Friday's Old Fashioned: Glory Alley (1952)

“Glory Alley’s” a weird one. It frames its story through an old newspaperman, Gabe Jordan, telling a young charge about the greatest story he ever told, which laces the ensuing movie with mounds of irony because if “Glory Alley” is the greatest story he ever told then, damn, he wouldn’t have been my go-to columnist. The story begins with a boxer, the immortally named Socks Barbarossa (Ralph Meeker), about to tangle for the title only to suddenly hop off his stool and bolt from the ring. Why? He won’t say, and so the movie becomes a journey to unwinding that secret, which would suggest something of a dark, mysterious tone, except that director Raoul Walsh packs the film with song & dance numbers that seem copy & pasted from some other film entirely. In fact, none other than Louis Armstrong plays Socks’s trainer, Shadow Johnson, if for no other reason than to. It’s like Walsh realized the secret that Socks was holding onto was a dud and so he called on Armstrong, and on Leslie Caron too, to sort of stall time until the secret revealed.

That the secret takes so long to be revealed can essentially be attributed to the astounding stubbornness of Socks and the equally astounding stubbornness of The Judge, Gus Evans (Kurt Kasznar), the possible father in law of Socks considering that he’s dating The Judge’s daughter, Angela (Caron). But if Angela can at least find it in her heart to forgive Socks, even if Socks won’t cop to why he ran out of the ring, The Judge cannot and will not. In a heated disagreement after the bout, in fact, Socks knocks The Judge down. It isn’t deliberate, but it adds fuel to the fire, and The Judge can only look at Socks as a rageful quitter, refusing to give him the benefit of the doubt, refusing to let bygones be bygones, calling him out as a cowardly quitter at every turn

Heck, even when Socks winds up drafted and going overseas to fight in the Korean War, a sudden interlude that between the singing & dancing and skulking seems like a third movie entirely where he becomes a hero in the process, recipient of the Medal of the Honor, it’s still not enough for The Judge to come around. And it’s not enough for Socks to come around either. When his hero status quickly wears off, he gives the medal up. Why does he need it if it won’t give him anything in return? And so it goes, back and forth, on and on, these two men stubbornly refusing to get along. And as they

This is not to say that Angela is any kind of complex character. She mainly exists to be pitted between Father and Fiancé, unsuccessfully trying to broker a truce. You cannot help but feel empathy for her, having to deal with these two inflexible idiots who would have it so easy if the requisite secret could just be unearthed. God, it’s a drag. And it’s the reason why her song & dance numbers still manage to fit despite being apart from the rest of “Glory Alley’s” tone. Because her stage performances become her escape from this pair of feuding numskulls. It becomes our only escape too.

Camp X-Ray

Set in the infamous detainee camp of Guantanamo Bay, “Camp X Ray” is designed as something of a monotonous slog. New to the joint, Pvt. Amy Cole (Kristen Stewart) is immediately indoctrinated to its grimly repetitive procedures, and watching as she buzzes her way through a series of same-looking security doors is like going down the rabbit hole of mindless procedure. True, some of the detainees are often riled up, screaming, psycho-screwing with the MP’s and even hurling bags of you-don’t-want-to-know-what; yet just as often the film deliberately rubs our faces in the mundane. Its closing credits sequence features simple footage of Guantanamo guards making their endless, circular rounds, over and over, on and on into infinity. It’s a drab, unloving environment where the MP’s can’t wear name tags, stripping them of personal identity, and purposely refraining from niceties with those in their charge. This works to allow those few occasional pockets of humanistic sunshine that inevitably shine on down to feel like a legit hallelujahs. 

The story turns on Amy’s relationship with Ali (Peyman Moaadi). Encountering him on her rounds, he forces conversation on her, provokes her, tests her, and eventually senses a glimmer of compassion, causing him to engage her on an emotional level that nonetheless remains tinged with suspicion. And even if an obligatorily tentative mutual respect emerges between them, in many ways, they remain at odds, and how could they not? No one particularly wants to be here, not the detainees, not the MP’s, not the commanding officers. Amy’s superior sullenly declares he hates Guantanamo and is only there because he was ordered, just as Amy was ordered, and on down the line. The detainees, of course, have been ordered here too, against their will, and now everyone is forced is forced to play what essentially amounts to a waiting game where they aren’t really waiting for anything.

