Some Drivel On...Late-Night Television

“How long they been doing this?” Morty Seinfeld asks his son Jerry upon learning The Tonight Show is taped in the afternoon to be aired at night. “30 years,” Jerry sighs. You understand Morty’s confusion, though. I have never attended a taping of The Tonight Show, or The Late Show, or Late Night, but I imagine the whole thing feeling a little out of place, like watching football in June. (Jimmy Kimmel Live! on ABC has, contrary to its title, also been pre-recorded for years.) When I was a kid, I would sometimes tape Letterman or Conan to the VCR and watch it the next day after school, and while it remained enjoyable, the mood never felt quite right, what with the sun still in the sky and dinner still to be eaten. You wouldn’t tape Good Morning America and watch it at midnight, would you? 

My relationship to late night TV began with Johnny Carson. At first, I didn’t even really watch Johnny Carson, but my parents did, the small color television set in their bedroom flickering the walls with light, the faint sounds of Johnny and his guests and the Doc Severinson Orchestra wafting down the hallway, and I would listen and imagine Burbank, CA as a faraway enchanted kingdom. It was for grown-ups, in other words, not kids, a truth evoked in 8-year-old Kevin McCallister watching The Tonight Show in his parents’ bed in “Home Alone” (1990). But that’s also why paradoxically, and in opposition to modern late night-TV viewing demographics always cited in death of late-night TV pieces, like those in the wake of Stephen Colbert getting the (eventual) axe, I have always associated the genre more with being a kid than an adult.

I only started watching at the tail-end of Carson’s run as the king of late night, meaning the tail-end of the genre as true monoculture, when it was a collective experience essentially limited to one network. Carson’s subsequent retirement in 1992, however, and the ensuing so-called War for Late Night as Jay Leno took over The Tonight Show and David Letterman left for CBS epitomized late-night TV’s fracturing, one that has only grown more pronounced and dire over the years. The bizarre thing, though, is that even when these after-hours variety shows were culturally prevalent, airing in those hours of blackened stillness, when the rest of the house was asleep, it felt like the rest of my small town was asleep too. Unlike, say, the TGIF programming block on ABC, or NBC’s Must See TV, I never felt the whole world watching along with me.

I gradually stopped tuning in to late-night as I aged and learned I was more of a morning person. I still saw Letterman from time to time, or especially the Colbert of Comedy Central’s Colbert Report, but that was in the form of clips and memes disseminated the morning after via the internet and social media. That’s how the world works, adapt or die, etc., but it also suggests that late-night TV isn’t about late at night anymore. The genre is fading away because stars don’t need it to promote their work, and because it costs too much money to produce, and all the other practical reasons that been cited a hundred times over. But when I think of late-night TV, I think of the time on Late Night when Letterman suddenly said apropos of nothing that it was cartwheel time with Regis Philbin and the hardest working man in show business ran in and cartwheeled through the aisles. I cannot, however, find online evidence of this skit. Did I conflate it with something else? Did I imagine it entirely? Either way, it’s a possibly faulty memory that feels apropos of what made it magical. What happened late at night always vanished by morning.

Some Drivel On...the Deliver Me From Nowhere Trailer

In his book “It Ain’t No Sin To Be Glad You’re Alive,” Eric Alterman recounts a classically zany David Letterman bit from sometime during Bruce Springsteen’s imperial phase: “Pick the subject that is not the subject of a Bruce Springsteen song: (1) Driving down the old highway, (2) Driving with girls, (3) Driving in New Jersey, (4) Sushi.” This was Letterman, of course, poking a little fun at Springsteen’s predilection for making cars the subject of his songs. And that is a colorfully extended way to ask, guess where the trailer of the new movie “Deliver Me from Nowhere,” based on Warren Zanes’s book of the same title chronicling Springsteen recording his 1982 album “Nebraska,” begins? With Bruce in a car. Is that a little wink and a nod to kick things off, or cause to worry? Granted, he’s not driving down the old highway, or with a girl, or in New Jersey, he’s just sitting in the car in a dealership parking lot. And though the dialogue between he and the salesman is on the nose, I didn’t mind for how it quickly conveyed Springsteen’s very real headspace when he made that album. And anyway, what can one truly glean from a two-minute preview about the quality of a full-length feature film? Next to nothing, that’s typically what, and so we can’t really know if “Deliver Me from Nowhere” is going to be, say, “Elvis,” or if it’s going to one more musical biopic that doesn’t realize it’s exactly what “Walk Hard: the Dewey Cox Story” was satirizing.  

One of the first details you will notice in the trailer is how it slips from color photography in the present-day scenes to black and white for the past. It might come across obvious, but “Nebraska” is an album that feels like it’s in black and white, with minimalist presentation, all acoustic, and with Springsteen having said the album was inspired in part by old monochrome family photographs, visually cued in the trailer. Yet, even if the moment glimpsed of a young Springsteen and his father boxing in the living room is drawn from a story Bruce tells in his autobiography, it can’t help but feel a little Dewey Cox-ish. Seeing that, you can almost imagine a scene where Springsteen sits down with the TEAC four-track in his bedroom to record and his guitar tech Mike Batlan (Paul Walter Hauser) breaks the fourth wall to look into the camera and say, “Bruce Springsteen has to think about his entire life before he plays.” (Shudders.)

I will say, the out of time sensation seems smartly conveyed in the movie’s aesthetic which is not leaning too hard on its early 80s setting – it hardly looks like the 80s at all, or at least, how pop culture wants us to think the 80s always looked.

One funny thing, I think at least in part because of that album cover, a monochrome image of a cloudy sky through a car windshield, and because the album was recorded in early January in his bedroom, I always pictured Springsteen recording it in harsh grey winter light coming through the bedroom window. But then, Springsteen was always a night owl, and so the low lighting that we glimpse in the recording session feels right.

Jeremy Allen White feels right too, at least in so far as I can discern, which is to say, he doesn’t seem to be going for mimicry.

Holy shit! Is that David Krumholtz as Al Teller, then-President of Columbia Records?! It is! And if nothing else, “Deliver Me from Nowhere” honors what Cinema Romantico has long proposed as an official Hollywood rule: every major motion picture must feature at least one actor from “Slums of Beverly Hills.”   

Jeremy Strong felt like perfectly casting from the jump as Jon Landau, Springsteen’s longtime partner and producer, and just as much, evangelist. But boy, that Landau monologue running through the whole trailer raises some red flags. In it, he talks about Bruce as a repairman, and that the singer needs to repair himself, which sounds a bit platitudinous given the circumstances. Landau has often said the first thing he thought of when he heard the “Nebraska” recordings was fear for his charge’s mental health. Then again, this monologue could just be the sort of evangelizing spiel that would have been required to convince Columbia Records to release an acoustic record that Springsteen recorded in his bedroom, that age-old divide between art and business.

But that’s the other thing. When Landau gets done talking about Bruce needing to “repair the hole in himself,” he says, “Once he’s done with that, he’s going to repair the entire world.” Uh. Leave aside for a second that it skews a little too close to how Tom Cruise perceived himself in the recent “Mission: Impossible” movie and consider that what he’s talking about there is “Born in the U.S.A.,” the epic album that followed “Nebraska” and that flowed directly out of the “Nebraska” recordings, including the title track. As Zanes says in his book, these two albums are the two halves of Springsteen. “‘Nebraska’ was the pulling back of the bow,” Zanes wrote, “and ‘Born in the U.S.A.’ was the arrow’s release.” That’s important, but the way this monologue phrases it makes it sound like the entire world can only be repaired through 30 million in album sales. 

Indeed, while the trailer includes the haunting title track to “Nebraska,” based on the Starkweather-Fugate crime spree, it concludes with the title track to “Born to Run.” It’s as if the Columbia execs had said, hey, “‘Nebraska’s’ great and all but we need a single, can you just re-record ‘Born to Run’ and sneak that on there?” In fact, I can absolutely imagine someone from 20th Century Studios saying, “You can’t have the trailer for the first Bruce Springsteen movie and not include ‘Born to Run.’” It’s almost enough to make one worry “Deliver Me from Nowhere” will be the kind of movie that puts “Reason to Believe” over the closing credits while the irony goes right over its head. I guess I’ll try and find my own reason to believe that it won’t.

