee coming in from Indonesia? Nothing, but also everything, because T*ump doesn’t see himself as a President but as a King, one who gets a say in all matters and who is, himself, both the law and the truth rather than the law and the truth itself. When he said Sanders should be drafted IMMEDIATELY, he meant it not as an offhand online observation but an Emperor Constantine-like edict and expected whatever team was on the clock at that moment to honor his decree. (They didn’t. Sanders was picked a few rounds later, and by the Cleveland Browns, so, not a team that wants to WIN.)

King Big Brain I’s Hollywood tariff social media decree, however, was not his only one on May 5th. Later that morning he also proclaimed his intention to rebuild and re-open Alcatraz. Because he’s a verifiable idiot, I jokingly assumed the President must have been watching “Escape from Alcatraz,” though as both The New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle wrote, it really did seem as if he might have been watching “Escape From Alcatraz.” In quasi-explaining his quasi-plan later, the President “appeared to (reference) a scene from ‘Escape From Alcatraz,’” wrote Aidin Vaziri for the latter, “in which a raincoat used in a makeshift raft is shown floating in the San Francisco Bay.” And though the Washington Post would also report that some of the President’s Hollywood tariff proclamation seemed to stem from not-ready-for-public-view information being gathered by his so-called Hollywood Special Ambassador Jon Voight, it’s not a stretch to imagine King Big Brain I ignoring, say, the state department’s reports on the escalating Kashmir conflict between India and Pakistan to watch Don Siegel’s 1979 movie and in that moment tying both tariffs and reopening Alcatraz together in his cerebral gelatin. 

The specifics of these tariffs, I’m not even going to get into that, not least because there are no specifics. “The whole thing is a goofball,” Variety quoted Schuyler Moore, a partner at Greenberg Glusker, saying, “I can’t imagine how they’re going to do this in practice.” In a modicum of fairness, it’s possible that Special Ambassador Voight was working toward something workable only for his pudding-brained overlord to take whatever he was working toward and then drive it right off the cliff. As with his Shedeur Sanders proclamation, it’s simply about the King, er, President injecting himself into everything, a way to remind everyone that America is the T*ump show, to paraphrase a 2017 Axios article by Mike Allen and Jonathan Swan, and he its megalomaniacal producer.

Kevin Smith has often told the story of attempting to write the Superman movie that was never made, “Superman Lives,” and producer Jon Peters insisting that it should end with the Man of Steel fighting a giant spider. Why, wondered Smith, to which Peters replied that spiders “are the fiercest killers in the insect kingdom.” Smith went on to remember people from Warner Bros. telling him that Peters was always on about that giant spider, as if he had watched some TV program on insects one time and saw a giant spider, a chunk of garbage snagging on something at the bottom of the occluded waterway of his brain, flapping away there forever. That’s me paraphrasing the inestimable David Roth colorfully noting how T*ump tends to repeat the same bits of weird pseudo-knowledge over and over and doesn’t this whole spider thing sound just like the 47th President? Smith also said that when he went to see the notorious Peters-produced stink bomb “Wild Wild West,” he could not help but note that it concluded with its main characters fighting a giant mechanical spider. In T*ump’s Hollywood, there are going to be a lot of movies ending with variations of giant mechanical spiders. That, as he would say, I can tell you. 

(One of) Gene Hackman's Greatest Feat(s)

It’s the weird reality of our current movie landscape that the brightest movie star moment of the 97th Academy Awards did not, in fact, happen during the Academy Awards themselves but during a commercial break. I’m talking, of course, about the latest Penélope Cruz commercial for Emirates. I have written before about how despite being among the most luxurious airlines in the world, this Emirates ad campaign breathlessly succeeds via minimalism by essentially rendering their airline and Cruz’s own magnificent aura as one. Yet, Emirates is not the only airline to utilize the majesty of a movie star. 

In the 1980s, when United Airlines wanted to state its intentions in the newly deregulated industry, they shelled out $300,000 to use “Rhapsody in Blue” to become, as the ads themselves occasionally said, their song. It’s hard to imagine a better choice. George Gershwin’s 1924 tune was not just transformative in melding classical and jazz, it was transcendent, just the sort of piece of music to make a person feel as if they are soaring high above the clouds. The Gershwin heirs seemed ok in signing off on it, as Tom Shales’s contemporary article for The Washington Post suggests, but Shales wasn’t, deeming the sale Rhapsody in bucks. Crass, or not, or somewhere in-between, it was potent. The first televised commercial of the campaign used no words, spoken or imprinted on the screen, just “Rhapsody in Blue” laid over images of a United jetliner, effectively linking the two just as Emirates did its own brand with Cruz’s innate luminosity. 

That also might have led to a significant problem. Because when United did finally want to verbally deploy its familiar slogan “Come fly the friendly skies” in one of these Gershwin-enhanced spots, who could possibly deliver it in such a way as to not be dwarfed by “Rhapsody in Blue?” Whether that is what led them to enlist Gene Hackman, who knows, not least because I can’t seem to find any old articles explaining why the late acting titan was offered the gig. But it’s also hard to imagine another actor flourishing in the role. Hackman had a coarseness to his voice, one that was frequently utilized to great effect in villainous, or anti-heroic roles, like “The French Connection,” or “Prime Cut.” Yet, consider the moment in “Crimson Tide” when as captain of a nuclear submarine, just as his vessel is about to submerge, he says, “This is my favorite part – right here, right now.” There is a distinct grandeur to Hackman’s voice in this moment that only certain movies occasionally found the desire to tap. The kind of grandeur he invested in United. 

