keira knightley prays that we all make it through 2018

It was a long week in America. I feel as if I’ve said that, like, every other week in 2017, but then that’s been perhaps 2017’s defining quality, at least to a blogger of a certain disposition, this unrelenting cocktail of despondency, dread, outrage, and weariness contributing to making every seven day week feel more akin to twelve or thirteen. And this week, the lead-up to Christmas, has felt, for me, less festive than tiring on account of being sick and professionally busy while Present-Day America has been busy wrapping up the year by Present-Day America-ing. I’m wiped, man. So Cinema Romantico will be shuttered for the holidays with plans to re-appear on New Year’s Day in order to begin our Best Of 2017 lists as 2018 starts because we like to slide in after the whole year-end list rush has already finished and no one’s interested anymore.

I had grand plans for today’s holiday send-off post to be a State of the Union. This address would have been entirely about one of my all-time Top 10 favorite movies, “From Here to Eternity”, and how Montgomery Clift and Donna Reed enact this allegory of America, all of it, from the Puritans crossing the Atlantic to the pioneers trekking west to now, with lies not so much passed off as truth as a nation so fully inhabiting a delusion that the urgency of the reckoning is lost, like my homegirl Donna at the end, on the boat bound for the mainland, living her fabrication about Clift so intently that the notes on the soundtrack slack-key sound less like paradise than ruin.

But, to go there, to get that deep, to phrase it right, simply wasn’t something that I had in me, not in my current state. So I scrapped that plan, as sad as it made me, and thought about just throwing up a Youtube video of Noveller’s “No Dreams.”

“No Dreams” was released in 2013, but I did not discover Noveller, the one woman guitar goddess, until this year through her release “A Pink Sunset For No One”, which led me back in time to “No Dreams”, and which, on the strength of its indelible apocalyptic atmosphere, with what sounds like this persistent ring undulating just underneath the whole song that reminds me of the ship alarms my family sometimes hears on the big ore boats that come through Duluth harbor, which made me feel like the whole song was taking place on some doomed metaphorical watercraft, like Noveller was the lone character in a sonic Winslow Homer painting, spoke so acutely to my state of mind this past year that I made it my 2017 anthem.



But then, going on that song’s emotional journey for the 1,700th time this year was something else that I simply did not have in me. And so I decided not to put up that Youtube video either.

So I thought, hey, it’s still 20th Anniversary of Titanic week! Maybe I could do a whole post centered around paparazzi photos of Kate & Leo, the kind where it seems like they’re a real couple, which are the apple of any Titanic devotee’s heart, fulfilling our not-so-secret wishes that one day these two might be all like “You? Me? YOU? ME? You-Me-You-Me-You-Me”, and which are always good for putting smiles on the faces of the Rose DeWitt Bukater fan club members even at their most forlorn.

Like this one, which Al Gore is inadvertently photo bombing, where they look so at ease in each other’s company that it’s all I can do to stop myself from just up and [melts].

Or this one, which I really like, because they look like two people with such a shared intimacy that they don’t even seem to realize they are standing on the red carpet on camera with flash bulbs popping. They’re just, like, giving each other shit in that way people in love do.

But, this isn’t fair. It’s not fair to them, and it smells of Donna Reed in “From Here to Eternity” delusions to boot, and anyway, it’s too inside baseball. And what’s worst, Kate has gone bye-bye in her dispiriting defenses of Woody Allen on the “Wonder Wheel” press circuit which has merely added to my red alert levels of despondency and, oh my God, why don’t we just cancel Christmas this year?

So that led me to the only place all this could — that is, you know where. Where else? Our favorite (your least favorite) movie blog meme. In a year where we have so often turned to frames of this blog’s beloved for solace, so do we one last time in turning the calendar to 2018 where we hope for the best even as we steel ourselves for the worst.

Earth, hear Keira’s prayer.

Downtown Athletic Club — The Movie

I was reading Chris Low’s ESPN oral history of the 1997 Heisman Trophy race that still engenders arguments over whether Michigan defensive back Charles Woodson really did deserve to win over Tennessee quarterback Peyton Manning. However, one line, spoken by Washington State quarterback Ryan Leaf, also a finalist that year, struck me more than anything else. He said: “We showed back up at the Downtown Athletic Club at 2 or 3 in the morning, and all the former winners were around the piano singing songs.” It stopped me in my tracks. I did not even finish the article. How could I? How could I possibly do anything but envision a movie?