Some Drivel On...Little Flags

Unable to secure a bouncy castle the likes of which we have never seen before for the south lawn of the White House to celebrate the King’s, er, Supreme Leader’s, er, President’s birthday, the federal government decided to throw him a parade in the guise of one for the Army. It will be the first of its kind since the National Victory Celebration on June 8th, 1991, to mark the end of the Gulf War and a tickertape parade in New York two days later to celebrate the same thing. It was the latter that Jem Cohen documented with his 16mm camera in a six-minute short “Little Flags” that was not released until 2000 (and which is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel). He never explicitly identifies this parade; there is no title card, no voiceover, and looking up through the downtown canyons at the tickertape falling from the sky, one might for a moment think it’s the New York Rangers victory parade of 1994. It innately evokes the age-old overlap between nationalism and sports. “U-S-A! U-S-A!” we hear people chanting. Our country kicked your country’s ass! Cohen, though, never shows the troops, meaning he renders no judgement of them or even of the war. In fact, he hardly focuses on any one person or group at all. Rather, he creates a collage of sensations and of little flags, so many little American flags, so many little American flags that wind up strewn on the streets with so much shredded paper. And in the sound design, transitioning from diegetic jubilation to an eerie non-diegetic drone-like noise, it’s as if all those littered little flags are the excess jingoist sludge from patriotism fed into the blast furnace of a big, beautiful parade.

Some Drivel On...Ferris Bueller's Day Off

This year marks the 39th anniversary of “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” not the 40th, but it does mark the 40th anniversary of the school day Ferris Bueller and cronies skipped. At least, it does if you believe the internet sleuths who have in part used the Chicago Cubs game the hooky-playing trio attends to pinpoint the date as June 5th, 1985. (The Cubs lost to the Atlanta Braves 4-2 in extra innings when Lee Smith surrendered a two-run homer to Rafael Ramirez. “I’ve got nothing to say,” the wire services reported Smith as saying afterwards, which was probably about as much as Edward R. Rooney, Dean of Students, had to say on June 5th, 1985.) And in some ways, this 40th anniversary feels more useful than the official anniversary by illustrating how John Hughes’s classic 80s comedy has come to be viewed less as a movie to be critiqued and more as a cultural artifact to be endlessly re-interpreted and mined for content. The three most popular quote-unquote reviews of “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” on the social media movie-watching diary Letterboxd implicitly prove the point.

The first one is a common revisionist analysis that every yute who watches “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” for the first time thinks they just invented, the second embodies how long ago the film’s art stopped imitating life and life became a way to deliberately imitate its art, and the third demonstrates its emergent status as a pop culture philosophy lodestar. I’m not immune to all this myself. Though it often gets derided as an emblem of Reagan era radical individualism, well, Ferris himself is the one who tells us he doesn’t trust “isms” in any form and who does that sound like? Gen-X, that’s who, slackers like me that went from rhetorically asking “How can I possibly be expected to handle school on a day like this?” to “How can I possibly be expected to handle work on a day like this?” And though I’m not sure you could deem Ferris a true flâneur, a leisurely observer of urban life, given his spiritually itemized list of stuff to do on his day off, there is still plenty of crossover between that lifestyle and the Ferris mantra memorably imbued on the poster: Leisure Rules. Yeah, it does!

But look at me, interpreting, when I should be talking about how “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” was made, how its story was told, how I can now confirm with some manner of authority that Hughes effectively encapsulated the way a perfect summer day in Chicago makes you feel. Indeed, I have always thought of white cumulous clouds not as “Simpsons” clouds but as “Ferris Bueller” clouds. More than anything, though, writer/director John Hughes innately impressed upon me the concept of mise-en-scène before I would have had any idea what mise-en-scène meant, let alone flâneur. Hughes had Ferris break the fourth wall to render us co-conspirators in his caper, costumed the eponymous character’s best friend Cameron in a Detroit Red Wings jersey to evince how he viewed himself as an outsider in his own mind, turned props like flip-up sunglasses into punchlines, utilized the Art Institute to create a sequence of reverie, and emphasized faces of other characters as much as his principals. Like the roll call scene featuring Ben Stein’s hapless economics teacher.

It is difficult to pinpoint “Ferris Bueller’s” most famous scene out here in the future (present). But even before tariffs became foremost in every frightened American’s thinking, that Ben Stein scene and his monotone asking “Bueller? Bueller?” had become a staple of our meme culture. Before he gets to the absent Bueller, however, he goes through a litany of A names. As he does, Hughes provides a shot of each student, each one and his or reply comical in their own way. Yet, what I had somehow never noticed, or maybe just never fully ingested, despite having watched this movie, I dunno, 52 times over the years, was the unnamed student who doesn’t speak in the background as “Adams” confirms his presence in the foreground.

At her facial expression, I erupted with a hearty unanticipated laughter. That expression is a little disgusted, a little pained, and a little perplexed. In “Superbad,” when Fogell (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) tells the girl the time without her having asked, that spiritually evoked how I felt during most of high school. And this extra’s deer-caught-in the-headlights-aura evokes it too. Like her, every day in class I wanted to be anywhere else in the world. Like her, I knew of no other option than to grimace and bear it. Like her, I never would have followed Ferris Bueller and seized the day.

Some Drivel On...Blue Velvet

“Man, oh man,” says Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) after waking up from a bad dream. It’s a funny line and an even funnier line reading, a little aw shucks, a little gee whiz, epitomizing “Blue Velvet’s” (1986) hazy dreamworld somewhere between 1950 and 1980, like if George McFly had been pulled from his peeping tom escapades into a psychosexual nightmare. That’s essentially what happens when Jeffrey returns to his idyllic hometown of Lumberton to see his ailing father (Tom Harvey), a wry red herring, as it’s not this familial strife that sets in motion a reckoning but Jeffrey discovering a severed ear in the grass. “It had to be an ear,” writer/director David Lynch would remark, “because it’s an opening.” I suppose that’s true but taken in context with Lynch’s opening images of swaths of black insects buzzing just beneath the finely manicured lawns of small-town paradise, I thought it more emblematic of how Jeffrey essentially puts his ear to the earth to hear the thrum of the underworld below.

Though Jeffrey takes the ear to a police detective (Dean Stockwell), he also blithely decides to open his own faux investigation into the severed organ with the detective’s daughter Sandy (Laura Dern) as his co-amateur sleuth, their clue leading them to nightclub singer Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini) with whom Jeffrey becomes romantically entwined too. Indeed, “Blue Velvet” is a movie of contrasts and there are none more striking than Sandy’s pink costuming and Dorothy’s blue, the former like a wholesome prom queen, the latter a noirish femme fatale. MacLachlan furthers those contrasts by alternating his persona between a cocky college student back home when Jeffrey is with Sandy and a scared overgrown kid when he’s with Dorothy, no more a child yet not quite a man. In that way, “Blue Velvet’s” most famous sequence, the one in which Jeffrey hides in Dorothy’s closet while sadistic drug dealer Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper), who has kidnapped her husband and child, holding her in bondage, terrorizes and tortures her, becomes nothing less than Lynch’s version of the wardrobe in Narnia, a window into the bewildering, tantalizing, traumatizing world of adults.

The scene is also our introduction to Frank, a character virtually reduced to nothing but animal urges. “I’ll fuck anything that moves!” he screams at one point. And there is something about the way Hopper says this line, just as he memorably barks “Pabst Blue Ribbon” to indicate his beer of choice later. The words don’t come out at the right tempo, or something, bringing to life the character’s terrifying impulsiveness, the way Hopper makes him feel like he’s not acting out instructions in the script but following his own muse. He’s such a big presence, in fact, that his demise feels anti-climactic. He needed to be devoured by a black hole. The antidote to Frank is Sandy, played by Dern with an All-American innocence that is slowly compromised, though not quite shattered. Her unforgettable monologue about dreaming of a world in darkness only for robins representing love to effuse it with a bright light is elevated by Angelo Badalamenti’s score into the realm of a fairytale. And yet, as “Blue Velvet” ends, flowers bloom, robins arrive, spring has come, love has triumphed. Is it real? More than any time in my life, I came away wanting to believe it was.  

