Friday's Old Fashioned: Heavy Metal Parking Lot (1986)

As “Heavy Metal Parking Lot” opens, its co-directors and producers, John Heyn and Jon Krulik, film from inside their car as they are ushered into the parking lot of the late Capital Centre in Landover, Maryland for a Judas Priest concert on May 31, 1986. “Where do we park?” they ask. “Where do you park?” asks the parking lot attendant, who sounds a lot less put out than most of the parking lot attendants that I’ve encountered. “Anywhere you want,” he says, almost mystically beckoning them forward, or perhaps just under the influence despite being on the job. Into the lot they go. And as I watched this legendary 17 minute cult doc for the first time, I kept thinking of the myriad recent Woodstock ’99 retrospectives, each one lamenting the false utopia of its ex-Air Force base site. “It was not a beautiful or pastoral place,” Rolling Stone’s Rob Sheffield told The Ringer. “It was a parking lot.” Man, why hoof it all the way to upstate New York when you got a good hunk of cement right there in the ’burbs?

There’s that scene in Cameron Crowe’s “Almost Famous” where William Miller is dropped off at the Stillwater show by his very concerned mother as we see various longhairs, drunk or stoned or both, all of whom she judges. There is no passing judgement in “Heavy Metal Parking Lot”, but neither, really, is there celebrating or even analyzing. This is total immersion, the barrier between worlds sort of ineffably fading once Heyn and Krulik enter the lot, where underage drinking and drugs – the latter happening just up the road from “Just Say No” ground zero – are discussed openly, gleefully. And the directors toss out some off camera questions, they mostly let the people speak for themselves, so much so that at certain points the subjects just commandeer the microphone and spout off to their heart’s content, like the kid in the Zebra-striped jumpsuit expounding on Madonna being a “dick” and how he doesn’t really give “a shit about that kind of punk fuck.”

This is as close as “Heavy Metal Parking Lot” gets to dissecting metal music itself, aside from random shouts of “Priest!” The absurd questions of subliminal messaging would dog Judas Priest are never delved into here, the absurdity of this zebra-striped jumpsuit kid seeming to underline the absurdity of such accusations in the first place. Not that Heyn and Krulik are making fun. If the apparently legendary Zebraman is crude and cocky, he’s also an astute encapsulation, in its way, of what it’s like to be a teenager when you’ve latched onto a thing and made it your Thing, meaning that not only does nothing else matter but everything else sucks. This is your culture, these are your people, and if you don’t get it, you’re a dick. And that’s why “Heavy Metal Parking Lot” belongs not to the band but its fans, a lot of whom got a rap for being Satanists, or something like it, though this felt less like a Satanic ritual than carving out a charmless chunk of concrete as a rowdy Eden.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Flashpoint (1984)

As border patrolman Bobby Logan, Kris Kristofferson is ostensibly the hero of “Flashpoint” (1984), though he’s not exactly heroic. That’s not to suggest he’s anti-heroic, necessarily, nor outright evil, but, as connoted in his frequent bemused chuckle and “whatever, man, you do you” grin, never gets all that hot and bothered; when he says he took this job for a little “peace and quiet”, you believe him. That peace and quiet is threatened, though, as director William Tannen’s thriller opens with some government flunky advising Bobby and his border patrol pal Ernie Wyatt (Treat Williams) and all the other agents about their imminent replacement with sensors planted in the desert that can detect border crossings. If this provides motivation for Bobby when he comes across $800,000 in cash buried in a jeep buried in the desert, it also foreshadows the government’s looming role in the proceedings, epitomized in a twist I never suspected until the t’s started getting crossed. Compared to the film’s more minimalist tendencies, this twist is rather overwrought, yet still comes off, not least because of Rip Torn’s grand supporting turn, which we’ll get to.

Upon finding the cash, Bobby lets Ernie in on his discovery, not least because Ernie takes this news of potential job displacement the hardest. But if Ernie rages against his employers, he has ideals, glimpsed in his no holds barred excoriation of a local border smuggling kingpin, and so the thought of absconding with money that isn’t his makes him queasy. So rather than simply taking the money and running, they decide to check out the origin of this jeep, running the license plate number through their computer system, setting in motion a chain of events that leads back to the Federal Reserve in Dallas, Texas and November 1963 which, well, connect the dots, hotshot. As the government quickly descends, given face by Carson, played with dependable sneering disdain by Kurtwood Smith, the more Bobby floats the idea of simply high-tailing it to Mexico, which is an irony that “Flashpoint” never pushes too much, Americans crossing the border going the other way.

“Flashpoint”, filmed in various locales throughout Arizona, has an impressive sense of place, the unremitting desert interspersed with jagged rocks and craggy crevices, underlined by a Tangerine Dream score accentuating the eerie emptiness. When Bobby and Ernie inspect the jeep, you never expect the expected moment of someone happening on them at just the wrong moment because you already sense they are too far away from everything. And that oblivion becomes the point more so than it being the border between America and Mexico. In fact, Carson recites a lengthy monologue about how the border and the problems accompanying it is nothing more than a vehicle for keeping a certain kind of patriotic fury in business. And though that feels even more relevant seen through the prism of Right Now, it’s still laying the whole thing on thick, though Kristofferson has his character meet this ornate monologue with the perfect plain-faced expression of bewilderment.

Yes, the American government is the villain here, and those persnickety motion sensors not only are coming for your jobs but symbolize the intrusion of the surveillance state, ensuring that no last speck of America land will go unwatched. The concluding shootout, including a brief bout of ho-hum slow motion, is no great shakes, but Torn, as a local sheriff, is. In his eccentric being, defined by a southern accent so marble-mouthed you almost lean forward in your seat to try and make it out, embodying an older, weirder America, where it still seemed so vast, where secrets seemingly so preposterous no one could ever believe them might remain tucked away out of sight, destined only to be found by accident.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Special Bulletin (1983)

Edward Zwick’s made-for-TV 1983 movie “Special Bulletin” deliberately utilizes its small screen format to the fullest, telling its story of domestic terrorists threatening to detonate a nuclear bomb in Charleston, South Carolina unless the American government hands over 968 nuclear warhead modules in hopes of spurring unilateral global nuclear disarmament entirely through fake news reports. As such, it evokes Orson Welles’s famous 1938 “War of the Worlds” radio drama, though Welles’s only aim, in his words, was to annihilate the world before your very ears, entertainment for entertainment’s sake, any accompanying news of people mistaking for the real thing an unintentional byproduct. Of course, those reports of people mistaking it for the real thing were, in retrospect, often as fake as the Martian invasion itself, the latter more of a commentary on the news media than the actual radio drama. Zwick, however, in tandem with his longtime writing cohort Marshall Herskovitz, not only uses his format to ingeniously create tension by limiting the information flow, believably rendering it so that we, the audience, only know as much as the newsmakers, but then uses the format to question the format itself, frequently coming across more as an attack on the news media than nuclear war.

We meet a young news reporter, Steve Levitt (Christopher Allport), in the middle of filming a feature on a Charleston pier, lambasting the noise of passing trucks, standing with one foot up on a crate, like a faux-heroic swashbuckler, but throwing himself into harm’s way when a firefight erupts between the Coast Guard and the terrorists as they enter the harbor aboard their plutonium-carrying tugboat. And though Steve and his cameraman are taken hostage, becoming the mouthpiece for the terrorists, headed up by nuclear scientists Bruce Lyman (David Clennon) and David McKeeson (David Rasche) turned anti-nuclear radicals, Steve maintains an eager beaver air, expressing less fear of the threat than excitement at being the one in the middle of it, still dutifully thrusting his microphone into the terrorists’ faces. Alas, that becomes a problem when his character is meant to feel the gravity of the situation much later, an emotion Allport can’t quite convey, never making the turn from faux-hero to real one.