 

You not only hear grandeur in those lines, however, but a warmth, as if you can practically see his lips curl into a smile as he says them. More than that, you can practically see him, Hackman, in a pilot’s cap and uniform, beckoning you aboard a jetliner hearkening back to the golden age of air travel. In Hackman’s voice, the friendly skies are elevated from mystical marketing verbiage to a real place at 35,000 feet. It’s not real, of course, not these days in which United treats us all less like friends than entrapped customers who are always wrong. And maybe that was Hackman’s ultimate trick. You might recall that after the turn of the century, he was replaced as voice actor during another United reboot by Robert Redford, a skilled if solemn actor who always believes in his own myth. With Hackman, on the other hand, you could envision him saying the line in the recording studio, taking off the headphones, chuckling his unforgettable Hackman chuckle, and muttering under his breath, “What a crock of shit.” 

A Post for the Michael Clayton Hive Only

Congratulations to one of St. John’s University’s most distinguished alums, Michael Clayton, class of 1980 and current special counsel specializing in wills and trusts at the law firm of Kenner, Bach & Ledeen, on the basketball team’s first Big East Conference Tournament championship in a quarter-century and first outright Big East Conference championship in 40 years.

Bob Hope's All-Star Superbowl Party (1986)

Though it’s difficult to pinpoint precisely when the Super Bowl went from merely being America’s biggest football game to a true American cultural event, it really did seem to come into its own, so to speak, in the 1980s, echoing the maximalist era. Indeed, while Bob Hope hosted myriad television specials throughout the 1960s and 70s, he did not host his first Super Bowl-specific special until 1983, followed by two more in 1986 and 1989, the years when his contractual partner NBC broadcast the game. Through the miracle of the internet, you can watch the whole 1986 version of Bob Hope’s All-Star Superbowl Party on YouTube, as I did as some sort of ill-conceived experiment in nostalgia. And it feels of its time in that specific way that so much of Ronald Reagan’s America felt, in which looking toward the future meant looking toward the past. It kicks off with a performance, of sorts, by the L.A. Rams cheerleaders, like a more scantily clad Ziegfield Follies, and includes a nigh hallucinatory interlude in which Hope and Donna Mills of “Knot’s Landing” sing old standards like “I Get a Kick Out of You” and “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” over NFL bloopers.  

Oh, it makes concessions to the present, like Hope making a few cracks about Vice President of the United States George Bush being in talks to guest star on “Miami Vice,” a pop culture interlude that I confess to not remembering. “What is this,” Hope wonders regarding the H.W. cameo that turned out not to be, “the government or ‘Star Search?’” Oof. Hope also essentially lusts after not just Mills but Miss America herself, Susan Akin, right there onstage in front of a whole television audience and makes a slew of vicious jokes about Boy George that to a present-day viewer are pretty shocking but in 1986 are received the same as deeming Gaddafi as the Don Rickles of the Middle East. I don’t mean to pat myself on the back or to scold with 40 years of hindsight. I merely mean to point out how this is evidence of the way we can and have advanced and evolved as a species. Then again, as the invaluable David Roth has frequently pointed out, our current President’s sense of attitudes, culture, and luxury is perpetually stuck in the 1980s. 

Reagan often talked of a so-called shining city on a hill, a phrase copped from the founder of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Winthrop, who essentially copped it from Jesus’s Sermon the Mount, and in his farewell address, the 40th President explained his vision in greater detail. “(I)n my mind,” he explained, “it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.” Let’s put aside debating whether Reagan’s actions lived up to that ideal and admit that it’s objectively a grand vision, imaginative and idealistic. The 45th and 47th American President, on the other hand, is an unimaginative sociopath, and so when he talks about Making America Great Again, I imagine the city on the hill that he sees would be a place that looks an awful lot like Bob Hope’s All-Star Superbowl Party.

The Greatest Inaugural

William Henry Harrison’s 8,445-word inauguration speech in 1841 is still the longest of its kind, lasting almost two hours, a record sources have told me the 47th President of the United States would very much like to break, since that’s exclusively how he understands the world, through breaking records, even if he did not officially break them and even if the records in question weren’t records in the first place, only to be stymied by the fact that the 47th President of the United States, to quote David Roth, is essentially “a defective Teddy Ruxpin (who) can only hold like 175 words in his head at one time and is just kind of mushing the button that seems most appropriate for the situation over and over again”; you can’t really say strongly and tremendously enough times to get to 8,446 words. He’ll have to drone on for a long time about cultural marxists, and how Today on NBC was better with Deborah Norville, or something. Nevertheless, today the fine folks at Constitution.com graciously provided me a platform to take a controversial position – that William Henry Harrison’s inauguration speech was not just the longest of its kind but when you drill down, which admittedly requires a lot, it is also revealed as the best of its kind. My argument is not as long as Harrison’s address (ha ha!), but I did need more than a few paragraphs to marshal the necessary evidence. You can go here to read my argument in full.