Some Drivel On...Welcome to Mooseport

If the unrememberable “Welcome to Mooseport” (2004) is remembered for anything, it’s as the last movie of the irascible, immortal Gene Hackman before he unofficially retired. Did he retire because of “Welcome to Mooseport?” That’s the theory his co-star Maura Tierney half-jokingly floated in a 2014 AV Club interview, though it’s not a theory anyone has ever been able to confirm, not that I could find, likely because of Hackman’s notorious privacy. And having now, 20 years later, finally watched Donald Petrie’s poorly reviewed comedy, I can confirm, that not only is it bad, and not only is it blah, but it is also so, so feeble. It might have been Hackman’s last movie, but it was his co-star Ray Romano’s first (non-animated division), released during the final season of his “Everybody Loves Raymond” sitcom. And boy, does he feel like a sitcom star transplanted to the big screen, figuratively beating a retreat in every scene, virtually shrinking before our very eyes. I kept thinking of Val Kilmer as Doc Holliday in “Tombstone” (1993) during that scene with Billy Bob Thornton’s wannabe outlaw Johnny Tyler in the street: “Oh. Johnny, I apologize,” Doc Holliday says. “I forgot you were there.” I kept forgetting Romano was there. I wonder if Hackman did too. 

Hackman is Monroe Cole, “The Eagle,” not just the former President of the United States but the President of the United States with the highest approval rating in history who finds himself running for mayor in the small town of Mooseport, Maine against Romano’s local handyman Handy Harrison. Why, exactly, Handy wants to run for Mayor in the first place is never elucidated, an early sign of the milquetoast evasiveness in Tom Schulman’s screenplay, but he opts against dropping out upon discovering the divorced Cole has asked out Handy’s girlfriend of many years, Sally (Maura Tierney). She wants to get married, see, and Handy isn’t picking up the signal, which Romano plays with such inert obliviousness that it’s impossible to believe she would be with this dufus in the first place. It ruins any sense of romantic tension from the jump and the whole plot line becomes devalued further in the way it reduces Sally to nothing more than a wedge between the two men. At one point, Cole and Handy even play a game of golf to decide who gets to court her. The screenplay at least admits the insulting outmodedness of this idea, but it never grants her character any real agency, never mind identity, and you can sense Tierney’s disassociation from the role in real time.

Hackman, at least, comports himself with a believably Presidential air, and even better, effortlessly toggles between Person and Politician without letting the seams show, injecting a little vigor in a movie that otherwise has none. The media circus that descends on Mooseport is ripe for satire of how elections have metamorphosed into entertainment only to sand down every possible edge into weak sitcom punchlines while the purported conflict of the political campaign between Cole and Handy never materializes because, like, there is no political campaigning. There are no ideas expressed, no views established; for God’s sake, the screenplay doesn’t even have the guts to say whether Cole is a Democrat or a Republican. It’s tempting to label “Welcome to Mooseport” as Capra-esque given the Frank Capra-like underdog storyline, but whether they were profound, simplistic, or something in-between, Capra movies had politics. What “Welcome to Mooseport” intrinsically argues is government without politics, a fallacy so fanciful and pitiful it’s enough to make one think Alexander Hamilton’s skepticism of the will of the people was right all along. 

Some Drivel On...For Love of the Game

The historical record shows that 1999 was a year chock full of great movies; “For Love of the Game” was not one of them. It was the odd bookend to Kevin Costner’s baseball trilogy, sort of to “Bull Durham” and “Field of Dreams” as “Heaven and Earth” was to “Platoon” and “Born on the Fourth of July,” or something. Director Sam Raimi’s foray into big studio filmmaking might have been reduced to the dustbin of history if not for the MLB Network needing programming to fill airtime, and it works better on TV than it does as a complete, beginning-to-end big screen experience. If you just saw the baseball scenes, fortified by the one-part majestic, one-part mawkish Basil Poledouris musical score, it might come across like a feature length version of those old highlights they play on the scoreboard in baseball stadiums between innings. Trouble is, “For Love of the Game” is two movies in one. It is a baseball movie wherein aging Detroit Tigers ace Billy Chapel (Costner) pitches an improbable perfect game in Yankee Stadium in the twilight of his career and it is a romance movie that lives out as flashbacks in Billy’s head during the perfect game as he recalls his on-again, off-again, up and down relationship with Jane Aubrey (Kelly Preston). The screenplay by Dana Stevens was based on a posthumous novel by Michael Shaara published in 1991, but the finished product still feels like an attempt to replicate the ultra-successful formula of “Jerry Maguire” three years prior. But whereas that rom com’s fusion of sports and romance felt seamless, the two disconnected halves of “For Love of the Game’s” so badly fail to mesh it doesn’t just feel uneven, it feels lopsided. 

Chapel’s perfect game is a pressure cooker of a plot. It’s not just his relationship with Jane that is on the rocks, it’s that the Tigers owner (Brian Cox) is on the verge of selling the team, and that the new owners want to trade away Billy, meaning he has a deadline to decide whether he wants to retire or play on against the odds. And it is why Raimi’s clever sound and visual effects to convey how Billy blocks out the crowd’s cacophony on the mound double as an effective metaphor for how the mound becomes his place to both escape and focus. Those effects, meanwhile, demonstrate that even if “For Love of the Game” is a story-driven movie, Raimi makes an imprint. There is a solid rhythm to scenes on the diamond, especially when it focuses on in-depth at-bats, like one between Billy and his ex-Tiger pal who has been traded to the Yankees, and one with his foremost slugging Yankee nemesis that is like those old pitch-by-pitch breakdowns Tim McCarver used to do on TV broadcasts but set to a bluesy riff. And even when the sentimentality threatens to overwhelm, it all hangs together because these sequences believe in their own sense of grandeur as much “Field of Dreams” believed in its. That is helped in so small part by beloved baseball announcer Vin Scully playing himself calling Chapel’s perfect game by convincingly redressing every platitude the script espoused in his famously charismatic and relaxed tenor. 

In the screenplay’s melodramatic twists and turns, like Billy injuring his arm in a woodcutting accident, the romantic subplot suggests something Harlequin-inspired. And if “For Love of the Game” had believed in this as much as it believed in the baseball, maybe it all could have congealed into something entertainingly histrionic. It doesn’t, though, and that causes the two-hours-and-nineteen-minutes to feel ungainly. Costner’s sometimes goofy, even giggly, performance is like a Guy in the variety of Dave Barry’s Guide to Guys, and much more akin to a protagonist in a dumb romantic comedy than a weepy melodrama. Likewise, Preston seems to exist in a dumb romantic comedy too, unable to turn her myriad overwrought lines of dialogue into anything substantial. In fairness, Preston doesn’t have much to play given that her character essentially exists as a device for Billy to decide what’s more important, baseball or life. Worst of all, there is no heat between Costner and Preston, none, zilch, and that means there is no tension when the whole relationship arc is meant to turn on the tension between them. Well, I shouldn’t say no tension. 

One of the melodramatic turns involves Jane’s young daughter (Jena Malone) running away to see her good-for-nothing father and Billy being dispatched to bring her home. When he asks her daughter’s name, Jane replies, “Freedom,” waits a beat and then says, “Scared you didn’t I? It’s Heather.” Which, oh my god, what? On the other hand, this bizarre bolt from the blue suggests the age-old divide between the hippies and jocks, just as isolated bits like Jane’s career as a vaguely defined editor and a moment between the two at an art gallery evoke the age-old divide between aesthetes and philistines. You see it in their Meet Cute on the side of a New York expressway where Billy pulls up to help Jane when her car won’t start. Can a guy in shorts, tennis shoes, and a windbreaker and a woman in a hoodie, floral print dress, and combat boots really fall in love? I am honestly not even sure the screenplay is conscious of it, but hey, that right there is your ultimate Harlequin romance. 

Some Drivel On...Presumed Innocent

I have not read Scott Turow’s 1987 novel on which Alan J. Pakula’s 1990 film version of “Presumed Innocent” is based, but by all accounts, it was a book told from the perspective of its main character, Rozat “Rusty” Sabich, a county prosecutor assigned the case involving the murder of assistant prosecutor Carolyn Polhemus with whom he had an affair. That sounds like a classic case of an unreliable narrator, but Pakula’s version only begins and ends with a voiceover from Rusty (Harrison Ford), forgoing any inner monologues in-between, meaning that ultimately, we are not inside the character’s head but standing just outside of it. And while the opening image of an empty jury box seems to essentially establish us as the jury, hearing out the case as “Presumed Innocent” nimbly tracks the investigation, and then the trial, and then the aftermath, Pakula is stacking the deck, deliberately withholding information in order to craft a suspense movie as much a courtroom drama. That is not to suggest “Presumed Innocent” is flashy, or even salacious. In fact, strange as it might sound, the key scene between Rusty and Carolyn (Greta Scacchi) is as tragic as it is sexy, emblemizing the former’s fall from grace, as well as Pakula’s keen visual storytelling. It’s not anything fancy, necessarily, the direction, but so much framing and staging throughout the two-hour-and-seven-minute run time conveys a sense of either getting closer to the truth or further away from it. And though the average shot length might in general feel like an eternity to our overstimulated modern eyes, the shot length when we first see Carolyn, still stands out. The most thrilling moment in the whole movie was when I expected a cut away from her then...it didn’t come.