As John Woodley, senior RBS News Anchor, guiding the telecast from the studio, Ed Flanders evinces more dimension, playing the Cronkite-ish voice-of-god role as someone manifestly aware of his role as voice-of-god, every “um” and “ah” deliberately sounding less improvised than a means to impart gravitas by ensuring the people watching at home are hanging on his every word. That his speaking voice is for effect as much as assurance rhymes with the come-back-from-commercial-break America Under Siege graphic, underlined by music that sounds so much like a parody, like what people behind the scenes really would come up with in such a crisis, it loops back around and sounds real. That graphic is so good that it becomes the one moment where the terrorists communicating their demands through TV runs aesthetic interference as McKeeson’s literally calling out the graphic feels too on the nose; the absurdity of the graphic speaks for itself.

Of course, McKeeson calling it out also demonstrates how the press gets it from all sides, the terrorists and the government, the latter only glimpsed in brief snippets of spokesmen, often scolding RBS for giving the bad guys a platform even as RBS insists it has no choice. There is no right answer here, really, and “Special Bulletin” doesn’t provide one, thankfully, just letting the dueling ideas reverberate off each other throughout. In fact, as RBS becomes something akin to an antagonist of the government too. As Lane Smith’s self-impressed reporter skulks about the US Capitol and feeding news to the terrorists by way of feeding it to the American people, the terrorists’ demands fade into the background, becoming a source of their frustration, brought home both in Rasche’s livewire performance and Clennon’s almost disbelieving exasperation that America seems ready to write off Charleston.

Though the terrorists are never meant to empathize with, their killing of a Coast Guard at the beginning instantly declaring the ethical line, their cause gets lost in the narrative, partially accounted for in the movie’s pretend news structure, RBS ensuring to portray them as the agents of chaos they are, though it still feels like a flaw. “Special Bulletin” might stress the role of media over and over, but nuclear disarmament in this scenario is only of interest to the ones who go rogue, a glaring oversight in a movie that undoubtedly seeks an anti-nuclear point. Then again, a clock is placed on the screen throughout, the news ticking down to the end of the terrorists’ deadline, which might be the movie’s suspense but is RBS’s too, and which has the eerie effect of trivializing the true nature of the event until it’s too late. No one gets the point until it’s already been made, and then it just becomes more news, one more solemn packaged piece in addition to all others.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Legal Eagles (1986)

Sometimes you can tell a lot from a movie poster and the “Legal Eagles” movie poster gives the game away quick. Its lavender hues denote the time as 1986, true, but I’m talking more about the forced grouping of the three stars – Robert Redford, Debra Winger, and Daryl Hannah. Redford is in front, leaning, casually kind of, and beaming that mega-watt smile, almost looking more the part of a “Three’s Company”-ish star than a silver screen leading man, who seems to be taking the four-sentence descriptor above as romantic comedy. Hannah, on the other hand, over Redford’s left shoulder, seems more focused on the murder portion of that descriptor, emitting the kind of air that comes with holding a bloody knife in the solarium. And Winger? Winger doesn’t seem to know what’s going on, emblemized in that “Wait, how do you want me to look expression?” that seems to have her so stressed she’s gripping the table. Indeed, director Ivan Reitman packs as many tones as product placement (“Legal Eagles”…brought to you by Miller Lite!), yet none successfully, rendering the whole affair boringly, weirdly blasé, a comedy that’s rarely funny and both a sex thriller and a legal thriller that’s never really sexy, hardly interested in the legal system, and negligibly thrilling.

The screenplay of Jim Cash and Jack Epps, Jr. seeks to combine the world of art and the law, though it seems to view the latter less as thumbing through law books, long hours at the office and inside courtrooms than snooping around and spying, the fanciful notions of jaded law students everywhere. “Legal Eagles’” relationship to art, meanwhile, is even more suspect, knowing the names and works of some prominent artists, at least, but defined in the moment where Redford’s Assistant D.A. Tom Logan briefly studies a Picasso and seems confused by the hoopla, shades of Caldeon Hockley dismissing Picasso as mere “finger paintings.” Uff da. The most vital artist here, anyway, is fictional, Sebastian Deardon (James Hurdle), who dies in a suspicious fire as the movie opens, and whose daughter Chelsea (Hannah) in the present day is accused of stealing a painting from a millionaire because she insists her father left it to her. Her attorney, Laura Kelly (Winger), cleverly finds a way to ensnare Tom, her nemesis, in the case, and his ensnarement worsens when he is caught in bed with Chelsea.

This twist sounds steamy, evoked in the newspaper headlines it engenders, though the scene itself is representative of how “Legal Eagles” repeatedly goes wrong, with the salaciousness of Chelsea showing up at Tom’s apartment, fearing for her safety and wet from the rain, canceled out by the fact Tom is looking after his adolescent daughter. What’s more, if this nominally paramount twist causes Tom to lose his job and then become co-legal counsel for Chelsea, suggesting a burgeoning relationship of great complication, Laura falls for Tom and him for her instead, his sleeping with Chelsea not so much written out but just forgotten as if it never happened.

Redford’s frequently bemused smile opposite Hannah might be intended to denote the character’s professional quagmire in these moments, but more so it comes to emblemize the actor’s own confusion about what he emotion he is supposed to be playing. Not that his so-so performance can be totally pinned on the script. He exposes himself as not cut out for pure comedy, like an early scene where he sort of half-asses it through Tom’s oven catching on fire, not playing it with enough domestic fish-out-of-water franticness, while his air opposite Winger never goes all in on screwball mania. He’s only in his element inside the courtroom, like the climactic trial where he feigns belief in the prosecutor’s opening statement to deftly turn it around and make a plea to the jury for a fair trial, a moment where Redford delicately lets you see the All-American innocence shade into seductive manipulation. If Reitman had set more of the movie in the courtroom, maybe it could have been partially salvaged.

Hannah, on the other hand, remains abstruse, always like she’s up to something, which the script suggests she is even as it somehow simultaneously ignores that she might be, sort of suggesting Elke Sommer in “A Shot in the Dark” filtered through Ellen Barkin in “Sea of Love”, or something. Her character is also a performance artist, illustrated in a scene where she exhibits her one-woman show of fireballs and self-identity for Redford’s character, a wild, woolly affair that is, like Tom’s off-hand dismissal of Picasso, meant to poke fun at art. Even so, Hannah takes it seriously, and if it’s batshit, shit, at least it’s got vision, which is more than I can say for Reitman. If only Chelsea Deardon had written and directed. That might have been interesting.

An Appreciation: James Tolkan

It was the damndest thing, in early 2016, just a few days apart, I watched “Bone Tomahawk” (2015) and then watched “The Friends of Eddie Coyle” (1973). In the former, there was James Tolkan, aged 84 years, sitting at a piano in an Old West saloon. In the latter, there was James Tolkan, aged 42 years, as a messenger for The Man. Forty-two years apart, and though his brief role in “Bone Tomahawk” drew from his age, portraying him as seemingly dead at his piano keys before suddenly be roused from a mere drunken stupor, that distinct bald head nevertheless rendered him unmistakable in each part. It made me think of his iconic role in “Back to the Future” as Principal Stanford Strickland who looks exactly the same accosting Marty McFly in 1985 as he does accosting Marty McFly in 1955 after the film’s infamous occurrence of time travel, evoked in Marty’s bewildered observation “Didn’t that guy ever have hair?”

Few supporting actors had as good a two-movie run as Tolkan did in the mid-80s. Not only was he Principal Strickland in the 1985 box office champion, he was Stinger, commanding officer of the USS Enterprise aircraft carrier, in the 1986 box office champion, “Top Gun.” And so I initially thought something akin to a role face/off was in order, to determine whether Strickland or Stinger was more iconic. But then I thought, that cheapens each Tolkan performance, and anyway, I’m a biased blogger and would stack the deck of such a face/off in favor of Stinger. I mean, Stinger is just a name he got for the credits; he’s never called Stinger in the film; he’s never called anything! That’s how iconic Tolkan was in “Top Gun”; he just was.