Golden Globes: A Formal Assessment

“I want to start by saying this whole angled camera thing is very weird,” Seth Rogen said at this Sunday’s Golden Globes when appearing midway through the telecast with Catherine O’Hara to present Best Female Actor - Limited/Anthology Series/TV Movie, gratefully giving voice to what everyone was thinking, certainly what My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife and I were thinking watching along at home about the bizarre close-ups in which all the presenters were too close to the camera while also stranded in something approximating the middle of the room with many of the attendees glimpsed in the background. “It’s inelegant, it’s strange, this whole half of the room can see my bald spot.” Charlie Chaplin, who knew a thing or two about a moving camera, observed that life is a tragedy in close-up and a comedy in a long shot and hey, here were the dumb ol’ Globes living it and having no idea they were living it. Simply amazing. 

On the other hand, they did sort of create some comedy in long shot, albeit unintentionally, as the weird camera angles allowed us to occasionally get glimpses of Ralph Fiennes at the “Conclave” table in the background suffering through these interminable and awkward attempts at humor in front of him, an actor in real time trying to decide between continuing to engage with full award campaign mode and shine it on or just crack and start crying. “I can’t take it anymore!” I imagined him screaming, going full Shakespeare. “It’s not worth it!” That was compelling, at least, and all for naught since Fiennes didn’t win Best Dramatic Actor anyway, losing out to Adrien Brody for “The Brutalist,” which maybe makes Brody the Oscar front-runner, or maybe not, who on earth knows, because the Globes are often not a bellwether. I mean, “Wicked” won for something called Cinematic and Box Office Achievement and I don’t even know what that means. That it made more money than the other nominees? It sounds like one of those movie awards that Alvy Singer jokes about in “Annie Hall.” (“It’s about damn time,” Vin Diesel said as he introduced the award, I guess forgetting that more than a few box office blockbusters have won the Golden Globe for Best Dramatic Picture along the way.) I don’t even want to research it. Where was I?

See Stanley Tucci toss back a glass of fizz in real time. This is what the people want.

The camera angles. I was going to say, this was just proof that enshittification has come for awards shows too, which can’t just stick to the camera angles that have worked for eons, how every ostensible improvement in our lives is the exact opposite, but nobody wants to hear that, least of all My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife, who hears this every day and is probably rolling her eyes right now. And anyway, I must call myself out; it’s not true! CBS made one discernible improvement to their Globes telecast! As if hearkening back to their coverage of the NCAA basketball tournament of yore, when they would throw it to commercials or come back from commercials by deploying a quad box so that we could see games taking place in all four regions, CBS used a quad box for the Globes each time they went to commercial so we could see interactions between celebrities in four different places rather than one, a la the poor image above taken of my television set. As I’ve repeated ad nauseum, this is what we want from Hollywood’s Holiday Office Party – celebrities! Altcasts are all the rage these days, especially for sports, showing big games through all manner of different perspectives, and for next year’s Globes, CBS needs to get into the alt-cast business by running a concurrent broadcast on another channel, or online, where cameras are trained on individual tables and we can watch the entire show by watching, say, the “Only Murders in the Building” table. Imagine watching Martin Short watch the Golden Globes. It’s the awards show final frontier. 

(All Golden Globes winners are listed anywhere else on the internet.)

Hot Frosty

“Hot Frosty” does not officially cite “Frosty the Snowman,” the 1950 song written by Walter Rollins & Steve Nelson and first recorded by Gene Autry, as inspiration, but draws from it, nonetheless, expanding some of its elements in greater detail while simultaneously retaining a winking sense of ambiguity. “You just buy that he’s a snowman?” asks an incredulous Kathy (Lacey Chabert), the snowman’s requisite love interest, when she summarizes the strange goings-on for the town folk gathered before her. Sure, they all essentially respond, why not, wryly evincing how the script does not get bogged down in dumb details. The snowman is alive! What else do you need to know?! As esteemed former member of the radical West German Volksfrei movement Hans Gruber once observed, Christmas is “the time of miracles.” 

Crucially, the snowman in director Jerry Ciccoritti’s movie does not remain a snowman, not like the 1969 animated TV special, but transforms from an anthropomorphic snow sculpture of a man into an actual man, nay, hunk, a Hot Frosty, as it were, christened Jack, played by Dustin Milligan with long hair and frequently no shirt, his conspicuously popping veins making him look like a lighter weight Olympic weightlifter. He inadvertently runs afoul not of a traffic cop as in the song, but an overzealous sheriff played by a game Craig Robinson as a comical version of “Cool Hand Luke’s” Boss Godfrey crossed with “It’s a Wonderful Life’s” Mr. Potter. Is “Hot Frosty” Capraesque in so much as it seems to be arguing for strength in community and against the overreach of the state? Or does it shrewdly write its sheriff off as a Bad Apple as not to offend? And is it folly to ascribe intent to a Netflix Christmas movie? 

Anyway, “Hot Frosty” is less concerned with injecting meaning than heat, in a manner of speaking, between Kathy and Jack. Trouble is, Jack is both written and played by Milligan as too much of an innocent, and in betraying her Hallmark Channel roots, Chabert is too sanitized and sentimental, as their scene at a middle school dance, of all places, inadvertently evokes, where they come across less like consenting adults than an overgrown kid and a chaperone and, oh my god, did the editors realize this midway through but know they had no choice other than pressing on? On the other hand, “Hot Frosty” occasionally breaks the genre’s church bake sale-type mode with some PG-13 flavor in recurring double entendres and comically compromised positions between Jack and the older Jane (Lauren Holly). “Can I give you a push from behind?” he asks when helping remove her car from a snowbank. The scene ends with an, eh, humorous climax, and I was left to wonder if all these made for TV Christmas movies are akin to the Victoria era, a prudish surface masking so many primal urges just below.

