Friday's Old Fashioned: Out of Sight (1998)

In discussing “Jenny From the Block” for his 60 Songs explaining the 2000s podcast, host Rob Harvilla mentioned Jennifer Lopez’s, shall we say, less than forceful voice and its myriad detractors, including her diva rival, Mariah Carey. And the thing is, they’re both right, Harvilla and Mariah. After the episode, I listened to my personal favorite JLo track “Ain’t It Funny” and it’s true, Lopez’s voice is thin, holding up its end of the bargain and not much more. Ah, but voices are strange, fickle things, aren’t they, and where, say, a voice might shoot the lights out on a song like “Emotions” that same voice might barely rise to the occasion in a movie like “Glitter,” or like “The Christmas Melody,” God help us, just as a voice that might get swept away by a gust of wind on “Ain’t It Funny” can turn around and be so kinetic in something like “Out of Sight.”

Lopez is Karen Sisco, a U.S. Federal Marshal, who winds up locked in the trunk of her own car at Glades Correctional Institution in south Florida with bank robber Jack Foley (George Clooney) after he escapes with the help of his friend, the aptly named Buddy (Ving Rhames). It’s a meet cute by trunk light, and one shrewdly designed to put Karen and Jack in as close physical proximity as possible before moving them apart, tantalizing us as much as they tantalize each other, occasionally giving us glimpses of their chemistry, like him waving at her from across a hotel lobby, just for a second, so you can practically feel the static electricity in the air. Scott Frank’s screenplay, adapted from Elmore Leonard’s 1996 novel of the same name, might have a jigsaw design, but interestingly, it’s not trying to gin up surprise. Instead, it uses its mismatched time frames to illuminate backstory without having to resort to exposition while also enhancing the romantic tension to nigh unbelievable levels.

Yet, even if “Out of Sight” effectively maximizes its stars, it just as effectively builds out the world around them with a gallery of well-crafted and well-played supporting characters. As the chief heavy, Don Cheadle nimbly plays both halves of his alternating nicknames, Mad Dog and Snoopy, to be feared and not as big as his britches, while Steve Zahn as bungling thief Glenn Michaels invites improbable empathy while demonstrating so much comic haplessness in concocting the climactic heist of a wealthy tycoon (Albert Brooks) in Detroit. And though Lopez and Clooney share magnificent chemistry, they each have equally magnificent chemistry with, respectively, Dennis Farina as Karen’s dad and Rhames as Buddy, both actors help illuminating so much backstory and texture in just their airs. (Rhames has a fantastic bit of body language in the way he just munches on pieces a candy bar, delighting in the small pleasures of the incarcerated.)

Still, for all the fine supporting turns, “Out of Sight” remains the Lopez and Clooney show, building to a showstopping scene in a Detroit hotel bar where they finally meet again. Building off a jokey observation from the trunk, Jack wondering what might happen if they met under different circumstances and he offered to buy her a drink, this scene feels like fantasy. A fantasy to them, yes, but also to us, illustrating the silver screen’s ability to let us indulge the fantastical. The snow falling outside the window virtually literalizes the snow globe effect, the two embracing their chaotic “relationship,” and when they return to her room, Soderbergh briefly trades out the chillier hues of his Motor City scenes re-infuses the images with the warm colors of the Florida scenes. It doesn’t last, though, as “Out of Sight” punctures the fantasy in a conclusion that emotionally counts. 

Maybe because of how Soderbergh emerged through Sundance, we tend to think of him as an independent filmmaker, outside the mainstream, but in “Out of Sight” he also tapped his unlikely gift as a movie star whisperer. He helped Clooney ditch his head down-eyes up acting style, and the hair and makeup people helped him go away from the Caesar cut, unlocking his inner-movie star in a way the previous summer’s “Batman and Robin” could not. From the marvelously crafted opening scene, a gentlemanly bank robbery, he belongs on the big screen in a way he theretofore had not. In fact, Joe Chrest and Wayne Pere, playing ad guys who haplessly hit on Karen in the hotel bar before Jack appears, become a useful juxtaposition between posers and real thing, between showing off and self-confidence.

