Peak New Yorker Parenthetical

“A parenthetical sentence is a paradoxical thing. It straddles worlds: It is both inside and outside the text simultaneously, included and excluded. It is not quite important enough to merit the full center-stage spotlight but also not unimportant enough to be shoved entirely behind a curtain. A pair of parentheses is the sound of a text leaning over and whispering to us,” wrote Sam Anderson in The New York Times. He was referring to The Great Nadar by Adam Begley, but he could just as well be referring to the commentary traditions of The New Yorker Magazine, which, like the incandescent 1980s Oklahoma quarterback Jamelle Holieway executing the option pitch from some absurd angle the hapless defender never saw coming, proffers parentheticals with delightfully unexpected flourishes. And if that is an oblique similie, well hell, it’s The New Yorker we’re talking about here.

Their parentheticals are often merely about clarification, sure, though even then great care is taken in placement and wording. Consider the No Comment issuance of Reince Priebus in Ryan Lizza’s infamous recounting of an Anthony Scaramucci phone call. But just as often the parenthetical is for effect, a place for a fun-filled fact that feels like an inside joke, such as Evan Osnos in his recent North Korea piece mentioning clerks in said country must avoid creasing newspapers bearing the face of Kim Jong Un on the front page. But sometimes those parentheticals allow not simply for observations apart from the overall thrust of the article itself but observations that overpower the overall thrust of the article itself.

Anthony Lane, longtime film critic for the mag, pitches a damn good parenthetical. I sometimes see Anthony Lane get crap from the New School Film Critics who, paradoxically, comically, often seem more rigid in their views on what a review “should” be than the Old School. Godfrey Cheshire long ago dismissed Lane as “a quip-minded belletrist.” A quip-minded belletrist? That sounds fantastic! That sounds like just what I want in my parenthetical! I like Anthony Lane. He, as my girlfriend says, a great stylist. He, to paraphrase William Goldman, writes reviews to be read, and God bless him. And in reading his review of “Battle of the Sexes” in the latest issue, one particular parenthetical went next-level.

It might have been the text leaning over and whispering to me but it still blew me back like a gale, a bolt of lightning resounding not in a crack of thunder but a melancholy sigh because the parenthetical bore such hard truth. And after placing the magazine in my lap to drink in the parenthetical, I never returned to the review because all that mattered in the end was between those parentheses.

Antonymic Shueroll

The purpose of a Shueroll, as it is with the Shueroll’s forefather the Rickroll, is it to deliberately lead you down the blogging primrose path. For instance, I say on some social media platform, or such, that I am going to be showing you the latest trailer for “The Last Jedi”, the new “Star Wars” movie (don’t see it here!). So you click on the link only to – gasp! – find that what Cinema Romantico is proferring is not “The Last Jedi” trailer but the opening sequence of “Adventures in Babysitting” (1987) in which Elisabeth Shue, alternate dimension Oscar winner, is essentially doing private room karaoke by herself to the sweet, sweet sounds of The Crystals. This, you see, is because there are eleventy jillion other places on the interwebs you can, and probably have, already seen the trailer for “The Last Jedi” and Cinema Romantico likes to have a little fun with trailer culture even though Cinema Romantico would never ever be one of those people that would say something jaw-droppingly stupid like “It’s just a trailer” as if we fancy ourselves Copernicus for making such a banal observation.

Well, “The Last Jedi” trailer did premiere yesterday and so this would be the opportune time for our latest Shueroll. But these are strange days, readers. These are days when our America First President is maybe going to lead America into global nuclear war, maybe depending on nebulous criteria that he has yet to define, perhaps because its definition is subject to what the next Fox & Friends tells him, or subject to whether POTUS got his chocolate cake before bed, or dependent upon whether Ivanka just got a big order from Pyongyang for some Floral Print Flare dresses. I sure hope the worst doesn’t happen, but if it does, well, Cinema Romantico wants to go out on the highest, most blissful note possible. And there are no notes higher and no notes more blissful than these…

Wistfully '95: Leaving Las Vegas

Since I could finally both drive and get into R-rated movies in 1995, it doubled as the year in which I fell head over heels in love for the experience of Going To The Movies. And so, here in the future in 2015, we will periodically re-visit a handful of the offerings to which I first paid homage in various multiplex cathedrals of Des Moines, Iowa.