Roll Call Regret

By the time My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife and I tuned into Night 2 of the Democratic National Convention from the safe harbor of our Chicago couch, they were already a few states into the roll call, meaning we had just missed DJ Cassidy playing “Edge of Seventeen” by Phoenician icon Stevie Nicks to herald the Arizona delegation but just in time to hear him soundtrack the Arkansas delegation with “Don’t Stop” by Nicks’s Fleetwood Mac, a nod to the first Bill Clinton campaign of yore. And that was generally how the roll call proceeded, with music to properly match each American state and territory. The District of Columbia, My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife’s hometown, was scored to nation’s capital-native DJ Kool, and Florida got Gainseville’s own Tom Petty. Even states not scored to a native’s music, were scored to something appropriate, like Illinois being introduced via “Sirius” by The Alan Parsons Project, as if the Illinois delegates were the ’96 Bulls, or The B-52’s “Private Idaho” to accompany, well, obviously. I was getting excited about what they might choose for my native state of Iowa. And then DNC Secretary Jason Rae asked, “Iowa, how do you cast your votes?” and DJ Cassidy cued up “Celebration?” 

Kool & the Gang hail from Jersey City, of course, a good 938 miles or so from Davenport. True, Iowa does not have as many native recording artists to choose from as some other states, like Minnesota, which went with Prince, obviously, but could have gone with The Replacements, or Hüsker Dü, or Babes in Toyland, or what’s his face, Robert Zimmerman, but the Hawkeye State has enough. There’s Slipknot, the heavy metal band that formed in Des Moines, and released an album literally called Iowa. They’re no little thing, they’re big, so big that I once saw a kid wearing a Slipknot backpack in the Jardin of San Miguel de Allende in the central highlands of Mexico. There was also Glenn Miller, born in Clarinda, and “In the Mood” still slaps, as the kidz say. The folkier tendencies of beloved Iowa singer/songwriter Greg Brown might not have felt right for such a raucous affair, but hey, how about some of the stuff he produced with another Iowa boy, Burlington’s celebrated sideman Bo Ramsey, like the bluesy, groovy “Poor Backslider?” That would have fit right into the theme of the night of going forward, not backward.

 

If those native choices don’t move the needle enough, fine, the artists could have been appropriate without being Iowan. Why not an ode to Clear Lake and the Surf Ballroom with Buddy Holly’s “Rave On,” speaking of songs that still slap. As My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife suggested, why not go with “Our State Fair” from the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical? Aren’t we always telling people our state fair is the best state fair? And if that doesn’t rock hard enough, then go with “Urgent” by Foreigner, or “Roll with the Changes” by REO Speedwagon, as a nod to music you hear at the Iowa State Fair. Maybe they could have played “Flying High Again” by Ozzy Osbourne to commemorate the time he bit the head off a bat at Veterans Memorial Auditorium?

I got really upset with DJ Cassidy, and My (Poor) Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife can confirm, railing about how he didn’t do the research. Except it turns out this was not entirely DJ Cassidy’s fault. No, the New York Times reported that DJ Cassidy “worked with each state’s delegation to find a song that captured a spirit of ‘unity and celebration’ and had meaning to the state.” And that made me even more depressed. This is how the DNC Iowa delegates saw themselves and the state they were representing? As the most basic party anthem of all time? That in choosing to evince a sense of celebration they just picked the song literally called “Celebration?” As My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife remarked, “What, was it down to this and ‘(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life’ by Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes?” The only way this could have worked is if the Iowa delegation had enlisted the Farmer Tan Funk Band to record a “Celebration” cover and then played that. (The real Des Moineseans know what I’m talking about.)

Playing “Celebration” at a celebration is like playing Donna Summer’s “Last Dance” when it’s the last dance; it’s like the scene in “Bob’s Burgers” when presented with myriad ice cream choices, Regular Sized Rudy marvels, “Ooooooh, vanilla!”; “Celebration” is what AI would play if you asked it to choose a song. I would expect this from so many culturally uninterested Republicans but my God, you’re the DEMOCRATS. You’re supposed to be the ones who like art and culture! My native state is one where the right-wingers in charge are working hard to make art and culture bland and vacuous, and this is your chance to say our appreciation and understanding of art and culture runs as deep as anyone and what do you do? You serve up something as bland and vacuous as possible. Is this why Democrats never win elections in Iowa anymore?

(Did New Jersey choose “Born in the U.S.A.?” Yes. Yes, it did. I give up. “Land of Hopes and Dreams” was just sitting there.)

Wanna Feel Old?