Retroactive 1998 Costume Design / Hairstyling of the Year: bangs, turtleneck, and popped black leather jacket collar that frame Jennifer Lopez’s face like the Movie Star she is.

Clooney’s self-confidence manifests as relaxation, presaging his roles in the “Ocean’s” movies, but Lopez’s onscreen self-confidence manifests as a rock-solid physical presence in scenes where her character is in peril and in others, as a quiet inner strength. Even when it’s clear that Karen is smitten with this handsome bank robber, Lopez never tamps down those traits. Both Lopez and the movie are conscious, after all, that Karen is a woman in a man’s world, managing an overprotective father, suffering a condescending superior, fending off so many blowhards, like those ad guys. Another movie might have had Jack tell them off, but Karen handles them herself, first politely, then with no uncertain exasperation. “Beat it, Andy,” she says, finally, and emphatically, though without Lopez raising her voice, her breathiness like a bass drum, a line reading as cutting as it is comical. Mariah couldn’t have said it that way.

Dream a Little Dream of Them

I think often about this one scene from “Ocean’s Twelve.” It happens near the end, when The Night Fox (Vincent Cassel) returns to his luxurious Lake Como villa to find his thieving rival Danny Ocean (George Clooney) and wife Tess (Julia Roberts) sipping his champagne on the balcony. It’s not so much what they talk about, no matter how crucial it may be, as it is the chemistry between Roberts and Clooney. To paraphrase former Notre Dame Football coach Lou Holtz explaining the campus’s mystique, Roberts and Clooney’s chemistry requires no explanation if you’ve seen it just as no explanation, really, would suffice if you haven’t. Their chemistry just is; it’s undeniable; it’s off the charts. They work charmingly, effortlessly, innately in one another’s company. Together, they reduce Cassel’s character to a bystander on the balcony of his own home, merrily communicating in what’s tantamount to secret code. (Roberts whispering into Clooney’s ear...shut it down. Just shut down the cinema and go home.) Every time I see it, every time I think about it, I think: God, what a waste, what an absolute waste that the movie industry has collectively, idiotically failed to harness this again in any real way since it happened nearly 20 years ago. That’s as big an indictment on modern movies as any.

I thought of this scene again just the other week when the 2014 Vanity Fair video of Julia Roberts and George Clooney having a side-by-side discussion for the magazine’s Hollywood issue of that year was uploaded to Twitter apparently apropos of no other reason than reveling in it all over again. Though the Vanity Fair interviewer asks them questions, their magnetism is such that they could be talking about anything, their star power virtually illuminated by the blank white wall behind them, putting the focus right where it needs to be. And though George mentions having a movie theater in his home, and though Julia cites the expensive Tiffany ring gifted to her by the “Ocean’s Eleven” team, they still come across not like you and me but relatable nevertheless because of the jovial way they b.s. one another. And that is to say nothing of Julia’s exalted laugh, which she deploys twice, the guffaw that elevates her into the firmament being the same thing that renders her down to earth. It’s always good hear to that laugh. 

I know, I know. Loyal frustrated followers are turning up their noses. “Is he on about this again,” you’re asking. He’s whining about a lack of Roberts/Clooney comedies every fifth post. But that’s the thing, I always wonder if I’m merely screaming into the void, consumed by an issue about which The People (as in, What The People Want) could not care less. And while reading the Twitter Tea Leaves is not the same thing as doing genuine market research, scrolling through the effusive replies and the quote tweets to this tweet of the Roberts and Clooney heartened me. I can’t say for certain that all these people were younger than me, but a good chunk seemed as though they were, and they were just as smitten with the self-evident chemistry. They saw it! They all saw it!

As much hope and joy as I felt scrolling through these replies, however, I also came away saddened by the fatalism in so many responses, those referring to Roberts and Clooney as the last two movie stars or the kind of white people, to borrow one phrase exactly, they just don’t make anymore. Maybe they don’t make ’em like Julia and George, fair, but the real reason we don’t see movie stars anymore is for the same reason that we too often discuss them in terms of box office receipts for some other sort of analytical b.s. unattuned to seeing movies as flickering myths. Movie Stars are about a feeling, the kind you get watching Julia and George in one another’s company, and it’s out there in other places too, I swear it is, in the space of Tessa Thompson and Michael B. Jordan in the “Creed” movies or Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling in “La La Land”. Even Julia Fox in “Uncut Gems” “has got something”, as they said in “A Star Is Born.” Problem is, rather than specifically cultivating projects around stars, we have gone the other way. The concept, the almighty, dreaded I.P comes first. And though I know one viral Tweet won’t change anything, it was still comforting to see, if just for a moment, to see the allure of Roberts and Clooney justify its own existence, to see those stars shining so bright. 