A movie set at the Downtown Athletic Club, which no longer exists, but which used to sponsor and host the award ceremony, in those glorious, throwback days before ESPN commandeered the event and transformed it into something like an overblown Broadway event with false drama. A movie in which three fictional finalists — the cocky, photogenic quarterback from USC, the talented yet touchy running back from Florida, the wide-eyed country bumpkin two-way player from Wyoming who isn’t even sure how he wound up here — spend the 24 hours leading up to the Heisman ceremony, and a few hours after it, in the Downtown Athletic Club in the company of former Heisman winners. It would be something like those ESPN Heisman House commercials but blown out to a feature film and ending at 2 or 3 AM with everyone gathered around a piano, sloshed, singing “C’Mon ’N Ride It (The Train)” by Quad City D.J.’s

The emergent question, of course, becomes what type of Heisman winners would surround our finalists? Luckily for you, we have some ideas.

Downtown Athletic Club — The Movie, Heisman Winner Archetypes

Steve Spurrier-type. The ol’ Ball Coach, particularly as he has aged and seemingly lost interest in the sport, exudes a smart-alecky nonchalance that would mark him as the Statler & Waldorf of the proceedings, drinking Coors, cracking wise, getting bleeped on ESPN.

Tim Tebow-type & Ricky Williams-type. Tebow is a staunch Christian and Williams is a cannabis advocate! And hey, what wacky comedy doesn’t peddle in obvious, terrible stereotypes?! These two could be The Downtown Athletic Club Odd Couple! Hijinks!!! My God, the hijinks!!!

Reggie Bush-type. Reggie Bush forfeited his 2005 Heisman Trophy when it seemed clear the Trophy was going to be taken from him on account of his accepting gifts (God forbid!) in violation of NCAA rules. His post-college career has not quite existed at the same incendiary level, and so what if the Reggie Bush-type is there to make amends, only to be told by the doorman he is not on the list, leaving him to scheme a way inside. (The Downtown Athletic Club must have had air ducts.)

Eric Crouch-type. Crouch, formerly of my beloved Nebraska Cornhuskers, parodied himself a couple years ago as an egotistical Heisman winner resting fiercely on his laurels, and so why not take that parody and twist it, turning the Crouch-type into the scraggly ex-Heisman winner who, having fallen on hard times, is now living at the Downtown Athletic Club, causing comic mayhem at every turn?

Doug Flutie-type. Our apologies to the former Boston College quarterback, an irrefutably deserving Heisman winner and a seemingly genuinely good guy, but something about his visage suggests him for the part of Downtown Athletic Club’s Dean Wormer, authoritatively defending the Heisman Trophy’s honor, scheming to keep that rule-flouting Reggie Bush out, dealing with that scruffy Eric Crouch’s antics.

Gino Toretta & Andre Ware. Neither of these quarterbacks from Miami and Houston, respectively, really should have won their Heisman Trophies and I dare say they both know it. And that is why they would spend the entire day in “Do-Deca-Pentathlon”-ish escalating feats of strength.

Johnny Manziel-type, and Jason White-type & Carson Palmer-type. Johnny Manziel is Biff Tannen, Jason White is 3-D and Carson Palmer is Match, the Heisman Trophy winner gang that goes around bullying the newbie nominees.

Vinny Testaverde-type. Like Jerry O’Connell in “Can’t Hardly Wait”, the Vinny Testaverde-type will appear like an apparition near the end, unshaven and in a tux with the necktie and collar loose, warning that year’s victor that being a Heisman Trophy winner and #1 NFL draft pick are not necessarily all they are cracked up to be.

America: Not Dead, Just Resting

This One Scene in Chain Reaction with Kevin Dunn

Bear with me and this post might make sense. (Might, I said, though we here at Cinema Romantico make no promises about “sense” or “points”.) It all began with a dream, and not a dream like Robert Fulton and the steamboat, but a dream you have while you’re asleep. In late August I had a dream involving an Ice Boat somewhere on some frozen lake. I don’t remember much else. I imagine this was my subconscious pining for winter in the midst of summer’s insufferable humid sop but who knows? That’s for dreamologists to debate and I don’t know any. The point is, when I awoke, suddenly, with images of an Ice Boat still dancing in my head, I returned in my now-awake mind to 1996’s Keanu-infused action-adventure opus “Chain Reaction” because 1.) I’m a complete idiot who brings everything down to movies and 2.) There is a scene in “Chain Reaction” that involves Keanu and his fugitive-ish accomplice Rachel Weisz making a dramatic escape aboard an Ice Boat.