Physically, I imagine, getting old is no picnic no matter the era and quality of medicine and medical technology; bodies and minds are always going to break down and deteriorate. But I do wonder if emotionally getting older used to be easier, even just a few decades ago, before everybody in the world knew that when “Cocoon” was released in movie theaters on June 21, 1985, Wilford Brimley, despite playing a senior citizen in a retirement home, was 50 years, 9 months, and 6 days old. Would getting older be easier if I did not know that tomorrow Kristen Wiig (!) was going to cross the so-called Brimley/Cocoon Line, becoming the same age as Brimley when he starred in “Cocoon,” and would getting older be easier if I did not also know that Tempestt Bledsoe, Vanessa freaking Huxtable, passed the Brimley/Cocoon Line a couple weeks ago (!!), both of which make me feel like Private James Francis Ryan morphing from young man to old man in an instant in “Saving Private Ryan,” or elderly Rose Dawson in “Titanic” saying It’s been 84 years,” two images remade into memes for people on social media to express themselves when life seems to have passed them by. So, I try not to think about my life passing me by, but its ever-encroaching impermanence always rears its head in the most unexpected ways.

Dermot Mulroney is an actor I don’t think about all that much. But, you know, I saw him in “Young Guns,” back when I was in fifth grade, and I saw him opposite Julia Roberts and Cameron Diaz in “My Best Friend’s Wedding” in 1997, right before I set off on my star-cross’d journey to college, and I saw him opposite Sarah Jessica Parker and Claire Danes in “The Family Stone” in 2005, not long after I moved to Chicago, the only movie I ever saw at The Esquire, which has now been closed for almost 20 years, and then, holy cow, there was Mulroney in “Anyone but You” (reviewed yesterday) as the dad of Sydney Sweeney, and M. Emmet Walsh, the guy who played Mulroney’s dad in “My Best Friend’s Wedding,” died a couple months ago at the age of 88, and if I had been standing, I would have to sit down, and did you know Dermot Mulroney crossed the Brimley/Cocoon Line ten years ago when I had only known my future wife for five months?

What Movie Will Margot Robbie Make Next?

On the heels of Cinema Romantico quite possibly predicting Tom Cruise breaking into a submerged submarine in the next “Mission: Impossible” movie, this blog’s esteemed powers of prescience are at it again. Longtime and extremely frustrated followers might recall that last spring, to mark the release of “Air,” detailing the birth of the Air Jordan Nike sneaker, we proposed some other products that Hollywood could exploit for entire movies. Bartles & Jaymes Wine Coolers, the Rubik’s Cube, even Monopoly, the boardgame that I think was supposed to be teaching me the basics of finance but that I mostly treated the same as the classroom, a conduit to daydreaming, in this case, imagining the extravagant beauty of places like Marvin Gardens and St. Charles Place, and hey, before I slip into another St. Charles Place daydream right now and forget, did you hear, fresh off her “Barbie” triumph, Margot Robbie’s LuckyChap Entertainment will produce a Monopoly movie. [Searches blog for bugging device.]

Margot Robbie after drinking too much Surge.

What a Monopoly movie might look like, whether it’s a tense game of a family stuck at home during a blizzard that comes to life, a murder mystery on the Reading Railroad, or something that causes Marco Rubio to take out an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal about Marxists, is difficult to determine and undoubtedly dependent on who winds up directing. No, the question of what a Margot Robbie Monopoly movie might look like interests me less than wondering what movie based on which product this blog pitched will Robbie and LuckyChap take on next? 

United Airlines probably needs to put its focus elsewhere these days, and a movie based on the Dominique Wilkins sneaker is probably less likely at this point than one about Caitlin Clark’s forthcoming footwear. No, I think Robbie’s most likely post-“Monopoly” move is a movie about Surge, the ostensible Mountain Dew Killer that was advertised as the soda of the extreme sports crowd, meaning her performance could combine Glenn Howerton in “Blackberry” with Dan Cortese, which could maybe paint economics as nothing more than a version of extreme sports, or vice-versa. I’m picturing an ending where her character is reduced to eating at the Shakey’s Pizza buffet, wistfully noting they still have Surge on tap. 

Lessons in Darkness (cont.)

In a Best Picture race that is all but over, Werner Herzog at least threw a little more flour into the dying flame with his controversial, or maybe just confusing, remarks on Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie.” Talking to noted horse’s ass Piers Morgan, the eccentric and esoteric German director was asked to weigh in on the Barbenheimer phenomenon that in so many ways defined moviegoing in 2023. Herzog confessed he had yet to see “Oppenheimer,” likely Best Picture winner, but of “‘Barbie,’” he said, “I managed to see the first half-hour. I was curious and I wanted to watch it because I was curious. And I still don’t have an answer, but I have a suspicion – could it be that the world of ‘Barbie’ is sheer hell?” Of course, Herzog also admitted he had only watched the first 30 minutes of “Barbie,” which perhaps ruled his view out of order, though plenty seemed to suggest he was just out of order in the first place. 

Though like most takes on “Barbie,” if not most takes in general, this one could stand to just be laughed off and ignored, I feel somewhat qualified to weigh in, nevertheless. After all, astute readers might note that this blog’s banner deploys a phrase - The Ecstatic Truth - of one Werner Herzog. What is The Ecstatic Truth? That can be hard to pin down. He sort of laid it out many years ago in a 12-page speech in Milano, Italy, translated by Moira Weigel, describing The Ecstatic Truth as “the enemy of the merely factual.” In his discursive manner, he eventually arrives at another explanation, describing “a deeper stratum of truth—a poetic, ecstatic truth, which is mysterious and can only be grasped with effort; one attains it through vision, style, and craft.” He submitted another version of that same sentence in 1999 at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, transcribed by the late Roger Ebert who deemed it the “‘Minnesota Declaration’ of (the director’s) principles.” “There are deeper strata of truth in cinema,” Herzog explained, “and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.”     