Life: In 3 Acts

tfw you’re on vacation

tfw your vacation is winding down

tfw vacation is over

Let Julia & George Read from the Phone Book

Talking about paying to see a favorite actor read from the phone book is as familiar a form of praise ruing plot holes you could drive a truck through or condemning dialogue by asking who talks like that in real life? are familiar forms of criticism. These are all things people just say without genuinely scrutinizing their inherent meaning, which is why one of the New Yorker’s film critics, Richard Brody, wondered recently on Twitter if anyone really had sat down on a screen and read from a phone book. Of course, as several people replied, this sort of apocryphal idiom has been tried.

Morgan Freeman and Charles Bernstein, the poet, have read from the yellow pages for amusement’s sake, and apparently the late Robin Williams impersonated John Houseman on SCTV doing that very thing. And after minimal digging on Google I discovered that PRX had an entire series where actors John Lithgow and F. Murray Abraham, among others, read from the Manhattan white pages. But all these are essentially glorified Funny or Die sketches, meant to check in and check out of, have a few laughs over, and then move on. I dare say, however, that Mr. Brody was thinking about seeing someone read from the phone book in a different sort of context, just as I too have always dreamed bout seeing someone read from the phone book in a different sort of context.

Just recently on this very blog I proffered my un-researched, un-verified belief that Steven Soderbergh makes bets either with himself or others to see if he can pull off certain arduous aesthetic tasks in his movies. Like finding a fresh way to implement “Take Me Home Country Roads” in “Logan Lucky”, or shooting a film on an iPhone, or, and this is my favorite urban legend that only I have posited and believe, that on the set of “Ocean’s Twelve” George Clooney bet Soderbergh that the director could not make a scene of the entire eponymous gang just sitting in a jail cell interesting.

That’s how we wound up with that scene where Soderbergh whip pans from actor to actor in the jail cell, each pan triggered by one actor looking at the actor sitting next to him after taking a moment to ruminate, by which I mean taking a moment to just sit there and, like, you know, actor-ize. It’s inane; it’s wonderful. What’s more, I also loved “Ocean’s Twelve” because Soderbergh is one of the few directors we have who has actually recognized and seized upon the explosive chemistry shared by Clooney and Julia Roberts, and that brings me to this post’s overriding point.

Years later, when tomes are written about this period in Hollywood, this age of brands and franchises and spandex, historians will read and rub their eyes, and re-read incredulously and then ask: “Wait, what? Julia Roberts and George Clooney were only in THREE movies together? What were these studio idiots thinking?” The old Star Machine had a lot of problems – A LOT OF PROBLEMS – but Mayer, Zukor, Zanuck, any of ‘em would have took one look at Jules and George and know exactly what to do. We would’ve had a spate of Jules & George movies, and if a few of ‘em would have undoubtedly been rushed and slapped together and awful, so many more of ‘em would have been brilliant fun, and a couple, if not a couple more, would have been A+ master classes of cheery entertainment. That none of these movies actually exist is an unfathomable artistic blight on our era; shame on all of us.

I appreciate experimental Steven Soderbergh, and understand that his experimentation is crucial to keeping his artistic battery charged, but I confess, the more genre-oriented, populist-ish Soderbergh has always been my favorite Steven. (This blog’s favorite 2017 movie, after all, was “Logan Lucky.”) And so I wish the latter Steven Soderbergh would find time to concoct a Jules & George trilogy leaning hard into Golden Age screwball, rom-com-ish machinations, not functioning so much as homages as the director’s own semi-avant garde recipe. And I wish one of those movies would be about, say, a pair of bickering but in love con artists. And I wish that during production, in some remote locale, Clooney and Soderbergh would he forced to make a dinner reservation by finding the restaurant’s phone number in the phone book. And I wish that upon doing this, Clooney would say to Soderbergh: “Bet you can’t make a scene reading from the phone book interesting.” And I wish Soderbergh would then take Clooney’s bet and concoct a scene where the characters played by Julia and George discover their lavish south of France home is bugged by Interpol. And I wish that upon discovering this, to occupy and/or have fun with the hapless Interpol lackeys, the characters played by Julia and George would spend infinite hours just reading the phone book aloud.