Both Stinger and Strickland are antagonists, pushing back against, respectively, Maverick’s bravery to rescue a frozen-in-air Cougar and Marty’s rock ‘n’ roll dreams. In fact, in his most memorable “Back to the Future” moment, Strickland harangues Marty for much more, his very essence as a McFly, citing the kid’s old man, condemning them both as slackers, weaponizing that word in such a way that, speaking as a Gen Xer, I remain disappointed we didn’t get to hear him shout at, I don’t know, Steve Zahn in some mid-90s dramedy. Tolkan’s harangue memorably concludes in a two shot of he and Michael J. Fox, the former doing this thing where he juts his chin out, the shape of his head given the baldness evoking the idea of a missile that is aimed straight for Marty’s head. It mirrors what Tolkan does in “Top Gun’s” narrative-setting scene, where he chews out Maverick and Goose, first from his desk and then rushing around from behind his desk in a neat bit of comical blocking to get right in their faces, metaphorically towering over Maverick and Goose even as he looks right up at them.

Yet if in “Back to the Future” Tolkan was employed to try and dash dreams, in “Top Gun” his character becomes a reluctant facilitator of them, very reluctantly, saying “You two characters…” and then drawing out the pause with this little twitch of the neck as he looks from one to the other, like he’s delaying saying it because he really doesn’t want to, “…are going to Top Gun.” And though then his spiel is pure exposition, it’s cool, first of all, that Tolkan gets the exposition, giving us the background on Top Gun and why these two characters get to go, which he doesn’t deliver with authority so much as you morons-better-not-screw-this-up exhortation which is why he doesn’t need to conclude it by warning Maverick about screwing it up though the line, of course, about a flying a cargo plane outta Hong Kong full of you-know-what is so good that, no, it did need to conclude that way after all. And though the scene is about Maverick and Goose’s ass-backwards triumph, Stinger still gets the scene’s closing shot, a doozy, watching them go, looking, now that I think about it, very much like a Principal who knows he’s going to see those two kids again after class real soon.

Maverick does end up back in Stinger’s presence come movie’s end, of course, though it’s more of a hero’s welcome. And though it is, Tolkan, bless him, does not dial it back and act all humbled in this hero’s presence. No, he has Stinger blow cigar smoke in Maverick’s face and when Maverick expresses his interest in returning to Top Gun as an instructor, unleashes this comically disbelieving guffaw and then half-attacks the hero, joshingly perhaps, but still with enough intensity that Cruise palpably blanches.

It’s Maverick’s movie, certainly, that’s why he’s getting a second one, but let me be clear: Stinger wins both scenes.

Friday's Old Fashioned Flashes Back to the Eighties

It’s everyone’s favorite time of year! By which I mean, it’s this blog’s least favorite time of year. By which I mean, the dog days of summer (ugh). Even now, 20+ years after I graduated high school, August still conjures up that oh-my-God-there’s-only-a-month-til-school-starts-again dread. I hate August. And so I find myself, as I do every year at this time, nostalgically and cinematically returning to the decade of my youth – The 80s. Which is why this year once again Cinema Romantico’s “famed” Friday’s Old Fashioned column – the only classic film column on the internet named after bourbon, bitters, sugar, orange, and maraschino cherry – is going straight 80s for August, beginning a week from today, August 2nd, with a semi-festive 80s-ish kickoff on Thursday August 1st. Hawks gets traded in for Hughes. Jean Harlow takes a momentary respite to allow face time for Jean(ie) Bueller. Harold Lloyd cedes the stage to Lloyd Dobler. So crank the Teena Marie, crack a Capri Sun and climb into my blogging DeLorean. Onward.

Thursday's Flashback to the 80s Freeze-Frame

Commercialism always had a place at the movies, sure, but it really exploded in the go-go 1980s when product placement became the marketing scheme du jour. Charlie Jane Anders’s piece for Gizmodo in 2015 neatly outlined the assault of 80s-ish product placement in sci-fi, citing the Reese’s Pieces of “E.T.” and the omnipresent Pepsi of “Back to the Future”, two beloved, lovely movies that nevertheless put the pedal to the merchandising metal. These pieces of product placements made for good jokes, absolutely, but there is something even more striking in commercialism being rendered as comically integral to the plot, like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. Of course, if you’re Christopher Walken in “At Close Range”, you simply transform a moment of product placement – “You want some Corn Flakes®?” – into sheer terror, deliberately mangling marketing in the process. Props.

No instance of product placement, however, warms my heart as much as its preeminent appearance in “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.” No, not the Michelob namedrop nor the McIntosh plug (which is a pretty good joke itself); I’m talking about Pacific Bell. I’m talking about this shot.

The first noticeable detail of this shot is the color. The sun falls, barely, down the alley off to the left, mixing impeccably with the faded yellow of the Pacific Bell ad, emitting a washed out feel that actually come across kinda guerilla, like director Leonard Nimoy was crouched between two parked cars across the street getting the shot on the fly without a permit. Of course, that’s a sentiment dripping in irony given that the moment is, as established, product placement. And the product placement might, in one way, be viewed as even more egregious than your usual product placement even if it is simultaneously crucial to the narrative. But then, it is that narrative relevance granting it weight.

The moment is born of McCoy, Scotty and Sulu in present day San Francisco (time travel!) on the prowl for some sort of twentieth century equivalent of transparent aluminum. But where oh where will they find it?! And as they wonder, this advertisement appears before them. In a way, it’s a precursor to the “Google” narrative trick, in which a character who needs to know anything can simply “Google” it, which is often dismissed, not wrongly, as storytelling laziness. You could call the Pacific Bell shot in "Star Trek IV" storytelling laziness. But while it is, through a modern lens, something like a throwback to a time when you could not just “Google” something, when you actually had to find a phonebook and then, ye gods, go through it, this shot is nevertheless a caustic shot across the bow. It is mystical product placement in which consumerism becomes the answer to their prayers. What’s more 80s than that?

Forgotten Characters: the Pizza Man in Ferris Bueller's Day Off

The above moment is one of many comic interludes in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” The butt of this interlude’s joke is Edward R. Rooney (Jeffrey Jones), Dean of Students, who is scoping out a suburban pizza joint for the three teens – the titular Ferris (Matthew Broderick), his paramour Sloane (Mia Sara), and his best friend Cameron (Alan Ruck) – on the lam. He stands near a small television set showing the Chicago Cubs game that the Pizza Man (Joey Vieira) is watching. And at the precise moment Rooney looks away, he misses the TV catch sight of none other than Ferris catching a foul ball. Curses! It’s funny all on its own, of course, but then John Hughes appends one more bit of funny.

Rooney: “What’s the score?”
Pizza Man: “Nothin’, nothin’.”
Rooney: “Who’s winning?”
Pizza Man: “The Bears.”

But here’s the thing I find myself wondering more and more: what if Edward R. Rooney, Dean of Students, isn’t the butt of this joke?

Once, many years ago, before moving to Chicago, I was working my desk job during a summer afternoon when I returned from some wholly unmemorable lunch to discover a voicemail waiting. I listened. It was not a client nor a customer but two friends of mine in Chicago at Wrigley Field where Max Weinberg, of my beloved Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band, had just thrown out the first pitch. Cackling, hopped up on Budweiser I could imagine sloshing around in their plastic cups, “Glory Days” blaring in the background, they explained they just felt like they needed to let me know where they were and what had just happened. When the voicemail concluded, I seethed with envy. I seethed with more envy later in the kitchen when I caught sight of the very Cubs game my friends were at on the television. It looked nice there.

A perfect summer afternoon in Chicago, when the humidity is low, when a gentle breeze wafts in off the lake, when the sun is bright and accompanied by just a few picturesque, wispy clouds, when 80 degrees is entirely true to its number, Lord, that’s hard to beat. And while there are all manner of fine places to be in Chicago on such an afternoon, be it a porch, be it a beer garden, be it the lakefront, be it Parson’s Chicken and Fish (so long as you’re a hipster dufus), well, Wrigley Field, the Friendly Confines on Addison & Clark, even with all the bros gone rabid, might be peak Summer Afternoon Chicago. And that is naturally why Ferris, Sloane and Cameron have to end up there, at least briefly, during their infamous day off in 1985.

Movie literalists have determined this was a clash against the Atlanta Braves that the Cubs lost by a couple runs just as movie literalists have determined that there is no way Ferris, Sloane and Cameron could have visited all the places they did in the time allotted. What movie literalists incessantly miss, of course, is that the day is impossible to actually pull off because the day is an ideal, not unlike Ferris Bueller himself, living the dream and pulling the rest of us, we Cameron Fryes, along in his wake. And that’s why I always wondered what might happen if Ferris aged out of the ideal. Alas, the Honda CRV commercial for the 2012 Super Bowl in which Broderick reprised his famous role revealed that even in humdrum adulthood Ferris found a way to attain the unattainable.