If literally a good chunk of “Presumed Innocent” takes place in the courtroom, figuratively an even bigger chunk of it takes place in the grey areas of the law. That’s because of the nebulous ethics in Rusty manning this investigation, but also because Rusty’s boss (Brian Dennehy) is in the middle of an election and determined to put the ballot first and because Detective Lipranzer (John Spencer) co-running the investigation comes across willing to put his friendship with Rusty first. Indeed, when Rusty asks Lipranzer if he might, ahem, lose the record of Carolyn’s phone call to his house, editor Evan A. Lottman chooses a close-up of Spencer, mouth open, struggling to process what he has been asked in real time. That look of Spencer’s also denotes how “Presumed Innocent” is chock full of fine performances underlining the movie’s grey areas. As Rusty’s defense attorney, Raul Julia comes across like a suave version of Robert Duvall in “A Civil Action,” bemused by the finer points of the law and how it can be deployed. As the judge overseeing the trial, Paul Winfield might give the deftest performance of all. That’s saying something considering the character, somehow both direct and verbose at once, could merely have been a black robed stereotype. Winfield, however, imbues the part with a deeper knowledge of the law than anyone else in the room and a deeper respect too. No performance is more important, though, than Bonnie Bedelia as Rusty’s long-suffering wife Barbara, effusing the exhaustion at holding the family together and the frustration at trying to stake out her own career.

Ford, meanwhile, initially seems to embody the Everyman type he had started to play in the 80s and would more or less give himself over to completely in the 90s, never more famously than “The Fugitive.” In that sensational 1993 version of the TV show, Ford’s Dr. Richard Kimble might have been found guilty of killing his wife, but we know he’s innocent because Ford innately projects that innocence. He might project it, too, in “Presumed Innocent,” yet the movie bit by bit puts chinks in the armor, in one fantastic through the looking glass moment with his attorney, literally making the case against himself. And in both flashbacks and scenes with his wife, when we are shown proof of his affair, Ford lets all the metaphorical air out of Rusty, rendering him as nothing more than a frightened little boy who wants everybody to believe he didn’t know better. In the end, though, Rusty is not the one who can clean up his mess. That turns out to be his wife, a transgressive twist on the whole chestnut of behind every great man there stands a strong woman. 

Some Drivel On...Atlanta

Alexandra Schwartz’s May profile of the multi-hyphenate artist Miranda July for The New Yorker noted that July’s first film was a ten-minute short from 1996 called “Atlanta.” Shot on a borrowed video recorder, July explained in a different New Yorker piece many years earlier, she “played both a twelve-year old swimmer competing in the Olympics and her domineering mother.” This piqued my interest, of course, because I’m an Olympics obsessive, but also because I, too, shot my first movie on a borrowed home video recorder purchased used from my pizza place boss in 1996. July would have been 22, and I would have been 18, but still, this intrigues because whereas I thought strictly in terms of concept and writing lines that would make my friends laugh (or maybe just make me laugh), July was already thinking like a filmmaker, how images conveyed feeling and meaning rather than merely functioning as a conduit for words in a raggedy screenplay. That’s why she’s her and I’m me. But that goes without saying. Anyway.

“Atlanta,” which is streaming on YouTube in very rough form, features the 22-year-old July playing both a 12-year-old Olympic swimmer and her mother, cutting back and forth between the characters as they give a television interview. She is taking the form of a standard-issue Olympic puff piece, in other words, and then wickedly undressing it as daughter and mother begin by espousing athlete and athlete mom clichés before gradually spiraling into mid-interview psychosis. All of this, meanwhile, is interlaced with fragmented images seen through what it appears to be swimming goggles suggesting the 12-year-old swimmer drowning in the tub. Simone Biles helped to bring the mental health struggles of the athletes to the fore in 2021, and the attendant complications of that decision, the black-hearted bad actors it automatically brought out of the woodwork upon sensing blood in the culture war water, only underlined why for so long athletes were hesitant to open up about it. And that is why, given the roughhewn yet disturbing nature of “Atlanta,” I kept imagining July somehow hijacking the evening NBC broadcast of the Atlanta Olympics in July 1996, like the Martians in “Mars Attacks!”, transmitting these ten minutes to the masses that did not want to hear it instead. 

Some Drivel On...Go

“Go” might well have had no grand ambition other than to be a rollicking good time, but released as it was six months before the turn of the century, it has in the years since emerged as something like a summation of the 90s. It begins with supermarket checkout clerk Ronna (Sarah Polley) querying of a patron “Paper or plastic?” in a disgruntled tone of voice and repeating it when she doesn’t get an answer, not so much burned out as just pissed off, in general. She’s a disaffected Gen Xer, in other words, and destined to end up like her customer (“Don’t think you’re something you’re not – I used to have your job”), until Adam (Scott Wolf) and Zack (Jay Mohr) come through her line looking to score drugs since the guy, Simon (Desmond Askew), whose shift Ronna took and normally sells them their stuff has gone off to Vegas with his mates instead. She decides to improvise as a drug dealer so she can make rent, essentially spinning Richard Linklater’s “Slacker” off into Quentin Tarantino territory, the two dueling American indie archetypes of the period sort of converging as Doug Liman’s comedy thriller becomes a triptych with three storylines about all these people and a few more bouncing off each other and resolving in, well, no grand resolution at all beyond one character wondering what they are doing for New Year’s Eve. Call it a Gen X styed elixir to all that Y2K anxiety; take a chill pill, man. 

For as much as “Go” can’t help but come across as Pepsi to its forebear “Pulp Fiction’s” Coke, however, Liman manages to inject enough verve to keep it feeling fresh if not even occasionally original. True, his documented DIY approach can’t quite save the Vegas sequence, all of which still feels as if it’s following a screenwriting treasure map than just getting made up by the characters on the spot, but there all manner of flourishes that elevate the overall movie, nevertheless. You see it almost right from the start, something akin to a point-of-view shot of Ronna watching various grocery store items circle the checkout conveyor belt toward her, the humdrum realities of low wage work, while the close-ups of William Fichtner as the undercover cop trying to bust Ronna for dealing are genuinely hilarious, cutting straight to his whole uncomfortably off-kilter character and performance. The crucial flaw to “Go,” however, proves to paradoxically be its single best element: Sarah Polley. She’s too good! She grounds the proceedings in such a surprisingly real way that when she is ushered off screen a third way of the way through, clearing room for the other two stories, the seesaw goes so far in the other direction that an affecting black comedy becomes a violent cartoon.

Some Drivel On...Summer of Sam

Spike Lee’s oeuvre is so extensive and varied that it’s impossible to drill down to his most essential work. That’s why over the years I have come to think of “Do the Right Thing” as the best Lee movie, and “He Got Game” (1998) as my favorite Lee movie, and “Summer of Sam” (1999) as the most Lee movie. When I say the most, first, I mean it as a compliment, and second, mean to say that it seems to me the exemplar of his preference for exaggerated emotion and aesthetic, a movie made his way, no one else’s. Even if Lee’s halting and mannered acting in a handful of brief appearances as a television reporter is kind of terrible, his presence is right. He is a true auteur in so much as he rarely vanishes from his own movies, imprinting them with his personal taste, distinctly coming across as their author. When the sun glints off a Dead End sign around which some characters congregate, it’s as if Spike himself is winking at you; when a couple breaks up, it is underscored with Thelma Houston’s “Don’t Leave Me This Way,” like a sentence with two exclamation points; he even copies the “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” Phil Rizzuto breakdown to score one of Son of Sam’s killings. Anything goes.