The Monuments Men

Sgt. Richard Campbell (Bill Murray) and Pvt. Preston Savitz (Bob Balaban), academics more than G.I.’s, find themselves in a nighttime Mexican standoff with a German soldier. But, you will notice straight away the lack of tension, the absence of expectant music on the soundtrack. Instead it is all a bit leisurely – so leisurely, in fact, that Campbell decides the best course of action is to sit down. So he does, and Savitz and the German soldier follow suit. Campbell offers them each a cigarette. They all light up. No one pulls the trigger. They all walk away clean. This is “The Monuments Men” in capsule – it may be set in the midst of the European Theatre of WWII, but it all it really wants to do is sit down and have a smoke.

This does not have to be bad thing. In fact, it can a very good thing, a great thing even, if the film commits to that tenor and the director at the helm provides a light touch. “The Monuments Men”, however, is something of a casual disaster, a tonal meltdown, a film that transposes Bill Murray eating homemade jerky with plaintive shots of concentration camps, a sometimes jaunty “Knute Rockne All American”-esque music score with a swelling, uber-patriotic “Saving Private Ryan”-esque music score, and with no earthly idea how to blend the two.

George Clooney is a helluva a movie star but as a director and writer (he does both here), he leaves an extravagant amount of wanting, his narrative often devoid of both mere cause and effect and an ability to make clear just where its roving characters are and what they are doing. And in his own hands as an actor, his charisma is caught in quicksand. This isn’t a WWII Danny Ocean, this is Johnny Depp pretending to be a math professor in “The Tourist.” 

The film’s based-on-a-true-story idea is compelling. As the war rages, it becomes evident that Hitler is stealing and stashing every valuable piece of art on the continent in the hopes of curating a museum in his own honor. Alas, if the Nazis are to lose, and it’s headed that way, he has given the order that all the art is to be destroyed. Enter historian Frank Stokes (Clooney), introduced by lecturing President Roosevelt on the finer points of art, which is apropos because Clooney spends much of the film lecturing via voiceover in regards to its overriding theme. I half-wonder if voiceover was added in editing when it was realized how little of the film’s Art-Is-Worth-Saving motif was conveyed through traditional cinematic channels of character interaction and dramatic confrontation. The editing, in fact, often resorts to dissolves, which could suggest an old-fashioned spirit, but could also suggest editors scrambling to get the hell outta moments that weren’t working.

Stokes assembles a squad of art historians remade as military men who dash about France to reclaim the stolen paintings and scultptures. The actors, unfortunately, are forced to skate by on their readymade personas. Jean Dujardin grins. John Goodman is hefty. Matt Damon is square. Bill Murray is laconic. Bob Balaban is wry. They all stand around in handsome frames like opened cans of flat pop. Even so, they are all good enough to at least denote some sort of camaraderie, and in that way “The Monuments Men” could have – and probably should have – been a hoity-toity, booksmart “Dirty Dozen.”

The cinematography, art direction and production design here are all peerless. Filmed on location in Europe, the settings appear authentic, our intrepid Monuments Men often standing before towering piles of rubble. Yet, I wonder if this film would have been better to forgo the piles of rubble, and shoot for more of an old world Hollywood back lot feel. That would have lessened the historical authenticity, but might have upped the energy.

The film’s most insulting misstep, however, is the strange neglect of its most vital character, Claire Simon (Cate Blanchett). She is a Paris museum curator, the requisite bookish woman who magically becomes beautiful when she takes off her glasses and lets her hair down. She is vital because she has, daringly, been tracking every piece of art taken by the Nazis and where it has been hidden. It becomes Lt. James Granger’s (Damon) responsibility to enlist Claire’s aid. She consistently refuses. Until she doesn’t. Why she suddenly has trust in him when she was so resistant is never clear, nor is her sudden romantic interest in him, but so few things are in “The Monuments Men.”