And so, if we are all Cameron Frye when we are kids, the ongoing ideal of Ferris would suggest that we are all the Pizza Man when we are adults, trapped behind the counter, left to deal with never-ending orders and asinine Deans who don’t know how sports work, wistfully watching a faraway baseball game in a sunny paradise where some devil-may-care kid is catching a foul ball.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Glory (1989)

“Glory”, the white Edward Zwick’s recounting of the all-black 54th Massachusetts Civil War regiment, concludes with the infantrymen’s fateful charge on Fort Wagner. It is a stirring, stunning, sad sequence, one capturing just how willing the 54th Massachusetts was to push forward against all odds, which was not an unimportant statement at the time, when many dismissed, absurdly, the notion that black soldiers would fight. “The 54th’s attack did more than prove that Fort Wagner was impregnable to infantry assault,” the historian James McPherson noted in a New Republic piece at the time of “Glory’s” release, “it disabused hundreds of thousands of Northerners of their stereotypes.”

The film opens amidst a different battle – namely, Antietam, the war’s bloodiest. There, a young idealistic captain, Robert Gould Shaw (Matthew Broderick), the tide turned against him and stricken by shell shock, passes out. Eventually he is rousted awake by a gravedigger, Rawlins (Morgan Freeman). For a moment, in that light, with Rawlins looking down from above, seeming to emerge from the mystic, you’d swear that Rawlins portends The Magical Negro, that terrible archetype in which black film characters are presented merely as quasi-mystical aide de camps to white protagonists. But once Shaw is up, Rawlins moves on because he has his own life and story to lead, one that will eventually loop back around to the 54th.

“Glory”, however, while sometimes trafficking more in two-dimensional than three-dimensional characters nonetheless takes care to try and shatter such stereotypes, emblemized, as McPherson notes, in a later scene where Shaw gallops along, hacking away at watermelons with his saber. Of course, it is still a white character doing the hacking, and it is a white character through whose eyes we principally see this story of the all-black regiment, which not did not sit well with everyone, like the esteemed Roger Ebert who wondered “(W)hy does the top billing in this movie go to a white actor? I ask, not to be perverse, but because I consider this primarily a story about a black experience and do not know why it has to be seen largely through white eyes.”

I have been thinking about “Glory” in the wake of this summer’s “Detroit”, recounting the city’s 1967 race riots, which has raised infinite questions about a movie’s ownership, who has the right to tell its story, considering it was directed not by an African-American but by a white woman, Kathryn Bigelow. Owen Gleiberman, a white critic, wrestled with this question for Variety, perhaps inevitably landing on the observation “That the only factor that should dictate who tells it is, ultimately, the power of the telling.” Perhaps, but many details factor into the telling, such as perspective, and it is perspective that troubled Angelica Jade Bastien so much in her impassioned “Detroit” critique, writing “I realized that I’m not interested in white perceptions of black pain.” This sort of mirrors what Wesley Morris spoke about on his and Jenna Wortham’s podcast Still Processing in a conversation centered on “Detroit” when he commended the all-white southern rock band Drive-By Truckers 2016 song “What It Means” as “a real attempt at looking at black people as a white person looking at black people.” What angered Jade Bastien, I think, was not Bigelow failing to consider black people as a white person but attempting to speak for black people as a white person.

“He wrote it,” Morgan Freeman said of Kevin Jarre, the white screenwriter of “Glory”, “from a place he could write a story from, the only place he could get a grip on it from.” That is why Gould Shaw becomes the protagonist. Kevin Jarre was not trying to speak for black people in “Glory.” The story was seen, as Ebert wrote, largely through a white person’s eyes because it was Kevin Jarre’s attempt as a white person to look at black people. That’s what Gould Shaw is doing, at one point writing home to his parents, “Try as I might, I do not know these men.” But he wants to, and it yields the film’s strongest sequence, when Gould Shaw approaches Pvt. Tripp (Denzel Washington) not long after the 54th’s first battlefield triumph on James Island.

Shaw wishes to award Tripp a commendation, which Tripp refuses by citing the whole conflict’s futility, which Shaw pushes back against with platitudes. In this moment, Shaw is essentially dictating to Tripp, telling him what a commendation means and explaining how you can’t win for losing. But then, he reconsiders. And rather than talking at Tripp, he decides to talk to him.

Shaw: “What do you want to do?” 
Tripp: “I don’t know, sir.” 
Shaw: “It stinks, I suppose.” 
Tripp: “Yeah, it stinks bad. And we all covered up in it. Ain’t nobody clean. Be nice to get clean though.” 
Shaw: “How do we do that?” 
Tripp: “We ante up and kick in, sir.”

That this scene precipitates the scene in which Shaw volunteers the 54th to lead the assault on Fort Wagner is no accident. He might be the one speaking in this scene but he is not speaking for the 54th. No, by essentially giving Tripp’s call a voice, he is letting Tripp, and by extension the 54th, speak for themselves, and Shaw equally commits to listening along, following his men unto the breach, militarily determined to see what it means.

Thursday's Flashback to the 80s Freeze-Frame(s)

In the wake of Bill Nunn’s death last September, many odes in his name mentioned Radio Raheem, the off-to-the-side central character of Spike Lee’s seminal “Do the Right Thing.” Radio Raheem may be best known for his eponymous boombox, forever challenging people to fight the power, in the words of Public Enemy, but just as fundamental were his brass knuckles, one espousing LOVE, the other declaring HATE. This is a nod to Charles Laughton’s 1955 “Night of the Hunter” where Robert Mitchum’s Reverend Harry Powell had Love tattooed on one knuckle and Hate tattooed on the other, intended to emblemize how the notions fought but love always won. Of course, the Reverend was a false prophet, and “Night of the Hunter”, as so many have opined over the years, placed these, and other, binary oppositions under the microscope to quash them. That’s why Lee has Radio Raheem recite something like a remix of Mitchum’s Love/Hate speech, as well as sport those knuckle rings, because his film, like Laughton’s, challenges and distorts that Love/Hate binary.

Lee goes so far as to allude to this binary before these rings and this speech are seen, glimpsed in Radio Raheem’s introduction, where he suddenly appears, filling the frame, boombox blaring, and then crossing the street, stopping outside the building for WE LOVE radio, 108 FM, where D.J. Señor Love Daddy (Samuel L. Jackson) sits. Señor sees him and shouts him out and receives a fist in the air from Radio Raheem in return.

 

If Radio Raheem is something of a Greek Chorus, so is Señor Love Daddy, who sits behind a window overlooking the lone city block of Brooklyn where the entire movie takes place on the summer’s hottest day, observing, commenting, and whose soothing soul, jazz, and R&B stands in stark contrast to Radio Raheem’s preferred Public Enemy. You hear that in these opposing shots, with the rap booming outside the window and Señor’s more soothing selections undulating from within. But then, not for nothing does Señor speak principally in contrasts. To wit: “Here I am. Am I here? Ya know it. It ya know.” Indeed, he is introduced proclaiming “Wake up” into his microphone, a standard greeting that in this case contains a self-evident double meaning, just as Radio Raheem reveals himself not so much a Gentle Giant as a Giant with an occasionally gentle soul.

These are significant shades of gray, all of which are brought to bear in them seeing each other through that window, not so much agreeing to disagree as respectfully acknowledging their coexistence, which foreshadows “Do the Right Thing’s” conclusion, a fit of fury preluding something less like peace than a suspension of hostilities, which gives way to the dueling quotes of MLK and Malcolm X, two sides of the same coin. It’s the Love/Hate Continuum.

Shout-Out to the Extra: Top Gun Version

America First is the foremost policy slogan of the current President of the United States. And it is an interesting phrase. America First, as in “If you’re not first, you’re last,” which was the philosophy espoused by Reece Bobby (Gary Cole) to his son Ricky (Will Ferrell), NASCAR driver extraordinaire, in “Talladega Nights”, one of the finest film lines of the new century, so exact in its absurdness that NBA superstar Kevin Durant literally, un-ironically quoted in a written profile. And it seemed that much more prescient when Durant, not long after quoting it, ditched the Oklahoma City Thunder for superpower Golden State to get a ring because because, well, it’s all about winning, whether it’s the basketball court or, as we were reminded the other night, the battlefields of Afghanistan.