Rotten Tomatoes might be a suspect tool for considering movies, but I still find “Summer of Sam’s” current grade of 50% to be apropos, split right down the middle, echoing its divisiveness. From the moment Lee’s movie debuted at Cannes, it was mired in controversy with people attacking its ostensible reverse racism and its graphic violence, exploiting the Son of Sam murders for profit, the latter accusation lobbed by the supposedly reformed Berkowitz himself from prison. It’s a molten movie, that’s for sure, as Lee generally knows no other way, but if Lee’s “Do the Right Thing” literally and figuratively evoked one scorching hot summer day than “Summer of Sam” literally and figuratively evokes one scorching hot summer, not just a city block but a whole city driven to madness, put into perspective right away as Lee segues from a recreation of one of .44 Caliber killings to a dance club, its denizens coping beneath gleaming disco balls. Indeed, though we see Berkowitz (Michael Badalucco) throughout, he is a peripheral character much more than the main one, a sinister version of the moon in “Moonstruck,” sending everybody over the edge. 

The nexus of this effect becomes Vinny (John Leguizamo), a Bronx hairdresser who is habitually unfaithful to his wife Dionna (Mira Sorvino) and navigating the unexpected return of his childhood friend Ritchie (Adrien Brody). The latter shows up after a period of time away affecting a British accent and sporting wild Liberty spikes, suggesting the punk rock version of “Mean Streets” Johnny Boy to Vinny’s Charlie Cappa. In reality, though, it turns out to be the other way around. Epitomizing his melodramatic tendencies, Lee never quite sees these characters beyond one dimension, boiled down to their dueling punk and disco preferences, but the filmmaking intensity and Brody and Leguizamo’s commitment to the bit means it works on an emotional level anyway.

If “Summer of Sam’s” explicit violence got everybody in a huff, so, too, did its explicit sex, much of it tying back to Vinny’s serial philandering on account of a classic Madonna-whore complex, struggling to satisfy his libidinous cravings in a would-be faithful relationship. Aside from a scene or two, this is all seen from Vinny’s perspective, but even in her own limited role, Sorvino imbues a distinct presence, someone who loves this idiot in spite of herself, and in spite of his failings, but also begins to see the writing on the wall. In one heartbreaking scene, she is even forced to consult with the promiscuous Ruby (Jennifer Esposito) about her own husband’s desires. Ruby winds up in an unlikely relationship with Ritchie, kind of a punk version of Pygmalion in which she trades disco glam for anti-fashion. Their relationship becomes a moving contrast to Vinny and Dionna, turned on by one another’s likes and desires, even filming an adult movie, which when cast against the other couple’s failing marriage is weirdly tender and true. Come to think of it, deep down in places they don’t talk about at parties that might have gotten the prudes in a tizzy more than the imagery.

Ritchie’s sense of self makes him an outsider in his own neighborhood and subsequently causes him to be fingered as the .44 Caliber Killer. Not by the detectives working the case (Anthony LaPaglia and Roger Guenveur Smith), mind you, nor even by the local mafioso Luigi (Ben Gazzara) who agrees to aid the hunt. No, the real murder investigation in “Summer of Sam” is a fake one conducted by Ritchie’s ostensible friends, the wastoids who gather around that Dead End sign day after day, lorded over by Joey T (Michael Rispoli), adults who never advanced beyond the teenage wasteland of “Baba O’Riley,” The Who’s anthem that scores a mid-movie montage functioning as Lee’s emotional thesis. Vinny reluctantly falls in with them as his life gradually falls apart, the portrait of a weak man subsumed by mob rule. So cocky and magnetic in the early going, by the end, Leguizamo has reduced his character to a ghostly husk. And if “Do the Right Thing” concluded with everything just sort of going back to normal, “Summer of Sam” ends with Sam in the back of a cop car but everything else up for grabs. 

Some Drivel On...June 17th, 1994

June 17th, 1994 began with a ticker tape parade for the Stanley Cup-winning New York Rangers hockey team in Manhattan and golf trailblazer Arnold Palmer teeing off for his final round in a U.S. Open at the Oakmont Country Club in Oakmont, Pennsylvania and the day concluded with Game 5 of the NBA Finals between the Houston Rockets and New York Knicks being preempted on TV to instead show celebrity and ex-NFL star Orenthal James Simpson, wanted for the murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, being chased down a Los Angeles freeway in a white Ford Bronco in what became tantamount to a twisted Hollywood version of a New Orleans Funeral. In other words, historic celebrations of athletes gave way to the infamous fall of one. In his astonishing 2010 documentary chronicling that bizarrely jam-packed day, director Brett Morgen eschewed narration and traditional talking heads to instead cultivate it almost exclusively from TV footage, creating the effect of a story told through channel-flipping fragments and sensations. After all, O.J. Simpson, as James Poniewozik essentially reckoned for The New York Times in the wake of the former’s death last week at 76, was as much media personality as man. The World Cup might have kicked off in America, too, on June 17th, 1994, but the hunt for a fugitive Simpson and the subsequent freeway chase managed to supersede the planet’s biggest event, at least for a day, with a vintage American-style spectacle.

For a comprehensive personal, political, social, and cultural examination of Simpson, “June 17th, 1994” is not it. That’s Ezra Edelman’s sensational five-part “O.J.: Made in America” (2016), and if you don’t have time to watch all eight hours then reading Ray Ratto’s evaluation of O.J. for Defector with Joel Anderson’s assessment at Slate as the necessary chaser will do. But that isn’t to say Morgen’s movie is uninterested in or unaware of these ideas. Far from it, he just manifests them in different ways. As an earlier sequence in which “June 17th, 1994” cuts from the elder Arnold Palmer hitting a tee shot at Oakmont to monochrome archival footage of the younger Palmer rocketing a golf ball down the fairway, Morgen tends to see history in eerie echoes and rhymes. During the freeway chase, a cut to archival footage of Simpson in an old Hertz commercial dashing through the airport echoes becomes a macabre joke, holding up these two sides of Simpson at once and then splitting them right down the middle with a figurative axe. Images of people cheering the Ford Bronco alongside the freeway and from overpasses reverberate with footage of the erstwhile football star being cheered on at L.A. Coliseum during a touchdown run in 1969 in USC’s Game of the Century versus UCLA, portending the Trial of the Century. Perhaps Morgen’s most cutting supplement is adding the recordings of an LAPD detective trying to talk down a possibly suicidal Simpson in the back of that Ford Bronco, underlining the grisly nature of the whole ostensible carnival, a man wanted for murder threatening to kill himself to the primetime entertainment of millions, reality and a distorted, disturbing funhouse reflection of reality blending until you can’t tell them apart.

By never zooming out, “June 17th, 1994” takes a Where Were You? moment and puts us right back in the middle of it, but with accumulated knowledge over time to put into perspective what it always was, a twilight drive through this country’s own splintered, media-addled psyche.

Some Drivel On...the Oscar Nominations

Oscar nominations, so many ripples in the rain.

So, how’s it going? The new membership of the Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences, I mean, which after deserved blowback in recent years has embraced diversity and youth while still retaining enough outmodedness to make the spirit of the Cocoanut Grove proud: after all, Billie Eilish and Leonard Maltin are Academy members now! And you can see this in the nominations for the 96th Academy Awards, unveiled yesterday, which were as vexing as they were satisfying (and can all be found here), especially where Best Picture was concerned, utilizing all ten slots to encompass a wide spectrum. If there was anything that decidedly wasn’t a surprise, it’s that my Top 5 Favorite Movies of the year earned a total of zero nominations, including “Fallen Leaves,” which I might have thought had a chance, for something, maybe. Eh, whatever. You can stream it on Mubi; watch it anyway; who cares; watch the other Aki Kaurismäki movies on Criterion; watch a middling thriller! 

2024 was defined in so many ways by the Barbenheimer phenomenon and continued apace in the nominations, though if Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” still leads both the global and domestic box office sweepstakes, Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” won in terms of Academy Award nods with 13 to 8. (Yorgos Lanthimos’s “Poor Things,” in fact, earned 3 more nods than “Barbie,” further evidence of the old William Goldman line about nobody knowing anything.) That baker’s dozen includes not only the big uns like Best Picture and Best Director and Best Actor for Cillian Murphy, but Best Score and Best Sound, where even an “Oppenheimer” agnostic such as me would confess to its excellence. It even dragged Emily Blunt to a Best Supporting Actress nod, an incredible performer for whom this blog has repeatedly stanned, so don’t come for us (me), but who, through no real fault of her own, is an acting non-entity in her nominated role. Penélope Cruz in “Ferrari” would have eaten her lunch.