They are all prisoners, in other words, and occasionally the film gets too aggressive in its evincing of this fact, like the on-the-nose back-to-back shots that show Amy first, then Ali, sitting on their bunks, eating and reading. And it also goes to expected lengths to question who “the real enemy” is by transforming Amy’s supervisor into someone of questionable moral merit, coming onto Amy, then turning on her when she rejects him.

“Camp X Ray” mostly evades politics, and the few times it does deign to raise them, it does so with an almost ridiculously simple temperament, prompting Amy to say things like “It’s just not as black and white as they said it was gonna be.” What brought Ali here is never discussed. Though the opening scene in which he is nabbed shows him with a table full of mobile phones suggests something is up, there is no follow through. Ali claims his innocence, but we are given no evidence of exactly why this would be and neither is Amy.

Though the rushed conclusion is too determined to traffic in sentimentality, something real is forged between these characters regardless, and that something subtly comes alive in the performance of Stewart who, between bouts of order-giving terseness, skillfully lets her character’s curiosity peek out. She isn’t concerned with his guilt or innocence and this doesn’t become a quest for justice; this is a quest for empathy.

Choose Your Own Post Election Post

Greetings! The Worst American Presidential Election In History is over! Maybe. Maybe not. I hesitate, of course, because we here at Cinema Romantico are on retreat, far, far away in the northern reaches of Minnesota and away from the Interwebs. And because we are away from the Interwebs we cannot tailor this post to account for exact election results. Still, we did not want to leave you, faithful readers, without some sort of soothing tonic if all went well or rot gut whiskey if everything got blown up, and so we hit on the idea of you providing you both options! Apply as necessary.

BEST CASE

Ah. The election is over. The air smells better, the breeze feels cooler, that headache you simply could not shake for 18 months has finally dissipated, the relentless drone of political punditry has gratefully been switched off and now the lilting nothingness of no polling data can be the metaphorical relaxation CD that lets us lay down for our long overdue national nap.........

WORST CASE 

Welp, they finally did it. They killed the republic of George fucking Washington. Smoke ’em if you got ’em.

McFarland USA

As the coach of an all-Latino cross country team in a predominantly Latino California town, Jim White is a name not so much too good to be true as scarily indicative of an old screenwriting go-to – that is, the White Savior. The White Savior is named White? So the characters can nickname him Blanco? That sounds like something only a terribly conservative and just plain terrible sports movie could conjure. Yet Jim White was a real person and that his young Latino charges apparently really did nickname him Blanco and Blanco really did coach these kids to a state title in 1987 (and eight more after). It’s a fine story all on its own, one hardly in need of embellishment or increased “conflict” to heighten the “stakes.” And yet “McFarland USA” goes searching for ways to ramp up the drama anyway, which it makes for a befuddling film, one that is actually quite good when it’s not getting in its own damn way.

 Kevin Costner’s Jim White is introduced as a sort of volatile football coach, dismissed because of that sort of volatility, volatility that they can’t make too volatile because it’s still Disney. So he throws a cleat that cuts a player’s chin. That’s enough to get him disgraced and dismissed. But Costner seems less than dedicated to this idea of volatility just as he seems less than dedicated to the idea of his character being a national emblem for his own last name. When he moves his family to McFarland, taking a last ditch job as PE teacher and assistant football coach, he takes his family out to dinner and seems genuinely confused by the word “tacos”. “Do you have burgers?” he asks incredulously, like if he’s not ordering at Chili’s he’s essentially trying to conduct impossible chemistry experiments. Not long after, a fleet of cars appear, made in the film’s cinematic language to look like gangbangers, and as Costner hustles his family to the car, Costner looks like a man less frightened than embarrassed by the scene he’s in. “Can’t we do better than this?” you imagine him asking director Niki Caro just after she’s yelled cut.
 
And that’s the thing, Caro can, and does. Her movie settles in as White and his family settle into the community. Once the clichés needed to set the tone for his emotional turnaround are dispensed with, she provides a clear-eyed view of this story. She presents the conception of the cross country team idea not with the traditional “A Ha!” Moment but with a moment that’s more just like “Oh, Hey.” Eating a sandwich in the bleachers, White recognizes how fast some of the kids in his class run and seems like a pretty decent idea to have them run competitively. Costner plays the moment so perfectly, so matter of fact, that he doesn’t even stop eating his sandwich.
 