It’s a thin line between politics and sports. Why else would there have been an over/under on the Clinton/Trump debates or bars offering drink specials during the Comey Hearing? Partisan entrenchment is just like picking a team, throwing on a metaphorical t-shirt with a donkey or an elephant and following the party leader’s plea to MAKE SOME NOISE. “Scoreboard!” supersedes policy. Why else would President Trump refer more to the specifics of his electoral victory than the specifics of, say, his healthcare bill? This inherent insistence on filtering politics through a sports prism, however, often goes beyond party and to country. In the go-go 80s, for instance, when America was in the midst of a war served cold it was Us vs. Them, Red, White & Blue vs. Red.

This geopolitical competition was part and parcel to “Top Gun” (1986), the preeminent American movie of the 1980s. The infamous (or was it just famous?) volleyball scene was not superfluous; this was a sports movie in which everything boiled down to rivalries, on the volleyball sand, in the air as Navy fighter pilots competed for the Top Gun Trophy. “Remember boys,” says Slider (Rick Rossovich), “there’s no points for second place.” The actual Naval Fighter Weapons School on which the film was based did not have a trophy or a competition, both of which were added to the cinematic version as a means to add urgency, of course, but also to underscore America’s overarching competitive drive. And that comes home in the concluding sequence in which Americans duke it out with Russians over the Indian Ocean, Maverick and Iceman vanish the evil MIGs and our two adversarial aviators meet on the aircraft carrier afterwards and...wait.

What’s that I spy?

Whether the extra was told to do this or was caught up in the moment we will likely never know, but whatever the case may be, it was the right decision. After all, index fingers after sports victories had become all the rage, so much so that some scholars cite Georgetown’s Patrick Ewing holding aloft his index finger after losing in the NCAA Basketball Championship game to Villanova the previous year as the moment “We’re #1” jumped the shark. Not me. I pinpoint that moment as right here, when the deck of an aircraft carrier in the midst of the Cold War became like a gym floor at the end of the NCAA Basketball Championship game. Maverick returned to Miramar to become a Top Gun instructor, as everyone knows, but no doubt in-between he went to Disneyland and in a Rose Garden ceremony gave Reagan a Top Gun bomber jacket.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Slipstream (1989)

Bad movies can be entertaining, even ennobling, shooting the moon and missing completely. Alas, director Steven Lisberger’s would-be sci-fi opus “Slipstream” is simply a nigh unwatchable fiasco, blindly edited with seemingly huge swaths of story missing and an overall look to the picture that suggests it was recorded on a camcorder pilfered overnight from the high school audiovisual room. Perhaps this was inevitable. Producer Gary Kurtz, famous for overseeing the “Star Wars” saga, said the budget fell apart just prior to filming and the studio refused to let them film sequences that would necessarily fleshed out the story. Maybe this after the fact covering, maybe not, but the fact remains that the finished product leaves a solid cast and crew hung out to dry, like composer Elmer Bernstein, for instance, whose score seems to take cues from his own “The Magnificent Seven” theme, unintentionally evoking parody. The lead performance by the late Bill Paxton, meanwhile, much too inane for a part that needed gravity, might well seem to be in, as they say, “a different movie”, but that’s just because I suspect he yearned to be in any movie other than the one in which he was starring.

The “slipstream” is a “river of wind” that has been engendered at some point in Earth’s future on account of “the convergence”, an event described in the voiceover as has having imperiled the planet’s weather systems, marking it as something of a pre-climate change disaster pic. Yet the film has more on its mind than simply existing as a cautionary tale, seeking to build off this admittedly interesting idea to illustrate how an environmental re-ordering of Earth nevertheless brings about the same sort of class distinctions. This is glommed onto something like a road movie by air, “Mad Max” with planes, in which Paxton’s Matt Owens, a vagrant catch-all, absconds with Byron (Bob Peck), an android wanted for murder and being hauled to justice by lawman Will Tasker (Mark Hammill), to collect a hefty reward.

The chase consists of several in-flight sequences, though these, like so many others, are jerkily edited, with movements of the craft in aerial footage not necessarily matching up to how the craft is moving when seen from inside, which elicits the odd impression of Owens or Tasker, who are typically at the controls, playing an arcade game. This amateur sensation is only amplified by the shoddy sound design, where the wind, this all-encompassing wind, which strangely only seems to become relevant when necessary for the action, rarely comes across as ferocious as intended, undermining the film’s most crucial element.

The emotional foundation of the film is meant to be Byron’s human urges, a la “Blade Runner”, which is not so much built to as just sort of suddenly dropped in, as the script’s multitude of stops and starts to make way for various on the ground vignettes render any momentum for the android’s arc non-existent. These in-between episodes make room for heavy-hitting guest stars, like Ben Kingsley as the leader of some cave-dwelling sect that worships the wind, and F. Murray Abraham ruling a group of hedonists hiding out in an underground museum. The third act revolves almost entirely around this latter pleasure-seeking cabal, deliberately indifferent to everyone else digging in the dirt, evoking 2015’s “High Rise.”

It’s more than a little funny, however, that the shoddy costumes and sets fail to underscore this group’s affluence, putting them more in line with the cave-dwellers, an accidental rendering that would be funny if the movie knew it was funny. What’s worse, the script never really condemns these hedonists, employing their lifestyle as a means for for Owens to acquire a Wait, How Did This Happen? love interest and for Byron to get a hold on how he feels, which is less philosophical than physical, demonstrated in a song and dance that no one will confuse for Broadway. It’s more than a little ironic, I suppose, that a movie which seemingly fell apart because it didn’t have any money ultimately sides with with the moneyed class. To paraphrase Reggie and Vincent from the same year of “Slipstream’s” release, don’t we all just wanna be rich?

Thursday's Flashback to the 80s Freeze-Frame(s)

Steven Spielberg’s Cinema Romantico-certified masterpiece, “Raiders of the Lost Ark”, was based on the old pulp magazines and adventure serials that he, and his collaborator George Lucas, loved so much, which is why the movie pleasingly skedaddles from one reverie of action to another with the bare minimum of exposition. It’s fun! Still, not so much tucked within this rip-roaring framework as standing quite openly right on top of it is something more brutal, evoked not merely in the immortal Marion Ravenwood’s introduction, tossing back whiskeys, but in her and Indy’s backstory, which the screenplay treads both lightly and loudly, involving a romantic affair that, from all available evidence, seemingly occurred while Marion was something close to, if not lawfully, underage. Yikes.

What’s more, Spielberg’s remarkable use of light and shadows suggest a film less like a cheap serial and more like a dark-hearted noir, such as the sequence in Marion’s Nepal bar, a photographic tour de force, as good as the medium gets, never more so than the indelible moment when Indy and the big Sherpa are engaged in a tussle and Ronald Lacey’s gestapo madman orders the dude in all black with the submachine gun to “shoot them both.” The dude in all black steps forward to do just that, except Indy and the big Sherpa work together by lifting Indy’s handgun to blast the dude in all black, a death unforgettably depicted in silhouette. The actor who portrayed the dude in black, Matthew Scurfield, is billed per IMDb as “2nd Nazi.” That’s important. He could have been billed as anything. He doesn’t even get a line! He could have been “The Dude In Black”, or he could have been “Man With Submachine Gun”, or he could have been “Gerhard”. But no, he is explicitly “2nd Nazi.”

“In ‘Raiders,’” wrote the esteemed Roger Ebert for his Great Movies entry on the film, “(Spielberg) wants to do two things: make a great entertainment, and stick it to the Nazis.” Spielberg, after all, is Jewish, and, as has been recounted in many places, spent his early life often being ashamed of and bullied for that heritage. An idea has emerged that he did not truly begin grappling with that heritage until his later, more “adult” films, to cite a cliché, like the remarkable “Schindler’s List.” Ebert played into this idea somewhat, writing that “Raiders” was “the work of Spielberg’s recaptured adolescence, I think; it contains the kind of stuff teenage boys like, and it also perhaps contains the daydreams of a young Jewish kid who imagines blowing up Nazis real good.”