“Barbie’s” haul was mostly down along the production line, which is all richly deserved, even as its unlikely omissions in a couple top line categories will provide unwanted ammunition to the freshmen economics students claiming “Barbie” is doing capitalism rather than being art. What’s more, Ryan Gosling earned a Supporting Actor nod (yay!) while Margot Robbie was, well, let’s avoid the word snubbed, shall we, and say, laughably overlooked, as if the Academy toed the Pop Culture Company line that Gosling stole the movie even while Robbie (her turn in “Barbie” in conjunction with her cameo in “Asteroid City” made her this useless blog’s Performer of the Year) was, in fact, making the whole movie right in front of their face with her face. And though America Ferrera got a Supporting Actress nod, undoubtedly because she recited the Big Monologue, Gerwig herself was left out of the Best Director race, all the more remarkable because she was also left out of the Best Director race for “Little Women” (2019) but wasn’t for “Ladybird” (2015) for which she deserved a Direction nomination least. Sigh. It’s complicated. She knows.

Though I would have put Sofia Coppola number one on my ballot for “Priscilla,” Gerwig was more deserving than Lanthimos for “Poor Things,” a movie which I will write about, eventually, and where I thought the direction ultimately interfered more than enhanced. As it is, a woman was nominated, Justine Triet for the French drama “Anatomy of a Fall,” and Jonathan Glazer was nominated too, for “The Zone Interest,” and because of that, it’s hard not to be a little happy. These are people, like their fellow nominee Martin Scorsese for “Killers of the Flower Moon,” who try to make films, not movies, to paraphrase Kit Ramsey, whether they work or not, for you, or for me, or for anyone else. Anyway, that category is Christopher Nolan’s to lose, just as “Oppenheimer” is certainly the favorite for Best Picture, leaving me to dream of Oprah returning to present it so she can modify her Golden Globes envelope-opening from “Oppenheimerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!” to “the Father of the Atomic Boooooooooooomb!”)  

In terms of the acting categories, the biggest news was Lily Gladstone becoming the first woman of Native American descent to be nominated for an Oscar with “Killers of the Flower Moon” and Jeffrey Wright earning his first Oscar nomination as Best Actor in “American Fiction.” Paul Giamatti, meanwhile, earned his first Best Actor nomination in “The Holdovers.” And though I had problems with the latter, I didn’t have a problem with Giamatti, and even if I did, I don’t think I’d care. It should be His Time; his inexorable march to the podium in March would be well deserved and overdue, and he might be Hollywood’s most unwittingly equipped to go through the next six weeks without letting the stress affect him. In fact, in our era, where these races are monitored so closely and dished about so incessantly there are no longer any real surprises, let’s close this recap by ranking the coronation levels for our probable acting winners.

1. Robert Downey Jr., Best Supporting Actor for “Oppenheimer.” LEVEL: Reagan over Mondale. 

2. Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Best Supporting Actress for “The Holdovers.” LEVEL: LBJ over Goldwater.

3. Lily Gladstone, Best Actress for “Killers of the Flower Moon.” LEVEL: Clinton over Bush.

4. Paul Giamatti, Best Actor for “The Holdovers.” LEVEL: Obama over Romney. 

Some Drivel On...Baseball

Meet this year’s Major League Baseball playoffs, the same as last year’s Major League Baseball playoffs. In 2022, the 111-win Los Angeles Dodgers and 101-win Atlanta Braves were eliminated from the postseason by teams with inferior records who only qualified as wildcards. in 2023, the 100-win Los Angeles Dodgers and 104-win Atlanta Braves and 101-win Baltimore Orioles were all eliminated from the postseason by teams with inferior records who only qualified as wildcards. If once upon a time, the Dodgers and Braves and Orioles and Astros might have met in respective best-of-seven series to determine who won the pennant and advanced to the World Series, MLB’s decision to remake the game with three divisions rather than one and thus add a single wild card team to a 4-team playoff put us on the road to where we are now. That is, a 12-team playoff with 6 wild cards, transforming the hallowed Fall Classic from a certification of regular season results, so to speak, into the finale of the MLB October Jamboree.

The reasons for this are clear. TV revenue, of course, which is as much the Spirit of the Game as anything these days, and TV revenue correlates directly to entertainment. “Are you not entertained?” Joe Posnanski asked of this new playoff format on his blog without necessarily criticizing that format even as his repurposing of the famous “Gladiator” quote made clear the format’s point. Really, it’s March Madness for baseball, and who wouldn’t want that? March Madness is fun! But then, the NCAA Men’s and Women’s Division I Basketball Tournaments are manifestly not designed to determine the best teams over the course of a four-month season but, merely, reveal which teams are left standing at the end of a three-week tournament. “Purdue’s the heavy preseason favorite,” went a recent laugh out loud Athletic headline, “but postseason is the real question,” virtually betraying college basketball’s entire four-month regular season as preliminary. But baseball, as Posnanski has written elsewhere, “is America’s only every-day game.” “Each inning of baseball's slow, searching time span,” Roger Angell wrote famously in The Interior Stadium, “each game of its long season is essential to the disclosure of its truths.”

Now you could interpret Angell’s encapsulation as David Roth did for Defector in attempting to put the gatekeepers in their place, that “the randomness built into the game…the weird hops and hot streaks and fluke caroms” essentially epitomize what baseball turns into in the month of October. “The regular season is the orderly part, October is the opposite; both are important, and the story of the season would not be complete without either,” Roth writes. It is not dissimilar to the argument mounted by Robert O’Connell for The Atlantic, that “After the slowness of the summer, (the wildcard) reintroduces everyone to the craziness of the fall. Time quickens; desperation festers.” O’Connell, though, is more apt to admit the contrived nature of the current playoff system, which Roth elides, never mentioning that for well over 100 years of its existence, the baseball season was in so many ways an “anticlimax,” to borrow another Posnanski word. In fact, in The Interior Stadium, Angell essentially proffers the same argument as Roth, though he notes how such manic swings and terrible reversals are built into the game itself regardless of postseason or regular season, the two closer in spirit than all this radical restructuring would otherwise suggest. 

Indeed, I am not necessarily arguing against baseball’s postseason as it has come to exist so much as I am explaining how I have come to the realization that what I appreciate most about baseball, nay, why I enjoy it at all has metamorphosed over the years as much as the sport’s playoff format. When I was a kid, only the playoffs really interested me, the regular season too much of a slog. That makes a sort of scientific sense, I suppose, because when you’re younger, your attention span tends to be shorter, and the immediacy of playoff baseball naturally lends itself to hyperactive mindset more than what O’Connell deemed the “drowsy daily pace” of the regular season. In writing about his Opening Day experience as an 11-year-old, when he was convinced one game of his beloved hometown Cleveland club would provide the key to the whole season, Posnanski noted that he was too young “to appreciate the length of a baseball season, the drone of 162 games, the numbing effects of tomorrow after tomorrow.” 

I live in Chicago where the Northside Cubs spent this season locked in a playoff chase while the Southside White Sox spent their season going from bad to worse to miserable. I found the latter more compelling. Maybe that’s because in entering middle age and discovering it’s where life truly becomes a grind, all about metaphorically, if not literally on occasion, putting one foot in front of the other, I have developed a newfound appreciation for the grind of the baseball season, of those numbing effects of tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day, where the old axiom of having something to play for becomes less practical than existential. If every burgeoning baseball player dreams of stepping to the plate in the bottom of the ninth of Game 7 with the bases loaded and two outs, what burgeoning baseball player dreams of rolling out of bed in a Ramada in Kansas City on a Wednesday in September to wrap up a three game road series you’ve already technically lost during a season that long ago went to the birds? Out, out, brief candle!

The Sox began September by losing 4-2, 10-0, 3-2, 12-1, and 7-6 on an end-of-game, bases-loaded balk. If you lost a game on a walk-off balk in October, it would always be remembered. As it was, the unlikely White Sox balk-off was washed away in the daily baseball tide, which means when they won 6-4 the following day, it wasn’t about redemption. It wasn’t even rememberable; I don’t remember anything about it right now. Like so many of the days of our lives, it was not a game to be remembered, just lived and then forgotten.

