A Couple Good Things

Last week I was telling someone how few big-name movie releases this summer thrill me. I have been content to stay at home and stream middling thrillers (so many middling thriller reviews to come), but I also know that’s no way to live. I love watching the new June or July blockbuster in a packed air-conditioned theater in summer and I’m genuinely happy for people excited to see the new “Superman” in packed air-conditioned theaters. And though once I might have been excited for it too, the truth is, the superhero movie boom wore me out and I have yet to recover. (Besides, Superman peaked for me when Parker Posey was stomping around Lex Luthor’s pad.) When Zaslav the Great promotes his 10-year plan and when people who have seen this new movie say it spends ample time setting up more movies, I feel pre-exhausted, already tuning it out. It’s always just the beginning when I’m begging for someone, anyone to simply stick the landing in a cool two hours and ten minutes and then move on to something else. So, yes, I know, Grumpy Gus over here. But. Not more than 24 hours after I was telling someone how few big-name releases this summer thrill me, I learned that a new Kathryn Bigelow joint is on the way. 

How I originally missed the news, I don’t know, but almost a month ago it was announced that in October, Bigelow’s “House of Dynamite” will debut in theaters before streaming on Netflix in October. The logline: “When a single, unattributed missile is launched at the United States, a race begins to determine who is responsible and how to respond. As the kidz say, SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY! While you’re over there discussing how David Corenswet compares to Christopher Reeve, I’ll be over here imagining Idris Elba and Rebecca Ferguson deliberating about a missile strike. That would have been all I needed to get me through three more months of this brutal summer and yet, on the same day I learned about “House of Dynamite,” Deadline reported that Hailee Steinfeld and Miles Teller are set to star in a romantic comedy called “Winter Games.” Deadline explains: “Set in the high-stakes arena of the Winter Olympics, the film follows a perpetually overlooked skier (Steinfeld) and a self-sabotaging hockey legend (Teller) who collide at their breaking points. Their unexpected connection threatens her chance for a medal and his shot at a comeback as they navigate romance and redemption in the Olympic Village.” As the kidz say, INJECT IT INTO MY VEINS!

I proposed an Olympic Village movie almost a decade ago, and though my pitch was a package deal with Richard Linklater attached to make it a “Dazed and Confused,” Everybody Wants Some!!”-ish comedy, I’ll happily take the counteroffer. I’ll be there opening day with my Milano Cortina 2026 t-shirt. We just have to hope it’s not merely set-up for a standalone sequel called Summer Games in which Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell play, respectively, inevitably, a beach volleyballer and a water polo player. In fact, forget I ever said that.

State of Play / Random Awards 2024 (truncated ed.)

The more movies you watch, the more you realize the Academy Awards are merely a drop in the bucket of film. Even so, I have always loved the Oscars. Because films are movies too and movies need a little glitz, glamour, some searchlights, and giant self-regard. Yet, as the 97th Academy Awards approach, I struggle to remember in the 30-plus years that I have been watching them when they have felt so small, so unglamorous, so inessential. It is not just the wrenching fallout of the Los Angeles wildfires, nor the pall cast by America’s Useful-Idiot-in-chief casting our lot, apparently, with the new Axis of Evil in addition to all the other acts of virulent stupidity. No, it’s the movie themselves. It was a year so uninspiring that for the third time in the last four, I was not even compelled to compile a Top 10 list, underlined in the underwhelming collection of Oscar nominees that not only failed to enter the zeitgeist but seem to suggest, as Matthew Gasda did for his Substack, the Academy Awards have been gamed.