In a 2008 review for Deep Focus, however, Brian Eggert went further, writing that “Spielberg’s passion in the project is felt so potently because the story, even on its pure escapist level, weighs on the filmmaker’s Jewish heritage. After all, the Nazis’ ultimate “solution” of wiping the Jews from the planet was Hitler’s sadistic design. He continues: “At stake then is not only the fate of an archeological landmark, but the entire Jewish people.” The American Jewish magazine Tablet, meanwhile, wondered three years ago if “Raiders” was actually more audacious than Quentin Tarantino’s Jewish avengers fable “Inglorious Basterds.” “And here, it’s not the Jews who foil the Nazis’ plans,” notes Gabriel Sherman, “it’s the spirit of God Himself.”

Indeed, Indy and Marion are tied to the stake when God gets, as God will, the last word, and the most ferocious shot in “Raiders” is the one above, the Ark stashed in a crate bearing the Nazis’ co-opted version of the swastika, and that swastika getting incinerated by You Know Who. Generally when we think of God speaking to us – if you think God speaks to us – it is through Scripture, or it is through someone who interprets Scripture for us, or it is through His/Her/Whoever's creation or miracles, though those creations and miracles are generally up to our own respective interpretations. Spielberg, however, by placing no one else in the scene, just us and the Ark, deliberately removes any possibility of interpretation. There is no mistaking what this is and Who is doing it. This is the wrath of God buttressing His/Her/Whoever’s unconditional love by expressing in no uncertain terms that this evil will not stand.

Power Ranking This Is Spinal Tap Names

“What's in a name?” wondered one Romeo Montague so many centuries ago. “That which we call a rose / by any other name would smell as sweet.” Eh, would it? I don’t mean to quibble there, Romeo, though I guess I do, because you mean to tell me that if you changed the word “rose” to, say, gillnet, that it would still smell as sweet? Yeah, I don't think so. This, I suspect, is proven most emphatically by the famed 1984 helmed mockumentary “This Is Spinal Tap.” That Rob Reiner film is chock full of striking names. These names are so striking that to dismiss them by wondering “What's in a name?” is identification blasphemy. Them who we call...well, I can’t spoil it, can I? Nah. Let’s count ’em down.

The Ten Best Names in This Is Spinal Tap

10. Derek Smalls. This is a good place to begin because it is evocative of how “This Is Spinal Tap” comes up with solid names – gotta love that “s” concluding a singular name – even when the names do not possess wackadoo chutzpah.

9. Lt. Bob Hookstratten. Wackadoo chutzpah like this name, for instance, a surname that sonically possesses a certain blustery quality that Fred Willard was born to embody.

8. Ronnie Pudding. Who doesn’t wish their last name was Pudding?!

7. Ian Faith. A name too good to be true, it fits just right for a band manager who is espousing something like false conviction.

6. Artie Fufkin. I cannot imagine a better name for a hapless promotions rep. There is something about the way it pops – FUF-kin – that makes you think you’re dealing with a guy who is not merely out of his element but never actually even in it.

5. David St. Hubbins. The surname seems to have been an ode to Derek St. Holmes, sideman for Ted Nugent, a gig that made me consider dropping St. Hubbins behind Artie Fufkin. Then again, I genuinely like any name with a St. prefix, and I really like it for St. Hubbins because it lends a phony regality that every frontman worth his ego should wholly believe in.

4. Nigel Tufnel. Like Derek Smalls, it fails to catch the eye in that same Whoa There way as St. Hubbins. Yet it nevertheless has that sort of plausible Robert Fripp-ish ring without existing as an homage.

3. Sir Denis Eton-Hogg. This, as my girlfriend likes to say, is the quintessential British name, especially because it leads with a “Sir”.

2. Bobbi Flekman. It’s perfect. It’s a perfect name. But it is not, mind you, an aptronym. It is not Usain Bolt or William Wordsworth or Amy Freeze, the meteorologist. No, like Burt Reynolds is absolutely a Burt, or like John Kruk is definitely a John Kruk, or like Kate Middleton is irrefutably a Catherine Elizabeth Middleton, there can be no doubt that Fran Drescher is a Bobbi Flekman.

1. Marty DiBergi. Are there “better” names in “Spinal Tap”? Maybe. But Marty DiBergi is the moniker that ties the whole movie together.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Brotherhood of Justice (1986)

Despite several names in the cast that would come to prominence not long after its debut, “Brotherhood of Justice” was a TV movie that aired on ABC, first in 1986 and then again in 1991. Indeed, myriad cliffhangers fading to black suggesting spaces for commercial drops, odd handheld camera work like tracking with a waitress carrying a pan of pizza where the actress seems to be going to great pains not to look at the camera, and the script’s determination to package Lessons to the youth of America all give it that distinct made-for-TV smell. The plot concerns a prestigious California high school beset by a crimewave so troubling that the local police pay a visit to the school’s principal (Joe Spano), a principal that brays about his school’s academic standing while simultaneously shooting Nerf hoops, a comical contrast I am not entirely certain was actually intentional. Rather than submit to private security, however, he gives a speech to the senior class that is, frankly, a thinly veiled call to arms, evoking Sam Adams telling the Sons of Liberty pre-Tea Party there was nothing else to be done. Sure enough, post-speech a vigilante unit of student council members and celebrated athletes emerges deemed the Brotherhood of Justice.

They are captained by Derek (Keanu Reeves) and co-captained by Les (Billy Zane), though the gang also includes Scottie who is played by Darren Dalton who also starred in 1984’s “Red Dawn” which I note because the “Brotherhood of Justice” suggests what might happen if The Wolverines of “Red Dawn” morphed into something like the malcontents of “Over the Edge”. This is because the Brotherhood begins with earnest intentions, if questionable tactics, going after drug dealers, even as the vandals of the film’s introductory passage seem to mysteriously vanish from the proceedings. Nevertheless, the Brotherhood gets results, though we see these results less than just hearing about them third-hand, either an emblem of the film’s paltry budget or of its director – Charles Braverman – taking the easy way out. Alas, the Brotherhood’s noble intentions quickly turn deplorable as they turn more and more violent and turn their attention less to legit troublemakers then to people they personally don’t like, settling scores, as the Brotherhood of Justice transforms into that which they set out to eradicate.

As you might expect, “Brotherhood of Justice” has innumerable poorly rendered passages, a slow motion knife attack and a hapless extra with a pointless control panel prop in particular, yielding high unintentional hilarity. Still, a cheap movie doesn’t have to be thoughtless, as countless modern indies and old school sci-fi goes to show, and Braverman’s film tries. Setting the film in California rather than Texas was probably a production necessity, but it still gives the film a chance to consider anti-Hispanic sentiment. Alas, this mostly goes nowhere, summarized in a sequence where the hapless gringos get a talking to from some surprisingly gracious Mexican gangbangers, a case of painting with the very clichés it seeks to subvert. What sticks out, however, is a sense of entitlement, evinced in Derek, who dresses like Steff McKee, dating Christie (Lori Loughlin), who works two jobs to get by, and her eventually drifting more toward proletarian Victor (Keifer Sutherland), whom Derek naturally eyes with suspicion.

Victor is never fully-formed, more just a red herring, but that also makes him emblematic of the lower class, fingered for all the community’s problems in this movie but never given a voice, and not having necessarily done anything. Derek’s journey, of course, means having to figure this out for himself, an archetypal journey not exactly sold by Reeves who, frankly, seems most at ease when there is less at stake. Billy Zane, on other hand, who in recent years has sadly fallen off the radar, is coolly hypnotic in his embrace of heinousness, introduced by eyeing a couple Mexicans like they are to blame for all the ills of the world. “What’d you want me to do, Derek?” he asks after the aforementioned knifing. “Pants him?” It’s less funny than stone cold, as if he fancies himself too cool for a burnout’s trite gags.