Some Emerald Drivel On...Runaway Jury

Released this week in October 2003, “Runaway Jury” was the last John Grisham legal thriller adapted for the big screen. Recent laments regarding the demise of the subgenre tend to blame the comic book monolith. That, however, was a good way off in 2003, and I wonder if just a few months after America had been lied into a forever war through false evidence and trumped-up testimony, we were all weary of what The New York Times’ Elvis Mitchell dismissed as Grisham’s “tired morality.” Yet, while that plagued the author’s work, as did a lack of “guts for real debate,” to quote Peter Travers’s own withering assessment of the same movie, Grisham movies were made in the image of all that sweat Joel Schumacher deployed in “A Time to Kill,” not serious drama but pulp. And it’s why “Runaway Jury” always played to me not merely like a conclusion of the subgenre but a culmination. Director Gary Fleder might well have been a hack, as Salon’s Charles Taylor pooh-poohed him, but I’m not sure who else you’d want at the wheel of this movie then a craftsperson. Ty Burr of the Boston Globe deemed “Runaway Jury” the cinematic equivalent of a beach novel, though I prefer the term Barcalounger cinema, to borrow a word of movie’s, made to wash over you from the comfort of a recliner, the ultimate modern middling thriller.

The set-up to “Runaway Jury,” as Manohla Dargis wrote for the LA Times, is a “fiendishly smart way to stack the decks,” not so much introducing us to Dylan McDermott’s stockbroker as allowing us to bask in his angelic presence so that when he is killed in a mass shooting, it comes across as the ultimate sin, the accompanying videos of his child’s birthday party rendering Fleder as something akin to the movie’s prosecuting attorney. In fact, we never see this stockbroker’s widow (Joanna Going) without her own attorney present, which is to say in the same scene with her, evoking how we are never allowed to know who she is even as she files suit against the fictional gun manufacturer responsible for the weapon in her husband’s death. No, given that the book is about cigarettes and the movie about guns, it only underlines how the subject itself is less the point than the idea of a jury trial in the first place, “the perils,” writes Dargis, “of leaving the law in the hands of the people,” epitomized in Rankin Fitch (Gene Hackman), a jury consultant brought in by the defense to rig the tribunal in their client’s favor.

Fitch is first seen in the back of a taxi in a series of tightly cropped shots that don’t let us get a good look at him, as if he’s an apparition, and eventually standing before a big bank of monitors, Beelzebub as Big Brother and able to summon each prospective juror’s entire personal history with a virtual snap of his fingers. He reduces all his ostensible peers to stereotypes just as the movie inadvertently (brilliantly?) does too, leaning on people like Nora Dunn, Luis Guzmán, Bill Nunn, Rusty Schwimmer, and Jennifer Beals to represent themselves. The wildcard jury member proves to be Nicholas Easter (John Cusack) who in tandem with his girlfriend Marlee (Rachel Weisz) claim they can swing the verdict toward either Fitch and the defense or the prosecuting attorney Wendell Rohr (Dustin Hoffman), whoever pays them more, though this extortion masks deeper ulterior motives both personal and political.

This means the case plays out less in court than in so many spiritual backrooms, suggesting a modern paranoid thriller in which one of the foundations of our free and fair democracy is unmasked as not so free and not so fair, the will of the people ripe for manipulation by the highest bidder. Despite a plot that is generally to the contrary, however, the four-person screenplay still pledges callow allegiance to the law, and despite one line of dialogue near the end trying to escape the corner it has painted itself into, accidentally evoking the trial by jury system as bunk. Given this muddled point-of-view, then Fleder steals a march, “crack(ing) the whip,” as David Edelstein noted for Slate, by lighting the fires and rendering the movie in the manner of his darting, dipping camera. And though such a relentless pace means some story points drop by the wayside, like Jeremy Piven’s jury consultant for the good guys, the trade of momentum in place of meaning works well enough, “a patina of noir,” per Dargis, “by way of a luxury-car commercial.”

A luxury car like, say, Jaguar, selling The Art of Performance for 89 years running, and which “Runaway Jury” does too. The cast is more top-heavy than “A Time to Kill,” and though no one gives a truly indelible turn, either dramatically or melodramatically, no one is phoning it in, all professionally present, Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band playing Albany, say, instead of East Rutherford, New Jersey. Though the script lets him down in this regard, sanding away some edges, Cusack comes closest to a three-dimensional turn, mischievously playing both to and against his innate likeability. Her character isn’t a femme fatale, but Weisz exudes some of those characteristics, nonetheless, as Marlee cockily keeps Rohr and Fitch on a leash. Bruce McGill should be in everything, which is why it’s nice to see him in “Runaway Jury” as the presiding judge, who the wily vet plays as the butt of the joke without knowing he’s the butt of the joke. Rohr is sort of the butt of the joke, too, and though the movie doesn’t always know it, Hoffman mostly does, his hammy tendencies here helping rather than distracting by helping emphasize the desperation of a naïve man lashing out at a rigged system he wants to believe is fair.

Part of the movie’s pre-release appeal was that Hoffman and Hackman, longtime friends, and one-time roommates, were finally appearing in a movie together, and is why they are given a scene not in the book, a courtroom lavatory confrontation. Theirs, though, is not as forceful as the one between Hackman and Weisz, a palpable physical menace in the air even as she maintains a playful edge before, right at the end, letting through this incredible whoosh of vulnerability.  It’s not vulnerability that Hackman creates in his part so much as “pro forma villainy,” to quote Dargis, though she does not really mean it as a criticism and neither do I. That’s what the role requires, evil exuberance rather than depth, though in his penultimate part, Hackman never goes too far even as he brings all sorts of delightful actorly flourish. Trials,” says Fitch, “are too important to be left up to juries,” a gauche line made for trailers that Hackman sells by the way he has his character sell it, the little expectant chuckle at the end, willing his employers to laugh, making it sound like his catchphrase. If you close your eyes, you can picture him delivering it in some cable TV commercial, one you might wake up to after dozing off, washing over you from the comfort of your Barcalounger. 

Some Drivel On...The Second Game

Corneliu Porumboiu’s “The Second Game” (2014) is less a documentary, really, than something like a running commentary between the director and his father Adrian of a 1988 Romanian soccer game between Steaua and Dinamo in the snow that Adrian refereed. If it was less than thrilling to me, a person who frequently enjoys watching old sports events on YouTube, imagine how it might play to you, person who does not enjoy watching old sports events on YouTube. As the title kind of alludes to, however, the game, the score, the action, is never really the point. In comparing it to one of his own deadpan Romanian New Wave movies, “slow and nothing much is happening” goes his description, well, he’s sort of cheekily selling his own movies short. Because something is going on just below the surface, as it is in “The Second Game” which evokes how the ultimate pointlessness of sports, to paraphrase a Colin McGowan article from the long-ago scrubbed site Sports on Earth, frees us to make anything out of them we want. “The Second Game,” then, belongs less in a movie theater than a museum; above all else, it invites contemplation. 

Steaua, as we learn, was managed by the Romanian Army while Dinamo was overseen by the Internal Affairs Ministry, essentially a team as an extension of the secret police, brewing political warfare on the pitch. Though Adrian speaks of each squad seeking to bribe him beforehand for preferential treatment, he shrugs that off in 2014 as much as he apparently did in 1988, making it clear he could not be bought, that’s that, hinting at the hard line that helped render the fall of the Iron Curtain. “If this was made in 1989,” Adrian drolly observes, “you could say that it predicted the end of communism.” It’s the funniest line in the movie, reminding me of Dave Barry’s old comical observation that Moby-Dick represents the Republic of Ireland, meaning anything can be philosophically or politically retrofit if you stretch it hard enough, while also putting into perspective how much of the Corneliu and Adrian’s commentary sounds exactly as it is, a dyspeptic father waving away his son’s questions before the questions are even done being asked. True, Adrian gets a little bit into officiating methods and the run of play, but mostly he expresses apathetic bewilderment about why they are watching this game in the first place, essentially citing it as one match in the snow out of hundreds, expressing the notion of a sportsball event as just one more thing to consume. In this way, the looming Romanian revolution retroactively strains out all the tension and turmoil, rendering the game as merely absurd and pointless, the dodgy visuals seeming to suggest it might be vanishing from existence right before our very eyes. 