Fabrication, and imagination, and stylization? Werner, baby, that’s “Barbie.” But then, as some on social media suggested, was Herzog even really insulting “Barbie,” or was he complimenting it in his own enigmatical way? After all, the final point of his 12-point Minnesota Declaration is this: 

“Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of a hell that during evolution some species - including man - crawled, fled onto some small continents of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue.”

I mean, could one not argue that is “Barbie?” Barbieland is life in a pink-hued ocean of artificial hell, and in traveling out of Barbieland to the real world, and eventually passing from plastic doll to human, Barbie herself has evolved, crawled, and fled, with a conclusion suggesting nothing if not the Lessons of Darkness continuing. “Oppenheimer” can have Best Picture, mate, no worries; “Barbie,” on the other hand, found something deeper, the poetic, ecstatic truth.

The Great Heisman Race of 1997

The sixteenth entry of the fourth season of ESPN’s apparently never-ending 30 for 30 documentary series “The Great Heisman Race of 1997” is named for what became that season’s showdown between Michigan Wolverine Charles Woodson and Tennessee Volunteer Peyton Manning to be named the most outstanding player in college football. As a movie, it’s better than most of these now definitively average offerings in so much as director Gentry Kirby eschews talking heads and modern context to construct his film entirely from archival footage. It’s an approach I prefer, though in coming close to exclusively employing ESPN clips, going so far as using old College Gameday player profiles to explain his subjects, the whole thing starts to feel a little too much like a lengthy episode of College Gameday itself, and crucially lacks any larger meaning, just a nostalgia trip. And though I might be criticizing, I am not entirely complaining. Where college football is concerned, I’m not necessarily opposed to a nostalgia trip. And as someone who happened to be on the campus of the University of Iowa during that banger of a 1997 CFB season, four months I both wish I could have back for several reasons and would not want back in any way, shape, or form, my foremost takeaway from “The Great Heisman Race of 1997” was, hey, remember when Iowa running back Tavian Banks was briefly a Heisman contender?

picture of my TV

Look at that. There he is, wedged between two future NFL Hall of Famers and ahead of two future high profile NFL busts. (Banks was drafted by the Jacksonville Jaguars and his professional career was almost over before it began on account of injury.) Indeed, Banks had a September to remember, gaining almost 900 yards and scoring 13 touchdowns in 4 games...against inferior competition. In their first game in October against #7 Ohio State, Banks basically got skunked and that was it, unwantedly adding his name to the illustrious, in a manner of speaking, list of so-called September Heisman winners. And so even if I told myself I would not subject you, extremely frustrated Cinema Romantico reader, to another college football post until August, sorry, but “The Great Heisman Race of 1997” only interested me in so much as wanting to count down my Top 5 September Heisman winners.

My Favorite September Heisman Winners:

5. Tavian Banks, Iowa, 1997. In retrospect, he was never as cool as Ronnie Harmon. 

4. David Klingler, Houston, 1991. More of an August Heisman, really. At the controls of a semi-infamous lawless frontier of an offense and relentlessly hyped in the preseason, Klingler hurled six touchdown passes in his first game against overmatched Louisiana Tech before Houston was clobbered by The U in their second game. His Heisman campaign sunk like a stone.

3. Jacory Harris, Miami, 2009. Harris was more electrifying in three September games than his fellow Hurricane Gino Toretta was the whole season in 1992 when he really did win a Heisman Trophy.

2. Kyle Orton, Purdue, 2004. Not enough people, it seems to me, remember that the future NFL journeymen, and so-called Altoona Gunslinger, really, honestly, truly was atop all the Heisman straw polls early in the fall of 2004 before it came crumbling down. 

1. Denard Robinson, Michigan, 2010, 2011. He could never finish the deal, and militant football coaches would tell you that it’s all about finishing. But then, Gaudí did not finish the Sagrada Família, and one could make an argument that there was never a better college football player than September Denard Robinson. 

Ray of Light

In doing research, so to speak, for my THRILLERS ONLY 2024 movie preview, I was looking into a thriller that failed to make the cut, “The Marsh King’s Daughter,” starring Daisy Ridley and Ben Mendelsohn. As I have noted before, in a profession generally marked by vanity, few modern actors are as willing to let themselves look like complete shit as Ben Mendelsohn. When they needed someone to be covered in grease and filth opposite Ryan Gosling in “The Place Beyond the Pines,” there was only one man for the job. But in consulting Mendelsohn’s bio, I realized that one of the Melbourne native’s earliest roles was on the Australian TV series “The Henderson Kids” opposite another Melbourne native this blog has mentioned once or twice or two thousand times, Kylie Minogue. And that discovery led me to an even greater discovery. This:

Where do we even go from here? Do we dream of an alternate universe where Ben Mendelsohn is more in the Ryan Gosling mode, one where he and Kylie became, like, the Down Under Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan? Or do we imagine what life looks like on Earth 2, where Mendelsohn became an international heartthrob and Kylie became a character actor so that the other Kylie, the phony American one, can’t remember her name, could finally trademark the name Kylie in peace? Or do we just let it be, this image, one glorious chance, as the Princess of Pop herself might say, to step back in time.