Nevertheless, when she grants her trust, she invites Granger for a “formal” dinner. He shows up dressed rather informally. So she brings out a tie and makes him put it on. Formal, informal, either/or, who knows? “The Monuments Men” sure doesn’t know.

Gravity

“Gravity” is the sort of film Hollywood should be making all the time and just isn’t. Visual effects are prevalent in the movies these days but too often are a crutch, a cover-up for narrative deficiency, or merely showing off for their own sake. Director Alfonso Cuaron, working in perfect harmony with cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, has crafted an occasionally transcendent little piece of Cinematic Experience in which the effects mix seamlessly with the story he’s telling because the story he’s telling very much is the visual effects. Yet even though “Gravity” is propelled very much by those visual effects, it remains Hollywood to its core by also relying on good old fashioned Star Power.

The story of “Gravity” is deceptively – well, maybe that make that glaringly – simple, and that simple story is contrasted against the jaw-dropping camera trickery at work throughout. Its opening is a virtually uninterrupted twenty minute shot that glides and winds its way through the earthly orbit where astronauts Kowalski (George Clooney), the old pro, and Stone (Sandra Bullock), the specialist tasked to assist with a bit of Hubble repair on this first trip to space. Alas, back on earth the distant voice of mission control (Ed Harris, thus echoing Gene Kranz of “Apollo 13”) indicates a Russian attempt to shoot down their own satellite has gone awry. Debris hurtles toward our defenseless spacewalking astronauts. Communications are cut. Their shuttle is smashed to smithereens and their fellow NASA men and women lost. They are on their own in space, short on precious oxygen and looking for a way home.

Anymore movies of this ilk seek to address the plight of humanity, to be about our world and its present ills, to function as commentary as it goes about kicking ass. "Gravity", however, is much, much less “2001” than it is Spielberg’s “Duel” or Rodrigo Cortes’ “Buried”, a sorta real-time thriller that proves Murphy’s Law applies even in space. Which is not to suggest it lacks thematic ambition. It does not, and that is also, I fear, where perhaps the film partially miscalculates.

As established, “Gravity” is first, foremost and throughout a story being told visually, and yet when Cuaron and his son Jonas, with whom he wrote the screenplay, turn to theme they do so through either awkwardly wordy passages or images that have not earned their supposed weight. The latter is tied directly to the end, which feels less spiritually uplifting than it wants to be because of the former. Stone is saddled with a tragic, and tragically thin, backstory, yearning to illuminate effects of isolation both on the Earth and above it. And thus, Cuaron’s film shoehorns in monologues and helpings of characterization that distinctly feel as manufactured as his set pieces feel effortless. One scene meant as Stone’s turning point to the drive for home is so jarring and frustrating you’ll know it’s a fake straight away.

It’s weird, and it’s weird because “Gravity” is so regal in the way it looks that nothing Cuaron could have these characters say would live up to what they and we see. Earth can be a lonely place, after all, but never more so then when the entire planet itself is right in front of you…..so close, so far.

That we still find ourselves tethered to emotion and not just sensation is a testament to Ms. Bullock, who has chopped her hair and significantly dialed down the every-woman charm she oozes in such abundance. She seems more terse and withdrawn and impatient with Clooney’s glibness in the face of doom. As such, “Gravity” emerges less than some sort of metaphorical rebirth than a closed-off woman opening up to the battling back, fight and (space) flight. Her moments of weakness are as winning as her moments of strength, and that duality is what prevents me from betting onboard with the attitude of the finale.

For all the soundless explosions and zero gravity spins and dips that caused my weak-willed stomach to order my eyes shut, the shot I will remember most involves Stone floating wordlessly in a space station airlock moments after surviving another frenzied ordeal. She closes her own eyes and just…..floats. Physically re-grouping, mentally re-charging, preparing to forge on. It is open to symbolic interpretation, but I will go with a more literal reading. Even when you’re all alone in space, sometimes you just need a moment to yourself.