Each of his young charges is given at least a little time in his own world, so we see them for them, who they really are, and what this cross country team might mean to each one. They are so fast, we learn, because they are made to run everywhere, from home to picking in the fields in the morning to school and then back to the fields. For the most part, they don’t lash out at this life, they accept it with equal parts admirable grace and understandable frustration. This is how they live, and the real drama in the film is simply in watching the effortless empathy that develops between the coach and his athletes. When White takes them to the beach for the first time, apparently a moment that really did happen, it should by all rights be Disneyfied bombast. But it’s not. It’s a moving evocation of the world outside McFarland, an evocation of where they can go
 
The concluding sequences get mucked up a bit in false conflict of whether or not White will accept a job at a more prestigious school coaching their track team, yet the catharsis when the inevitable victory happens is never blunted and very real. It’s imbued with a selflessness, the way a team teaches you to be a part of something bigger than yourself, and how that team allows White to become part of a bigger community, and how a welcoming community can allow individuals the space to be themselves. Occasionally the film also gets a bit too pointed in painting its competitors This isn’t about Us vs. Them; it’s just Us. And they are more than good enough.

Cinema Romantico's Week Off

Hey, loyal readers, first-time readers and suspect readers wondering “who is this dufus and what’s his predilection for Keira Knightley in hats?” Once again, that time of the year has arrived. Today I am off to unwind, relax, recharge and smile brightly and widely while consuming coffee in 50 degree temperatures on the north shore of Minnesota and Lake Superior while partaking in a weeklong Internet sabbatical. I always take an Internet sabbatical this time of year during this particular getaway, but this year the getaway/sabbatical just happened to coincide with the feverish wind down of The Worst Presidential Election In History. I will be the hell off social media as everything, more or less, goes to social media hell. How’s that for timing?!

But don’t fret! Unlike this past June when we also took a few days off, Cinema Romantico will not be going dark during this absence. We have several posts set to go up automatically, including a couple reviews that were never published for reasons I don’t really know, as well as a traditionally served Friday’s Old Fashioned, and a couple short but sweet election themed posts to try and cheer you up as this interminable process finally (hopefully?) drags itself across the finish line. (Try to) stay sane, y’all, and we will catch back up in real time. Ha det bra!

Destination

Other 1980's Origin Stories

News came down that director Len Wiseman is considering a reboot the immortal “Die Hard” by making a film chronicling the “origin story” of John McClane which makes John McClane sound like a superhero which is pretty much what he has turned into even though he was originally established as, you know, just “a cop”, an ordinary guy in an extraordinary situation. And I can only imagine that the origin story of “Die Hard” will stick to the superhero routine and, thus, make the original “Die Hard” such an outlier that in all subsequent “Die Hard” box sets they will actually have to remove the original and pretend as if it wasn’t actually part of the initial conception for the series which will undoubtedly lead to nominal think pieces and Bruce Willis smirks on late night talk shows.

On a lighter note, this potential reboot got us to thinking about other potential reboots from the 80’s. After all, nothing is off limits in this day and age when it comes to reboots, and when it comes to absolutely-not-taboo reboots, nothing is off the table. So here’s five ideas, and one more for the road.

Other 1980's Origin Stories

Adventures in Babysitting

Adolescent Chris Parker is left in the charge of a babysitter, English exchange student Tuppance (Cara Delevigne), who, on the prowl for a boyfriend who said he was “busy” and couldn’t come over, takes young Chris into the backroom of an English restaurant where an old man from Liverpool sets them forth on a hijinks-laden escapade into the infamous Anglo underworld. Keith Richards cameos as proprietor of a blues club. “Nobody gets outta here without singing the blues…and doing a little angel dust.”

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

How did Edward R. Rooney, Dean of Students, become such an cantankerous scholastic overlord? We learn the truth in “Ed Rooney’s Day Off”! As a precocious lad, Eddie Rooney participated in senior skip day to be with the woman for whom he pined, only to be thwarted by his high school’s dastardly principal, suspended and held back for another year, made to mingle with the waistoids, dweebies and dickheads.

Commando

Here we catch back up with Cindy (Rae Dawn Chong), the heroic flight attendant, and her origin story aboard a Pan Am flight skyjacked by a Libyan whom she thwarts while still caring for a six year old flying alone, an obnoxious first class passenger who can’t understand why beverage service has been shut down and a sky marshal gone rogue. She is forced to land the plane because both pilots have fish for dinner,

Fast Times at Ridgemont High

The whole gang as mischievous kindergartners. Animated, like “Muppet Babies” at Ridgemont High.