So a couple weeks later with the Toronto International Film Festival imminent, when I simply could not stomach one more Top 10 Movies To See At TIFF list, I made a Top 10 Not-At-TIFF Movies To See list. As I composed it, I remembered my dream and “Chain Reaction”, which I hadn’t thought about in years. I wanted a screen cap of Ms. Weisz onboard the Ice Boat. As it turns out, those are tough to find. Ah, but someone, perhaps an Andrew Davis devotee, had uploaded all of “Chain Reaction” to Youtube and it was still there, if only because copyright law doesn’t much concern 20th Century Fox in the case of “Chain Reaction.”

I started watching, merely with the intent to fast forward to the Ice Boat sequence. But oddly, or perhaps because I had a cocktail in hand, or maybe because I’m an idiot, I found myself drawn in to this mediocre movie, possibly because it’s set in Chicago and I live in Chicago and when I watched it lo so many years ago in a Des Moines movie theater I had no idea that I would live in Chicago and walk across that bridge that Keanu slides down which I’m usually walking across in a harried attempt to make a movie on time which means I have to sashay around tourists like Ameer Abdullah because I’m a ten-year Chitown veteran, yo, and that’s what we do – we complain about tourists.

But let me skip ahead to this past Sunday. While eating lunch, I watched, like, four minutes of “Veep.” I’ve never seen it and I probably won’t watch anymore of it even though I’m sure it’s brilliant and please spare me your “you’ve gotta watch it” rants because we know my policy on TV (that is – I’d always rather be watching a movie) and the point here isn’t really “Veep” itself. The point is, “Veep” apparently stars Kevin Dunn. I can’t believe no one mentions this more. Then again, I can. I mean, JLD is JLD. Tony Hale is beloved and Anna Chlumsky should be a superstar and Gary Cole is a character actor extraordinaire. But you do know who else is a character actor extraordinaire? KEVIN DUNN, THAT’S WHO.

My man Alex has you covered on that count. He went all in last year on summarizing Mr. Dunn as one of our more capable character actors. Dunn is a “that guy” and a damn good one too. You need one guy to show up in the comic escapade “Hot Shots!” and not be funny? That’s Dunn. You need someone to put on the fatigues in “Godzilla” and shout a lot? That’s Dunn. You need someone to portray Nixon’s Hatchet Man? That’s Dunn. You need someone back at base command to yell at Denzel Washington and be wrong about everything? That’s Dunn. Of course, Dunn is such a valuable cinematic resource because outfits each of these parts with genuine behavior. You know how sports announcers always like to say of certain players that what they do doesn’t show up on the stat sheet? That’s Dunn. What he does fails to appear on the stat sheet. But it’s there, in plain sight. To wit…

So I’m watching “Chain Reaction”. And in it, Dunn plays the FBI Agent summoned after this big explosion that Keanu escapes by the awe-inspiring speed of his motorcycle because it’s still Hollywood even if it’s Chicago. Except that Dunn isn’t the main FBI agent; Fred Ward is. Dunn is the other FBI Agent which is so immaculately Kevin Dunn. As they arrive at the location of the explosion, they have the following conversation. (You can watch the scene here. Fast forward to about 17:30.)

Ward: “Have the locals move the perimeter back about a thousand feet.”
Dunn: “You got it.”
Ward: “Find me a friendly judge. I want wiretaps, search warrants, on everyone that worked here. I want it ten minutes ago.”
Dunn: “All right.”

It sounds like nothing much, of course, particularly in the case of Dunn. But then, that’s the secret to a That Guy. The whole movie takes place during a harsh Chicago winter and this scene is set outdoors in the thick of the freezing Midwest; you can see the characters’ breath. A Chicago winter is a glacial affair. “The liquid in your eyes would freeze,” I heard some woman on the elevator tell her companion the other day as a means to describe Chicago in January. Winter here makes you so frozen inside that when you’re walking and talking you might be able to make sense of what the other person is saying but the temperature is low it prevents any response other than terse acknowledgement. And that’s precisely how Dunn plays it. The “You got it” is a man not wearing a stocking cap outdoors on a severely cold morning who can barely feel his face. The “All right” is a man who’ll get this done, sure, all right, but seriously, can we go somewhere warm first and get a damn cup of coffee?

He was born in Chicago so he understands the intensity of this frigidity. Maybe he called on that experience in playing this scene. However he harnessed it, he did, and he turned a handful of seconds, barely a blip in The Grand Scheme of Things into something special, because Kevin Dunn doesn’t take those seconds off.