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Though alcoholism is a serious disease, its portrayal at the movies is often treacly, where life-threatening drinking problems can be cured in the space of a montage (“Crazy Heart”) or worse. “It’s all wonderfully romantic, especially in the movies,” the late great Roger Ebert wrote of the silver screen alcoholism, “where a little groaning in the morning replaces nausea, headaches, killer hangovers and panic attacks.” Of course, Mr. Ebert was rather famously an alcoholic, one who stopped drinking in 1979, as he outlined in his invaluable piece in the last years of his life. Mr. Ebert also was a great champion of Mike Figgis’ 1995 film about an alcoholic who drinks himself to death, “Leaving Las Vegas.” He called it a “masterpiece.” He named it the best film of 1995. Perhaps I’m overstepping my bounds but it’s not difficult to wonder if Mr. Ebert saw in “Leaving Las Vegas”, in the plight of Nicolas Cage’s Ben, a road (thankfully) not taken. “Most alcoholics continue to drink as long as they can,” Ebert wrote. “For many, that means death. Unlike drugs in most cases, alcohol allows you to continue your addiction for what's left of your life, barring an accident. The lucky ones find their bottom, and surrender.” Ben does find his bottom and he does surrender, though the waving of his white flag takes a different form.

After a table-setting sequence in Los Angeles, Ben comes to Las Vegas with the express mission of drinking himself to death. And the film does not skimp on this mission. He gets the shakes, hallucinates, injures and embarrasses himself, the whole nine yards. And the Vegas of Figgis’s film is not the tourist’s life; it’s the seedy side. Not the underbelly, mind you, but the side, like you feel as if the camera is always catching everything in Sin City that you’d be seeing just around corner or down that alley where you don’t want to look. The soundtrack underscores this vibe. Perhaps the saxophone sounds cheesy, even dated to 2015 ears, but that’s just right. No high-priced soundtrack would do; this is the soundtrack of a beggar on the corner playing jazz for your nickels.

Yet as dark as all that sounds, as realistic as its portrayal of an alcoholic’s descent is, there is a strange romantic grandeur. Ben, understand, is not romanticized, but the film also wishes to at least look toward the sunny side of the street from the dark side across the way. When Ben arrives at his hotel, it’s not the MGM Grand, it’s The Hole You’re In, and as he reads the sign and figures out the pun, he smiles. He sees the humor in it. He sees the humor in life. Cage acknowledges the complications in his character. There are moments in this film when you catch a glimpse of the Ben he most likely once was; kind, even charming. When he’s fired his boss, you can tell his boss likes him, feels sorry for him, but has no choice. Perhaps he knows Ben needs help but perhaps he knows Ben is long past the point of help. It’s time to step aside.

The story turns when he meets Sera. She’s a hooker, though her heart is not exactly woven from gold. It is battered and bruised even if, in periodic conversations throughout the film with a therapist (never seen), she cops to a good feeling from her profession, a feeling of control. Of course, she is also controlled by her pimp (Julian Sands), who is smartly moved out of the picture, as she enters Ben’s life, first accidentally and then deliberately. She comes to care for him but she’s not there just to take care of him. She’s granted her own off screen life, one that unintentionally merges with Ben’s, as if by divine intervention. Maybe it is as she transforms into an approximation of an angel called upon to watch over him, to meet him on his earthly departure. That might sound maudlin, but it’s not, the film never pandering, because its characters never pander, because they look one another in the eye and embrace their respective realities, which is a helluva lot more than you can say about a lotta people who likely fancy themselves more in touch than these two.

If movies often revolve around identity, finding it, losing it, changing it, re-claiming it, there is little in the way of an Identity Crisis in “Leaving Las Vegas.” These two people are who they are, entirely accepting of the other person’s flaws, uninterested in forcing the other to correct those flaws. Movies, of course, are not ordinarily meant to be this way because movies are supposed to chronicle some perceptible change in their characters. But that's only because so many movie characters are engaged in some sort of self-deception. “Leaving Las Vegas”, bless its soul, is a movie where no one engages in self-deception. The only moment when that does not hold true is Sera asking Ben to stop drinking. But look at the sorrowful way Shue plays the scene, and listen to the meekness in her voice when she makes the plea; she knows she's lying to herself by asking, and yet she asks anyway. And because she grasps her willful, and useless, delusion, it becomes the movie's most tragic moment.

Of course, if there is no change then that means we are simply watching an alcoholic waste away with a hooker at his side. And this is true. It's a slow descent into death, a fulfilling of Ben's quest, the anti-hero's journey. It's not easy to watch, but it's also affecting to watch, if only because in coming together Ben and Sera find, as Ebert noted, “a measure of grace” in one another. In its own weird, twisted, fascinating, beautiful way, it's as moving an explication of selflessness as a motion picture has ever captured.

That's not to say these people are good people, in a traditional sense. They have made bad decisions, perhaps, a bounty of them, but “Leaving Las Vegas” understands the difference between those decisions and their innate human nature. It sees past their respective trails of destruction without denying or softening what they have done, and, by the end, that familiar glow has nothing to do with sin city neon and everything to do with the fractured light of Ben and Sera's souls.