Romancing the Stone

The northern territory days of Jack T. Colton. Michael Douglas produces, gives himself the role of young twenty-something Jack T. Colton and casts Amber Heard as his love interest.

Roxanne

A cinematic, comical graphic novel: the unforgettable origin story of Mayor Deebs, “The GQ Firefighter.”

Matt Damon, Serious Funnyman

“Underneath the comic façade I saw a real person of flesh and blood with serious beliefs. I never intend to be a satirist. I never intend to play for laughs.” This is how Margaret Rutherford inadvertently defined comic acting and it’s analysis that stands the test of time. It’s the basic comic principle the late great Roger Ebert cited again and again: “People trying to be funny are never as funny as people trying to be serious and failing.” In this new improvisational Apatow-influenced comedy ecosphere, however, people are almost always trying to be funny. In a New Yorker profile of Steve Carell, Tad Friend wrote that when “an improv really works, it has a skewed specificity that bears the stamp of an actor’s subconscious.” And that’s often what we are subjected to on screen anymore in comedies – the actor’s subconscious. Carell makes slight variations role to role but his innate nature always rises to the top. Heck, even in “Foxcatcher”, where he piled on the tics and changed his voice to approximate John DuPont, if you look real, real close all you really see is Michael Scott. The comedy subconscious hit barrel’s bottom in “Wanderlust” when Paul Rudd was allowed to stand in front of a mirror for what seemed like a half-eternity and make faces. It wasn’t comic acting so much as riffing, a bit for Funny or Die that just happened to be projected onto a movie screen.

That, I think, is why Matt Damon is undersold as a valuable comic acting commodity. Consider this piece of PopSugar clickbait (which you shouldn’t actually click on). It cites “14 Times In Which Matt Damon Proved He’s Absolutely Hilarious.” Alas, only one of those times, his glorified cameo in “Eurotrip”, is from a motion picture. The rest involve Internet videos and talk show appearances and such. It’s not that he’s not funny in these moments; it’s that it grossly undersells his substantial ability as a comic actor.

This came to mind a few weeks ago when Steven Hyden wrote a piece at Grantland exploring, as he called it, “The Four Versions of Matt Damon.” The versions: Everyman Leading Man, Reluctant Action Star, Team Player and Jerk. None of these Damon descriptors are wrong yet they conspicuously leave out his genuine abilities as a comedian. To be fair, Hyden does highlight Damon’s funny-man performances, he just sees them through a different prism. He sees Damon’s turn in “The Departed” as a “sniveling little liar” and his role in “The Informant!” as a “middle-American doofus.” The labels are apt, and perhaps this is why Mr. Damon never gets full credit for being such a funny guy – his funny guy parts are always wrapped up in another persona.

In “The Departed” he might very much be the “sniveling little liar” Hyden pegs him as, but Damon also outfits his Colin Sullivan, a Boston cop turned mob informant, a distinct petulant comicality. “They have this,” he says at dinner with the air… “and they don’t have duck l’orange.” He’s an asshat and Damon knows it and plays straight to it. In “The Informant!” he’s essentially playing a straight-faced version of Tommy Flanagan: The Pathological Liar. But whereas Jon Lovitz played the role like the sketch it was, fishing for laughs, Damon just takes the dude at face value; a compulsive liar who seems ill-equipped to confront that compulsion. In a way, these characters, living grand fabrications, are similar, but Damon plays both men completely different, getting under their skin to find what makes them tick, and allowing the humor to rise intrinsically from the person he’s playing.

In “True Grit”, Damon took it to the next level. In an interview with Geoff Boucher of the Los Angeles Times “Damon said he and Joel Coen came to the idea of making the cowboy a sort of Cliff Clavin of the Old West by modeling him on Texas actor Tommy Lee Jones but subtracting the notable fact that Jones is a Harvard-educated intellect.” That sounds like an impossible-to-meet standard, yet Damon manages the feat, affecting an Old West spin on George W. Bush and any untold number of Don’t Mess With Texans, citing his home state like it renders him impervious to criticism. But he is also a moral authoritarian, fancying himself an arbiter of, well, everything, and when he spanks the film’s other protagonist, the young girl, Damon looks like a put upon schoolmaster. It’s a great moment, of which Damon has many, but it’s also telling of the full arc he effects, one that goes from Texas Ranger to Big Baby.