“Brotherhood of Justice” was made in the wake of the real life Legion of Doom, a gang comprised of well to do students from Fort Worth’s Paschal High in 1985. After watching the movie, I read Jan Jarvis’s 1985 article for Dallas’s D Magazine examining the Legion of Doom. Her comprehensive piece suggested the wholesome image these boys cut belied something more sinister, taking furious umbrage with non-conformity, even dabbling in Nazism. “Brotherhood of Justice” doesn’t dare get that dark, all except Billy Zane, who in his refusal to hint at a lurking humanity is the one actor getting across the idea that elitism as arrogance breeds evil. Put him on your high school guidance poster.

Thursday's Flashback to the 80s Freeze-Frame

While “La La Land” rightfully took some shots for its tenuous grasp of jazz history, and while its main male character was perhaps not as endearing as its creator might have suspected, there was still plenty to dig, preeminently its colors, harkening back to the wondrous era of Cinemascope, when a movie need not look like Real Life. This was never more true than the rocket propelled “Someone in the Crowd” when Emma Stone’s dreamer and schemer is pulled from her apartment by her trio of friends – a pink apartment, that is, a nifty implantation of a lesser known Los Angeles locale that mixed impeccably with one of those peerless magic hour California skies, all of it brought home by the quartet’s not-matching primary color crayon-ed dresses as they sauntered down the street and (I’m quoting myself) march directly into your damn heart. Seeing that scene made me think of other moments at the cinema in which color spoke to me, like the boiling orange of the latrine scene in “Platoon”, or the Sherwood Forest of “Adventures of Robin Hood” erupting in eye-popping Technicolor. But like any dude born in 1977, “Star Wars” taught me so much, and I’m not talking about “A New Hope” in this case but “Empire Strikes Back.”

The “Star Wars” universe, with storytelling akin to the Millennium Falcon’s hyperdrive, is very accelerated and noisy, leaping from one of action-oriented confrontation to the next. Even its more intimate moments, like those between Luke and Yoda on Dagobah, still feel fraught with emotional weight, and its brief downtime can even be infiltrated, like that game of holographic chess while chilling out in hyperspace in the (real) first “Star Wars” ending with a threat of arms being torn out of sockets. No, the closest the series ever got to an actual respite occurred during the late stages of “The Empire Strikes Back.”

In a way, it should not be a respite at all. After all, it is right after Han and Leia and Chewie and 3-PO have evaded the Imperial Starfleet for about the 47th time in the movie by powering down the fabled Corellian frigate mid-flight and hiding on the back of a star destroyer, which puts them right there in the midst of the entire Imperial Starfleet seen moving to and fro just outside the cockpit window. One eagle-eyed Imperial lookout spots them and it’s all over for our rebel heroes. Never mind that 3-PO is, as 3-PO will, wailing non-stop. But Leia switches off 3-PO and Han dispatches Chewie to the rear of the ship and suddenly the Princess and the Smuggle have the cockpit all to themselves. He says they need to find someplace to port and calls up some sort of undefined sci-fi-y map screen on the Falcon’s control panel, a sci-fi-y map screen that bathes their faces in blue.

That blue completely flips the switch. It shuts down the engines on the movie just as the Falcon’s own engines have been shut down to evade detection. Throughout “Empire Strikes Back”, the colors emanating from the massive control panel at the rear of the cockpit cast the characters and the chairs the characters occupy in an orangeish glow. Orange, if you consult your local color aural expert, and why wouldn’t you if you are already a “Star Wars” nerd who believes in The Force, tends to represent confidence, a healthy ego, a daredevil attitude, passion, even sexual energy, which is not at all out of place in the verbal bickering of Han and Leia. But this blue softens the proceedings, communicating to them and to us, sitting in the eye of an Imperial hurricane, just after a movie-and-a-half of buildup, before another movie-and-a-half of wrap-up, that it’s finally time to take our legally mandated twenty second fifteen minute break.

Forgotten Great Moments in Movie History

Perhaps stemming from my general exhaustion with people whose biggest movie-watching kicks come from picking out plot holes and whining about them, forgoing ruminations on aesthetics and theme, I have a soft spot for moments in movies that, intentionally or unintentionally, derive humor from poking holes in real world logic. Like, the moment in “The Naked Gun 2 1/2” where villainous Quentin Hapsburg (Robert Goulet) is on the very specific lookout for two aging white men, a dude in a wheelchair, and O.J. Simpson, and yet upon encountering a four-person mariachi band consisting of two aging white men, a dude in a wheelchair, and O.J. Simpson cannot quite detect that his desired targets are right in front of him.

This sort of moment was just as ably captured in 2011’s “The Muppets” where Miss Piggy’s Parisian secretary, a sterling Emily Blunt, shoos The Muppets from the office only to be fooled by Muppet Man, wherein all The Muppets stand on one another’s shoulders while hidden in a trenchcoat to give the impression of being a lone individual. I have written this before but the way Blunt plays the moment just slays me; she knows something is amiss but she cannot quite put her finger on what it is. Man, I love when logic gets mocked.

“The Princess Bride” (1987) mocked logic a lot. The book on which it was based, in fact, mocked it even more, with memorable lines like “He was ashamed of his attire, worn boots and tore blue jeans (blue jeans were invented considerably before most people suppose).” I dug the whole Man in Black concept, honest I did, but I’d be lying if I said part of me didn’t wish Westley was wearing tore blue jeans. But I digress. The point is that logic has no place in “The Princess Bride” and the place where logic is least welcome occurs during the infamous of battle of wits.

This battle, as you might recall, involves our dear Westley (Cary Elwes), still masquerading as the Man in Black at this juncture even though the audience obviously knows it’s him (logic!), and Vizzini (Wallace Shawn), he of the self-professed big brain. The battle is wonderful, of course, this goes without saying, full of dialogue as comical as it is snappy as it is witty delivered with great flair. The scene concerns Westley placing iocane powder, “one of the deadlier poisons known to man”, in one of the two goblets before the men and then forcing Vizzini to guess which goblet was iocane-free, making the battle of wits a battle to the death.

But wait. The goblets. See, that is sort of what I want to talk about here. Because the battle of wits takes place at a conveniently table-ish boulder, with a blindfolded Princess Buttercup (Robin Wright), currently at the mercy of Vizzini, just off to the side. The conveniently table-ish boulder, however, is not merely occupied by two goblets; it is occupied by two goblets and three apples and a hunk of bread and a hunk of a cheese and a cheese knife all of which is situated on top of a tablecloth. Now, in the run-up to this scene, we have seen Vizzini carrying a medieval knapsack, nothing more, which naturally prompts the question: wait, where did all that crap come from?

I know. Believe me, I know. I sound like Neil deGrasse Tyson here. But then, that is precisely why I love this scene! No mention is made of how this extravagant spread came to be; no mention is made of this extravagant spread at all; Westley, when deciding what tack to take to thwart Vizzini, simply says “Pour the wine” as if it is the most natural thing in the world for this extravagant spread to be where it is. After all, Vizzini is, as he says, smarter than Plato and Socrates, and since Westley ultimately wins the battle of wits that means he is smarter than Vizzini and Plato and Socrates. This is to say, such men are above plot holes.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Youngblood (1986)

In “Goon” (2011), Doug Glatt (Sean William Scott) was a bouncer turned hockey player who was paid less to play hockey than to fight. And while director Michael Dowse took an empathetic view of his Goon, he nevertheless allowed a distinct sadness to permeate the film because Doug knew that ultimately he was not a real hockey player, just a dude paid to brawl. “Youngblood” (1986), in which the titular Dean (Rob Lowe) turns his back on the family farm in upstate New York to cross the border and play for the Hamilton Mustangs, has it both ways, playing hockey to kill and getting in fights to win. Indeed, Dean cannot attain his requisite elixir until he learns to properly throw a punch, suggesting goons and goal-scorers go hand-in-hand.

The fighting, of course, is a byproduct of manly acceptance and affirmation, which is much of what the movie boils down to, traditional male bonding rituals involving things like getting Dean trashed on tequila the night before his first practice and being taped down and having his nether regions shaved. Only when Dean has endured these episodes does the team’s star player Sutton (Patrick Swayze) give the newbie a thumbs-up, though Dean being pretty good at putting the puck in the net does not hurt. Sutton has his own contradictions, initially established as a loutish party animal before pulling back to show him as both a burgeoning star who wants to get paid and a guy with respect for game.