I Finally Watched Transformers

Ha ha! That was just a little joke! To get your attention! After all, I have sworn off Michael Bay movies because it’s better for me, for him, and for everybody else. But still. I’d be remiss to let the opportunity for a faux-quality hardy har har to pass. What happened is this, our TV had been on TNT from the previous evening and when I turned the television back on the next afternoon, it just so happened to be showing “Transformers” (2007). In the space of ten seconds, roughly, I saw in order 1.) Jon Voight as the President, 2.) A baby, and 3.) A tank silhouetted in the desert. I didn’t know what any of this meant, yet instinctively understood that it meant everything, a whole viewpoint condensed. Like seeing F*x N*ws over the shoulder of some dude on an airplane coming home from my native state this past August and seeing, in order, stories on Ukraine, crime-ridden cities, and Hunter Biden, I had seen enough to know I had seen it all. 

List of Things That Are Dying

Movies. 

Movie Theaters.

 

Broadcast TV.

Indie Rock.

The Middle Class.

Democracy.

The Pac-12 Conference. 

Bowl Games.

Liberal Arts.

Reading.

Writing.

Blogs.

But not this blog. 

(Yet.)

Real Housewives, the Wrath of God

The problem is, in typing this post, I am confessing that I watch Bravo’s venerable Real Housewives franchise, three of their myriad incarnations anyway. But you know what? I’m not confessing. A confession implies formally admitting guilt and guilt suggests having committed a crime and this is no crime, figurative or otherwise. If you wonder in this age of superhero spandex and PG piffle, where all the outrageous 1950s and 60s-styled Hollywood melodrama went, it’s on Bravo in the form of Real Housewives of Salt Lake City. The recent Season 4 premiere was all galactically haute fashion, a cornucopia of withering putdowns, enormous personalities operating at the known limits of eccentricity, and a typically wild study of postmodernism, people fully inhabiting their own warped realities. “You don’t come for my family,” declares Meredith Marks, Pharoah of Park City, after taking offense to a fellow cast member taking offense to her and her husband seen on camera together in the bath, “and you don’t come for my bathtub,” fusing home life and home decor until they become virtually, hysterically inseparable. The season premiere concludes with a deliberate snowball fight meant to expunge lingering resentments that is conveyed like a horror movie, jibing with the episode’s opening, a Bermuda flash-forward that is the Real Housewives equivalent of the storytelling promise. 

That brings me to my point here. One of the recurring tropes of these shows for the uninitiated is a girls trip spanning several episodes, and despite typically being in some sort of tropical paradise, these ostensible vacations almost always devolve into calamity, none more famously than Real Housewives of New York’s so-called Scary Island episode, where events on St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands went off the rails. And in last year’s Real Housewives of Potomac, when the ladies go swimming in a Tullum cenote, what should be spiritually rejuvenating, becomes mosquito-infested (semi) agony, the editors and producers deploying horror movie like cuts and needle drops. 

Aguirre, the Wrath of God, above, Scary Island, below, or maybe it’s the other way around...

And that’s when it hit me. “Aguirre, the Wrath of God” (1972) produced by Andy Cohen, a Real Housewives girls trip to some seemingly tropical idyll that gives way to madness. Of course, to make this movie, we will need a group of faux housewives, and because the Tampa/St. Petersburg area of Florida seems fruitful for the kind of abnormality we require, let’s set our fictional Real Housewives show there.

Real Housewives of Tampa/St. Pete

Abbi Jacobson. The contractually obligated Nick Prigge Player, yes, but tell me Abbi wouldn’t make for the ultimate Rosé warrior. 

Natasha Lyonne. The peanut gallery as a person, her confessionals would eventually dominate social media. 

Regina Hall. Hall’s housewife shows up for the girls trip with a gaggle of interns and multi-person glam squad, all of whom will be picked off one by one, gradually reducing her to a shell of who she appeared to be, like Tisha Campbell in the earthquake episode of “Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” if she and Will had been stuck in the Nostromo instead of the basement. 

Jennifer Aniston. If rewatching a lot of “Friends” during the Pandemic taught me anything it’s that Angry Aniston rules, and I see Angry Aniston as the housewife dealing with feuds on multiple fronts. 

Reshma Shetty. The British American star waiting to be born will play a housewife claiming some sort of convoluted Royal heritage while parlaying it into a nominally successful music recording career. 

Anne Hathaway. The pre-eminent pot-stirrer, taking this one’s strictly confidential confession about that one to that one hella quick and then stepping back, feigning innocence, a haughty and content version of Ken Watanabe in “Godzilla.” 

Anne Hathaway as a Real Housewife

Mira Sorvino. Sorvino was on fire in “Union Square,” which not enough people saw, but I have come to realize that the one thing I failed to appreciate is how it essentially was her Real Housewives audition reel. 

And starring... 

 

Academy Award Winner Michelle Yeoh...

as The Grand Dame®.

Revised Official Heart of Stone Rankings

Having watched and reviewed “Heart of Stone” (see yesterday), it is time once again to revise the Official Heart of Stone rankings. 

1. Heart of Stone, Taylor Dayne.

2. Heart of Stone, The Rolling Stones.

3. Heart(s) of Stone, Bruce Springsteen.

4. Heart of Stone, Cher.

5. Heart of Stone, Dale Watson.

......