Never, however, has Damon been more comically skilled than in his turn as Linus Caldwell in “Ocean’s Twelve”, the much maligned sequel to “Ocean’s Eleven.” The performance is all about, as Hyden noted, being stuck in “little brother lane” to George Clooney and Brad Pitt. Those two titans were very funny in their own right but were also playing variations of themselves, reveling in their Hollywood wattage, while Damon got under the skin of his character. The name “Linus” is no accident. There might be a live-action “Peanuts” movie on the way but Damon turns Linus Caldwell into a heist movie Linus Van Pelt, believing in the Lost in Translation like The Great Pumpkin. He wants to prove he’s a leader, that he can hang with the Big Thieves, and he spends the whole movie trying to worm his way from supporting to top billing, eager beaver-style, never quite getting promoted from JV to Varsity. And underneath that marvelous comic façade you see a real person of flesh and blood. Damon is not being a satirist and he is not playing for laughs; he just is. And goddam, is he ever funny.

The Heat

“The Heat” begins with a scene possessing the ingredients to actually be interesting. A gaggle of male FBI agents have come up empty in their search of a suspect’s house. Then, Special Agent Sarah Ashburn (Sandra Bullock) enters and immediately intuits the location of some drugs and the hiding spot of some guns. And like Kobe Bryant hitting one of his patented ridiculously angled twenty foot jump shots and then taunting everyone within a fifty foot radius, Ashburn lords her impeccable investigating skills over all her colleagues. She can do this job better and faster than an entire room of men and their obvious fury with her skills compared to theirs is palpable. But rather than making this the point of the scene – her skill set compared to theirs – the movie does pretty much what you’d expect to and brings it all back down to her relationship status. When Kobe gloats, he has hosannas penned in his honor about how he's “Doin' Work”. When Ashburn gloats, well hey, that's why she’s still single.

The potential for commentary on the ever-incendiary male/female workplace dynamic arises again and again, but alas, it’s not to be. Rather than give any real thought to its relationships and situations, “The Heat” is content to explore them by simply inserting two females into the overly-familiar framework of so many dude-centric buddy cop comedies of yore. “The Heat” is just “Lethal Weapon” with ladies, “The Other Girls.” And if Ashburn is the no-nonsense, primly-dressed, curse word-averse rule follower than the odds are 1-1 that her friend and foil will be strictly-nonsense, shaggily-dressed, curse word devotee rule breaker. And she is. Det. Shannon Mullins (Melissa McCarthy) is the brash Boston cop whose beat becomes interlocked with Ashburn’s case involving…..uh……well…… “The Heat” is something of a paradox in so much as it seems entirely disinterested with its plot while simultaneously putting way too much time toward its plot.

It is directed by Paul Feig, a man who has a knack for staging gags and for letting his actresses rock the ad-lib to the extreme. To wit, McCarthy, who often takes her sweet time winding to the punchline in “The Heat” before, improbably, barreling right past that punchline and into another punchline, and one that’s usually fairly foul-mouthed. She has a ferocious comic energy here, one that actually compliments Bullock’s fastidiousness pretty well, and it’s why you wish that Feig and his writer Katie Dippold had any desire whatsoever to do something more with these characters. Instead Mullins is, more or less, a monster who has alienated everyone in her department on account of her behavior, while Ashburn is her own kind of monster who has also alienated everyone in her department on account of her behavior. They’re just a pair of do-it-their-own-way cops forced to work together and better understand the value of teamwork while learning a little bit about themselves in the process. And that just seems like such a colossal waste, unless you’re figuring in box office receipts in which case......yippee ki ay.

Feig is set to helm the all female “Ghostbusters”, a concept which doesn’t so much bother me because women have no right to wear the professional paranormal investigations and eliminations uniform as it does because of, well, “The Heat.” Plugging women into something that already exists in its own rigid way and simply having them copy of the moves of the dudes that came before seems like a wretched disservice. Wouldn’t be more interesting to tell new stories or, at the very least, to employ genre constrictions to subvert them rather than just saying, Hey, women can be in meandering, occasionally humorous buddy cop flicks too.