Though the latter is essentially limited to a single scene, it is nevertheless “Youngblood’s” most authentic moment, less in its rote writing and more in Swayze’s convincing aura, who in the moment comes across like he’s workshopping the role of “Point Break’s” Bodhi, suddenly a Zen master. It also goes to show why Swayze, injecting dreck with charisma, had more lasting power as an actual actor than Lowe, the latter just sort of sliding by on his pretty boy features, never more so than when his character is asked by Jessi Chadwick (Cynthia Gibb) if he still has his teeth. It’s meant as a jokey scene but Lowe’s face is framed by a pink-hued movie theater marquee over his left shoulder, a true movie star shot, as if everything coming is owed to him, like Jessi herself, the Zamboni driver and coach’s daughter who dreams of escaping somewhere else, though her dreams swiftly fade into the background.

If her being the daughter of the coach (Ed Lauter) initially seems like the prime point of contention, that issue fades into the background too as Dean’s rivalry with villainous Carl Racki (George Finn), a true blue goon, escalates. Racki cheap shots Sutton so hard that Hamilton’s star player gets sent to the hospital, which prompts a discontented Dean to briefly quit the team and return to the farm, only to have his brother (Jim Youngs) become his mentor, inciting a training montage that falls short of, say, “Rocky IV” but well ahead of, say, “Teen Wolf Too”, readying him for the climactic on-ice fisticuffs with Racki.

Dean’s father (Eric Nesterenko) also lends his son a helping hand, explaining that “It’s ok to hit a bag in the barn, but you’ve got to learn to survive on the ice”, a strange line in which the second half of the sentence seems to contradict in the first, which is perhaps appropriate, emblematic of the film’s incongruities. After all, Dean’s desire to throw down with Racki upsets Jessi so much that she dismisses her paramour’s macho pursuits in an impassioned speech and walks out on him. Alas, she comes back to him in the end, after he’s won the Big Game and the Big Fight, for reasons never made clear, as if somewhere there was a connecting scene that went missing. And so if Jessie’s desire to escape her surroundings falls by the wayside, so do her principals, unintentionally evoking the way in which sports stars imperfections are so often not merely glossed over but happily forgotten.

Which Movie Used “Holding Out For A Hero” Best?

Recently, my friend Daryl mentioned how he felt the semi-memorable, though I remember it fondly, 1989 John Candy comedy “Who’s Harry Crumb?”, which, as you might recall, but probably (understandably) do not, concerned a requisitely buffoonish private detective on the trail of some second rate thieves, contained the best use of Bonnie Tyler’s stalwart 80s anthem “Holding Out For A Hero.” I nodded. But later, I wondered…was it the best use? Hmmmmmm.

“Holding Out For A Hero” was featured on Tyler’s 1986 album Secret Dreams & Forbidden Fire, back in those glorious days when albums really had names, but it first appeared on the soundtrack for “Footloose” (1984), released by Paramount Records, because it was specifically written by Dean Pitchford and Jim Steinman and performed by Tyler for Herbert Ross’s film. You know Ross’s film, the one where Kevin Bacon’s majestically monikered Ren McCormack moves from the Big City to a Small Town where its Scripture-bound city council has outlawed dancing and rock music only to have Ren, as he must, shake, rattle and roll his way to change. He begins the ascent on the town’s norms via a game of chicken conducted aboard tractors that is scored to Tyler’s hit.

And so that it was composed specifically for “Footloose” should give it a built-in advantage, yes, except that “Who’s Harry Crumb?” smartly implemented Tyler’s righteous tuneage in much the same way. I say smartly because the urgent rhythm of “Holding Out For A Hero” lends itself to action and so “Who’s Harry Crumb?” fires it up for the climax when Harry, attempting to chase down the principal villains aboard a plane as it taxis on the tarmac, ascends a stair car being driven by his amateur sleuthing cohort and new bestie Nikki (Shawnee Smith, winning).

The stair car is key. This application of the stair car arrives years before “Arrested Development’s” more ballyhooed application of the stair car (“You’re gonna get hop ons”). And because “Who’s Harry Crumb?” is decidedly much squarer than “Arrested Development” that marks it as something like Bill Haley to Elvis. Still, a game of chicken tractor, not exactly a staple of the cinema, deserves novelty points too. (It also deserves points for having the song not simply laid out over the scene in question but cued up on a boombox, “Holding Out For A Hero” au naturel.)

“Footloose”, however, is a drama while “Who’s Harry Crumb?” is a comedy, meaning the latter trots out the stair car to be funny while “Footloose” wants this game of chicken tractor to be taken seriously. And while “Footloose” does take it seriously, rendering it with admirable brio, refusing to concede to the outward ridiculousness, it simultaneously draws the ploughing showdown out to such absurd lengths that it becomes comical, an unintentional precursor to the “Austin Powers” steamroller scene. I laughed at “Who’s Harry Crumb?” too, but I was mostly moved. Because in “Who’s Harry Crumb?”, there is a burgeoning mentor/protégé, father/daughter relationship between Harry and Nikki that culminates with the stair car, her essentially propping him up, meaning that a sequence taking itself less seriously than the one in “Footloose” nevertheless yields more significance.

And Ren, meanwhile, merely wins the game of chicken because of divine interference, with his shoelace becoming tangled in the tractor’s gears so that he cannot leap to chicken-ish safety as much as he might want to, while Harry Crumb, who seems like someone who would only stay at the top of that stair car because his shoelace got caught, stays there of his own noble volition. Look, Ren McCormack dances up a storm when he needs to, and right on, but that comes much later in the movie. Calling Harry Crumb a “streetwise Hercules” might be a stretch, true, and if he tried to sweep you off your feet, well, it would obviously end in a pratfall. But in this face-off between stair car and tractor, we know who is really racing on the thunder.

Editor’s Note: There has been moderate pushback regarding the omission of Tyler’s anthem in “Short Circuit 2” (1988). While the staff of Cinema Romantico would like to make clear that it is absolutely biased in favor of John Candy, always and forever, it did consider “Short Circuit 2” before eliminating it from contention. This is because “Short Circuit 2” could also easily have made the cut for Movies From Our Era Of Cinematic Innocence That We Didn’t Like.

Friday's Old Fashioned Flashes Back to the Eighties

It’s everyone’s favorite time of year! By which I mean, it’s this blog’s least favorite time of year. By which I mean, the dog days of summer (ugh) combined with the countdown to my dreaded another-year-has-passed-and-I-have-done-nothing-with-my-life-and-it’s-all-meaningless birthday at the dawn of September. And so I find myself, as I do every year at this time, nostalgically and cinematically returning to the decade of my youth – The 80s. Which is why this year once again Cinema Romantico’s “famed” Friday’s Old Fashioned column – the only classic film column on the internet named after bourbon, bitters, sugar, orange, and maraschino cherry – is going straight 80s for the next month (with a bonus September 1st edition), beginning a week from today, August 4th, with a quasi-special August 3rd kickoff. Hawks gets traded in for Hughes. Jean Harlow takes a momentary respite to allow face time for Jean(ie) Bueller. Harold Lloyd cedes the stage to Lloyd Dobler.

Ah, but this year, faithful frustrated readers, is no ordinary year. No, 2017 marks my 40th birthday. And that means I am feeling the whole another-year-has-passed-and-I-have-done-nothing-with-my-life-and-it’s-all-meaningless vibe even harder, especially since it seems to be coinciding with The Fall of the Republic. This birthday...this birthday is the worst one yet. That sucks for me, but it’s a bonus for you, faithful frustrated readers, because it means more 80s! That’s right! In addition to our traditional Friday’s Old Fashioneds there will also be Thursday freeze frames culled from 80s movies that I hold close to my heart. And that’s not all! There will be 80s-themed shout-outs to the extra, forgotten great moments in movie history, drivel, maybe more, who knows???!!! Maybe we will have an interview with Lea Thompson!!! (We will not.)

So strike up the Tiffany, crack a Capri Sun and climb into my blogging DeLorean. Onward.