227. Heart of Stone (Harper, ’23).

Top 5 Tom Cruise *** Scenes

There are several reasons why Tom Cruise is the perfect movie star for our moment, not least of which is how the frequently lamented sexlessness of the modern movie scene perfectly dovetails with the innate sexlessness of Cruise’s persona. The pointed lack of sizzle in his scenes with Jennifer Connelly in “Top Gun: Maverick” was that otherwise superb blockbuster’s millstone as was his inability to truly meet that Vanessa Kirby kiss in “Mission: Impossible – Fallout.” It’s why Cameron Crowe’s smartest screenplay move in “Jerry Maguire” was to make it so that Cruise’s eponymous sports agent and his love interest Dorothy Boyd (Renee Zellweger) weren’t in love, not really, not until the end, while part of what made “Eyes Wide Shut” work was the tension between the sexless Cruise and all the sex around him. This problem, as we noted in our “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One” review, has not so much been corrected as circumvented by writer/director Christopher McQuarrie in their troika of M:I movies in a variety of clever ways, though, to be fair, he is not the first one to skillfully work around this recurring issue. Here, then, is a definitive list from off the top of my head comprising the Top 5 Tom Cruise sex, in a manner of speaking, scenes. Sorry if this makes you uncomfortable.

Mission: Impossible – Fallout. The subtext of the bathroom brawl between Cruise, Henry Cavill, and Liang Yang is virtually text, a dance scene given the pulse-pounding club music just outside as much as a fight, as close as Tom will ever get to Studio 54.

Born on the Fourth of July. The prom dance with Kyra Sedgwick after his run through the rain is the rare Chaste Tom Cruise romantic moment that works because the chasteness is inextricably part of the point, the culmination of All-American innocence before he it is shattered.

Knight and Day. Not one of the Cruise joints people to tend talk about, which I have always found unfortunate, not because it is one of his best movies, per se, but because it does a fun job harnessing the wackadoodle public-facing Cruise persona of the new millennium. This is especially true of the moment when his character Roy leaps off a motorcycle from above and lands on the hood of the car of Cameron Diaz’s June. It’s not a Meet Cute, because they have already met, but has the feel of one, nonetheless, and the certifiable smile on Cruise’s face and in his air suggests sexual yearning in, well, a “There’s Something About Mary” sorta way.

Top Gun. It’s a weird quirk of our present world that the homoerotic undertones of the original “Top Gun” are acknowledged, if not generally accepted and embraced, and yet “Top Gun: Maverick” eschewed having any of its own, as if it were running for President against Ron DeSantis and had to tone it down or else. And that’s unfortunate because a whole new generation of moviegoers (movie streamers) deserved their version of the volleyball scene, and one that was less virtuous team-building exercise, though the volleyball scene was not even the height of the original’s most pertinent romance. 

Look, I don’t mean this as disrespect to Jennifer Connelly, nor to Kelly McGillis, because romantic scenes with Cruise are like advanced calculus for cinema, just as a testament to the man, the myth Val Kilmer, who grasped that the negative charge of Cruise required a positive charge. That’s why in the bar scene, Kilmer palpably invades Cruise’s space, going so hard that he instinctively connects with his co-star’s cocky indifference. And when it does...to quote Bruce Springsteen, “Sparks fly on E Street when the boy prophets walk it handsome and hot.”

Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation. Granted, “Mission: Impossible 2” tried this, too, with a car chase between Cruise and Thandiwe Newton’s character as roadway flirtation, though “Rogue Nation’s” motorcycle chase between Cruise and Rebecca Ferguson did it better. It did it better because it was less overt in its connotations if more electrifying in its action, and because Cruise wore that shirt, that shirt up there, getting dressed in his action/adventure best for his rip-roaring spur of the moment social engagement, and because Ferguson pulled the same trick as Kilmer, if in a different way, like a tractor beam, in her cool air just sort of ineffably pulling this unwittingly smitten dude toward her.

Adventures in Movie Promotional Photos, part 134

Of all the pre-Actually Seeing the Movie discourse generated around Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer,” not to mention the whole “Oppenheimer” v “Barbie” subplot, one subject I have seen appear nowhere in the quasi-dialogue is how the promotional photo by Melinda Sue Gordon accompanying so many of these “Oppenheimer” stories has captured the ultimate essence of the promo photo (see above). (The photo is property of Universal Pictures who are jackanapses.)

For one thing, Christopher Nolan has assumed the ultimate auteur pose, framing the scene with his hands, his eyes a viewfinder to the whole world.  

For another, given how Cillian Murphy is standing in front of Nolan and not looking at him, the image emits an unlikely whiff of photoshop, as if Nolan is not really even there, just a directorial specter.

That distinct photoshop sensation, in fact, means that if you look at the promo photo longer, it starts to look less like a promo photo and more like a poster for a different version of “Oppenheimer,” one in which the forgotten (non-existent) physicist C. Matthew Linslade, the Christian Laettner of the Atomic Dream Team, becomes a crucial supporting character. 

And “Linslade” sounds like a better competing project to “Oppenheimer” than “Barbie,” quite frankly, kind of the “EDtv” to its “Truman Show,” written, directed, produced, edited by, I would imagine, and probably starring, Bobby K. Bowfinger. 

Linslade: It’s Not the End of the World.