The Judge

There is a scene midway through “The Judge” when Hank Palmer (Robert Downey Jr.), the requisite prodigal son returned home, first discovers his father, Joseph (Robert Duvall), has cancer. In that instant, Downey Jr. the actor perceptibly overtakes the character he’s playing. He puts this wry little spin on the standard aw-shucks grin, as if he’s saying to himself, as if he’s saying to Duvall, as if he’s saying to us, “Well hell, I held out as long as I could.” I mean, he knows where “The Judge” is going; we know where “The Judge” is going; everyone knows where “The Judge” is going. But like the lawyer Downey Jr. plays with semi-rich aplomb, one who tap dances with witnesses and proficiently charms juries who should otherwise be resistant to his blood-suckingness, he can only obfuscate for long. You can’t stop what’s coming and in this case what’s coming is your standard wheezy tale of redemption. You can practically sense Downey Jr. wanting to break character and shout at director David Dobkin “Objection!” To which, no doubt, Warner Bros. declared “Overruled.”

Hank is estranged from Joseph, whom he calls him “Judge”, like everyone does, because it’s that kind of movie. A cocky, morally bankrupt, big city defense lawyer with no qualms about representing the repugnant human fowl rich man’s America has to offer, Hank has returned home to quaint Indiana (where a majestic waterfall-side diner that really exists is the best thing in the whole film) for his mother’s funeral. A parent’s death is enough plot for most movies but “The Judge” ain’t about ma; it’s about pa. And pa, the night of the burial, winds up in a fatal hit & run, one that has left an unscrupulous young man dead – an unscrupulous young man whom The Judge knows all too well from the courtroom. All signs indicate The Judge found the unscrupulous young man guilty by the court of the lonely ol’ highway and ran him over. The Judge is taken into custody. The Judge will stand trial. Of course, The Judge claims he can’t remember. He’s having memory problems on account of the cancer and all. Eventually, willingly, yet also unwillingly, partially on account of his brother, Hank is pulled into this mess, forced to represent his own father, seemingly just days after his mom died (the film is vague about time), all while coming to grips with the fact that he may have a daughter with the small town gal (Vera Farmiga) whom he ditched years ago. (One early scene finds him making out with the girl who turns out to be his daughter. When the revelation is made, it gets about half of a quizzical “Wait, what?” look from Downey Jr. and nothing more. It’s that kind of movie.)

Sixteen years ago Duvall starred in another legal thriller for which he would earn a Best Supporting Actor nomination, “A Civil Action”, and there his character viewed the law as something like a dodge or hustle, to quote Dean Yeager. It wasn’t a courtroom he entered; it was a playground, a place to view the law from oblique angles and have fun with it. After all, the law mostly existed to pad the pockets of dudes who already had everything, and to screw over those with nothing, and he knew, and you knew it, and so let’s just do the dance. If you took a stand for something decent, well, you wound up like John Travolta – that is, plunking your ass down in bankruptcy court. Hank Palmer is born more of Duvall in “A Civil Action” than in “The Judge.” But “The Judge”, like The Judge, treats the law – pardon me, The Law – with a grand solemnity. In his introductory scene, The Judge lectures a rapscallion teen about The Law, forcing him to sign his truck over to his pregnant girlfriend, which seems like a stretch but, hey, plot-hole-picker-outer, who are YOU to question The Law? That potentially sets “The Judge” up for fascinating insight into these two ideals clashing, and gaining more intrigue when The Law turns out to have more subtle dimensions

But there are no dimensions. Any sign of characterization is merely a screenwriting weight to drag the movie toward its redemptive finish line. Consider Hank’s younger brother, Dale (Jeremy Strong), who is created as a guy carrying a camera with him everywhere so he can record key events and then play them back at important moments. In one of the most disgraceful cinematic moments I can recall, a tornado suddenly drops from the sky, forcing the family into the basement where the brother shows a home video that is ever so neatly constructed to essentially function as a time capsule of a family gone from good-to-sad. It’s incredible to witness, the most damning piece of evidence that the trial is rigged from the get-go, as if the whole production is being manipulated from a backroom by Rankin Fitch, which might have made for one helluva meta movie. Like “Adaptation.”

You remember “Adaptation”, with a Brian Cox version of Robert McKee who is basically The Judge of the screenwriting world. “Don't you dare bring in a deus ex machina,” Cox as McKee declares. “Your characters must change, and the change must come from them.” No one’s change in “The Judge” comes from them; it comes instead from the filmmakers, following the rules of screenwriting legislation to the tee, and making us all yearn for someone, anyone to break hacky dramatist’s law.