Some Drivel On…NYC 3/94

Hal Hartley’s 10-minute short from 1994 called “NYC 3/94” is a useful study in intent vs non-intent, or maybe what I’m just unfairly assuming is non-intent. I’m assuming it because to capture what is described as “the mundane circumstances of a city under siege” on a budget of grains, Hartley goes guerrilla, stealing shots of three actors in various forms of anguish on the streets of NY while gunfire, explosions, even the roar of planes is heard on the soundtrack, though it is never seen. Hartley rounds this out with a man giving her appears to be a radio interview, though he may as well be talking to us, filling in the blanks a little too overtly rather than letting us fill them in ourselves. No, more effective are the natural cityscapes, unwitting extras going about their day as Hartley’s three actors take evasive maneuvers, the most notable unintentional background player someone whizzing past on rollerblades. The image is maybe a half-second, but boy is it a striking contrast of obliviousness. Because even if images of rattling coffee cups and the terrified trio covering their ears feel a little labored, a little stagy, in opposition to our rollerblader, they also feel monumental. Not people hearing noises so much as people tuned to an apocalyptic frequency everyone around them is choosing to skip on the dial.

Some Drivel On...Goon

Michael Dowse’s 2012 comedy “Goon,” about a hockey enforcer monikered Doug “The Thug” Glatt (Seann William Scott), begins with an overture of violence, blood splattering the ice, quickly followed by a bloody tooth, as opera music plays. It’s not so much foreshadowing as a warning. This is a violent movie. It has four fights in the first ten minutes, each one more intense than the last, and though it relents a little from that rapid-fire bloody knuckle pace, it doesn’t by much. If there is strategy to hockey, “Goon” has no use for it, and neither does the minor league hockey coach (Kim Coates) in “Goon.” Far from the Disneyfied realm of “Miracle,” where even the most malicious tactics of miracle-working coach Herb Brooks were dressed up with inspirational garb, “Goon” proves more like the preeminent hockey movie forefather “Slap Shot” (1977), though less satirical if no less cutting, portraying its violence and the embrace of it so earnestly that it becomes revelatory. 

It was pure kismet that I happened to watch “Goon” for the first time in a dozen years when I did, which was as the last movie I saw before the episode of “Ted Lasso” in which, without spoiling too much, an English Premier League player goes into the stands to fight a fan. Like most anything in that Apple TV+ dramedy, this fight, triggered by an abhorrent slur, was fodder for a Learning Experience. In “Goon,” on the other hand, when Doug defends he and his best friend Pat (Jay Baruchel) against a hockey player who enters the stands, the moment is nothing less than his call to adventure in which pummeling a man becomes his chance to leave the ordinary world behind, recruited in spite of his negligible skating ability or hockey talent to be enforcer for a minor league hockey team and rough up anyone who gets in the best player’s (Marc-André Grondin) way, carving out an identity for himself and earning a measure of fame along the way.

That this works, that we are invested in Doug rather than repulsed by him a la his father (Eugene Levy), is testament to Scott, so gleefully unlikable in the “American Pie” movies, so lovable here. Spencer Hall, our preeminent modern-day college football scribe, clocked Scott’s turn so perfectly I feel compelled to just let him take over: “When (Scott) flexes up off the bench to wait outside the penalty box for a fight, he is a pit bull waiting at the door for a burglar. The rest of the time he’s a dog lounging on the sofa.” Doug has a girlfriend played by Allison Pill, but even if his actions toward her are gallant, she exists merely as a figurative figment of the male hockey-addled imagination, while Pat mostly functions as comic relief. No, Doug’s real soulmate is his fellow Goon, the past-his-prime Ross “The Boss” Rhea (Liev Schrieber), soulfully embodying their role as mere modern gladiators. They hardly have any scenes together, existing as a kind of hockeyland Vincent Hanna and Neil McCauley, right down to their climactic heart-to-heart at an all-night diner and giving way to a showdown on the ice that does not dissect nor even skewer violence, instead surrendering to its bloody, brutal lull entirely. 

Some Drivel On...War of the Worlds

Virtually any artistic portrayal of an alien invasion is about something else. “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” was about McCarthyism, and “Independence Day” was about America’s inalienable right to blow stuff up, and “War of the Worlds,” as H.G. Wells himself indicated, was a repudiation of English colonialism. It only made sense, then, that Steven Spielberg’s 2005 cinematic version of the 1898 novel by Wells would concern itself with 9/11, or more accurately, the American feeling in the aftermath of 9/11. A year earlier Spielberg had made “The Terminal” which came across very much like a feel-good response to the 2001 terrorist attack, and almost as if realizing that film failed to clear the air of a lingering sensation of dread, came right back a year later with “War of the Worlds.” For all that suggestion of immediacy, however, sometimes distance provides the best perspective, and I felt much Spielberg’s version much harder rewatching it this year after a 4th of July where, to paraphrase the esteemed Charlie Pierce, I didn’t feel much like celebrating. This “War of the Worlds,” is dark, so dark, in fact, that I’m not sure a filmmaker occasionally too sentimental for his own good knew how to see it through.

Though it begins with Morgan Freeman reciting narration from Wells’s text, the “infinite complacency” he references assumes a different tone taken in tandem with the ensuing shot of the World Trade Center-less Manhattan skyline seen from a Red Hook dockyard across the way, subtly imprinting in our minds the overriding sense of what was lost four years earlier. Our shepherd through this valley of darkness becomes Tom Cruise, playing a crane operator named Ray Ferrier, introduced grinning and swaggering, a cowboy with a Yankees cap, but one who quickly gets cut down to size upon returning home to find his ex-wife Mary Ann (Miranda Otto) and two kids, 10-year-old Rachel (Dakota Fanning) and teenage Robbie (Justin Chatwin), waiting for him. “Didn’t we say eight-thirty?” he asks in such a way to let you know that, no, they definitely did not say that. Mary Ann is lit to look like an angel and takes herself on an uninvited tour of Ray’s house where she finds spoiled milk in the refrigerator and a car engine on the kitchen table, establishing a father who can barely care for his kids. Indeed, he doesn’t seem to know Rachel is allergic to peanut butter and a game of catch with Robbie is like “Field of Dreams” turned inside-out.

He will have to become a good father, of course, graduating to that status through the crucible of an alien invasion, though the tone is less heartwarming than horrifying, opting for pure survival mode over sentimentality, evoked in the movie’s nigh bewildering speed. From the moment the first alien tripod emerges from within the earth and goes about destroying Ray’s neighborhood, the pace mirrors the ferociously roving camera, tightly choreographed to transmit chaos, the whole world seeming to spin out of control around Ray as he seeks to get back to his kids and then to get his kids to safety, relentless forward moment comprised of one close encounter after another, the characters trying to make sense of what’s going on without the usual TV broadcast trappings to guide them (save for one conspicuous sequence involving a news van that I desperately wish had slid its door shut to reveal something like Acme Exposition Media painted on the outside). When they finally find a safe haven and Ray plops down in a chair to close his eyes, you feel the weight momentarily fall off his shoulders, even if that shot quickly gives way to one of Ray literally re-opening his eyes to a new moment of impending terror, life as an unceasing nightmare. 

Though Spielberg injects his rollercoaster with some more straightforward allusions to humanity’s wicked impulses in the face of dire events, like a mob descending on the Ferrier car, he makes room for more cunning metaphors too. The image of a tripod through the dropped viewfinder of a camcorder is not just a cool shot but a manifestation of our obsession with documenting reality, and death and destruction most specifically, a moment tied to a preceding one in which Ray eschews safety to have a look at the otherworldly machine, staring up at it dumbly, effusing the look of a man who just can’t help himself. One of his friends trying to call him back by saying “Don’t go” foreshadows a later moment when Ray says the exact same thing to his son when he becomes desperate to ascend a nearby hill where the U.S. military is unsuccessfully trying to repel the alien attack. Finally, Ray relents, and Robbie vanishes from view just as massive explosions rock the landscape. I remember dismissing this moment when I first saw the movie as overwrought, or maybe absurd, but this time around no moment hit me more. Not the father letting his son go so much as the gruesome spectacle carrying Robbie away, the inescapable instinct to look our doom right in the eye. 

It is also the moment when “War of the Worlds” falls apart not. If Spielberg’s version seems to be forging its own path, it veers, honoring the novel’s own conclusion but in a manner that feels so rushed it plays more like a deus ex machina while Robbie re-appears at the end, not for a game of catch but close enough, a movie marching straight into the darkness suddenly taking a disorienting off ramp to the light.