Cinema Romantico's Week Off

Hey, loyal readers, first-time readers and suspect readers wondering "who is this dufus and what's his deal with Keira Knightley in hats?" Once again, that time of the year has arrived. Today I'm off to unwind, relax, recharge and smile brightly and widely while consuming coffee in 40 degree temperatures on the north shore of Minnesota and Lake Superior while partaking in a weeklong Internet sabbatical.

But don't fret! Cinema Romantico will not be going dark in my absence. We have several posts set to go up automatically, posts we have refrained from posting for reasons I don't really know. There will be a pair of reviews, a traditionally served Friday's Old Fashioned, an obligatory wonky list, and a long winded diatribe about Matt Damon's brilliance as a comic actor, a piece I'm not entirely sure I got right so, hey, why not just toss it up here while I'm far away? I'll catch back up with y'all just in time for my "Spectre" review to have been rendered irrelevant due to the passage of (Internet) time.

Destination

36 Things I Love About A Life Less Ordinary (that no one talks about)

My friend Alex of And So It Begins... regularly assembles these spectacular posts in which he lists a plethora of things in films he adores that no one else - so to speak - talks about. They are a delight. I love them. I love this one. And this one. Oh, and this one too! And I have been desperate for some time now to pay homage (rip him off). The time has come.

I love "A Life Less Ordinary", may God have mercy on my soul. If I could only watch one Danny Boyle film before I passed forevermore.....well, I'd watch "Sunshine." But if I could watch two Danny Boyle films before I passed forevermore, I'd watch "Sunshine" and "A Life Less Ordinary." Perhaps it's a bit of a, shall we say, mess, but life's a mess and love's a mess and the world's a mess and I adore every last iota of "A Life Less Ordinary's" mess. Here are 36 iotas in particular. 

 

36 Things I Love About A Life Less Ordinary (that no one talks about)

What a perfect opening shot. It looks like an album cover from when the sixties were starting to go bad and no one knew it.



I love the faux-rapture with which the dude on the right is listening to Robert blather about his trash novel to end all trash novels. And I love how the dude on the left just forgoes the fauxness.

 The establishing shot of the scene that will transform Celine's existence - her father prattling on about her irresponsibility and all we see to let us know she's there is the designer boot.



As the emerging plot is set in motion, we see our protagonists via the God's Eye shot, reinforcing the idea of the divine.

That shirt.

Walt.



Look at how HAPPY Celine is while hard-working Walt gives her his schpiel!

The set design! Holly Hunter's pose!



Even after kidnapping her and tying her to a chair, he's still offended by the thought that someone else would have been so rude as to kidnap her.





"I'm not interested in you, or your novel, or any other pathetic idea you have to change your miserable, mundane existence."

When Celine tells Robert to go to his "dark side", that's his ensuing expression. THAT! His dark side is like forgetting to ask for extra hot sauce with his wings.

Holly Hunter's performance in this film is one of my secret Favorite Performances Of All Time. Partially because every physical acting choice she makes it's like this one - what is she doing?!



"Catch ya later there, Mr. Johnson."

Sometimes it's easy to forget just how beautiful this movie looks.

"It's a common scenario." (I say these words - or write these words, or think these words - all the time. And when I do, I'm thinking of them here in Cameron Diaz's voice.) 

In the crosshairs.

Local boy Scotty Sherman.

Richie Vanderloo.

Love how Robert, typically so slow-witted, instinctively plays up the part of being Todd Johnson's close personal friend with the hug.



Ian Holm doesn't get a lot to do, but when he's on screen, he makes it count.





"You were great."

"I was?"



Those trees!



Holly Hunter!



Holly Hunter's Hand! Playing the part of The Monster That Cannot Be Killed.

Holly Hunter's Chaw! My favorite affectation in a film full of little affectations. I like to imagine she just showed up on set that day with the chaw and carried it on camera without telling anyone.



"All right, kill me! Just don't touch the girl!" yelled the gentleman bank robber.

"I often wonder what became of that girl. Sweet Eliza Gray."

Stanley Tucci so perfectly exemplifies a jackass.



Cameron Diaz's best effort at doing a Holly Hunter.



The rain slicker on Jackson's fedora. Prop of the year.

"How could anybody be that honest?!"

The look of a man who's confusedly run up against fate.

"I'll get the door. You play blackjack with the hostage."



I love how protective Jackson is of O'Riley in this scene.



Miracles.

Ah, love.