Now that is not entirely a new phenomenon. Before optimization became the trendy buzzword of the tech bros who would change your life (while stealing its pertinent details), studios were always seeking to game the awards system. Mark Harris’s book Pictures at a Revolution is partly about how “Dr. Doolittle” luncheoned its way to a Best Picture nod in 1967 while Miramax optimized its own kind of Oscar movie in the 90s and the aughts and then relentlessly, viciously promoted them. Many of those Miramax pictures were, in fact, just outgrowths of what critic Dwight McDonald once deemed Midcult. In his piece, Gasda quotes McDonald explaining Midcult: “the formula, the built-in reaction, the lack of any standard except popularity [covered] with a cultural fig leaf.” In other words, rather than focus on making a quality film that might ultimately appeal to the Academy, you reverse engineer it by working backwards from the Academy’s taste. The bigger problem, however, is that now this suboptimal approach to art is threatening to become the American movie industry’s prevailing method. 

In a comprehensive piece for N+1 Will Tavlin guides us through the streaming titan Netflix’s entire history from a mail rental company chewing up Blockbuster to a vertically integrated behemoth that is reshaping, if not ruining, the film industry by putting the cart before the horse, as they say, and working backwards to create movies by harnessing the data of viewers to then turn around and meet their expectations rather than seek to surprise of subvert them. Movies are no longer the end, as Tavlin writes, they are the means to the end, the end being subscribers. Netflix acquires and then keeps them by relentlessly churning out content, ensuring there is always something else on; you can log off, but you can never leave. They produce this content in-house, a la the old studio system but without a genuine commitment to craft, evoking a modern variation of “The Producers” in so much as a rushed, shoddy production can be more beneficial than a thoughtful, solidly made one. Their watered-down movies might as well be television, blurring the line once and for all between the two, an art form intended for the big screen reduced to what may as well be reruns of “Caroline in the City” on a Tuesday afternoon. 

In an interview on Defector’s flagship podcast The Distraction, Tavlin was asked by host Drew Magary if he saw any way out of this predicament. Tavlin cited federal intervention as potentially the best remedy, as it was in the 1940s when the Paramount decrees negated the big studios’ own vertical integration. He seemed fatalistic about this proposition, though, and it’s hard not to understand why, what with an American government currently being run by a plainly stupid philistine who seems determined in his way to recreate Hollywood in the image of the People’s Republic of North Korea. His maniac second-in-command, meanwhile, is upending government agencies in part by firing scores of people and deploying A.I. software instead and it’s easy to imagine a near future where Netflix does the same, cutting out the middleman between data collecting and artificial intelligence entirely. Distraction co-host David Roth took hope that the janky product this type of method is already eliciting might also elicit pushback, an outcry for a true human handprint. Me, I don’t know, my faith in people has wilted significantly the last few years. 

Still, I did not want to end on such a hopeless note. And so, even if I felt just as unmotivated to compile a traditional Random Awards list as I did a Top 10, I had, nevertheless, jotted down a few Random Awards throughout the year that are vintage in quality and did not deserve to sit in the drafts folder forever. There is quality out there, somewhere. Therefore, a truncated Random Awards. 

Random Awards 2024 (truncated ed.)

Her eminence Nicole Kidman appearing live via satellite from her couch to present the truncated edition of Cinema Romantico’s Random Awards.

Line Reading of the Year: “Hoo boy, Lousy Carter, what the fuck?” - Olivia Thirlby, Lousy Carter. In her immaculate drawing-a-blank deadpan and real emphasis of that concluding question mark, Thirlby hysterically encapsulates just what her character is doing in this moment, delivering the eulogy for an eponymous character who never quite believed in the worth of his own existence. 

Best Use of Wikipedia: Rebel Ridge. If using a search engine is typically a lazy storytelling device, in this Netflix (irony!) action-drama, a bunch of small-town southern cops only realizing a few moments too late what they are up against upon consulting everybody’s favorite free online encyclopedia not only turns a reveal into a hysterical punchline but a hysterical evocation of their own laziness for failing to look into things. 

Best Product Placement: Green and Red M&Ms®, Christmas Eve at Miller’s Point. A movie not so much about nostalgia as imbuing nostalgia through aesthetic, “Christmas Eve at Miller’s Point” creates a collage of emotions and feelings and sensory memories more than it unspools a narrative, like a slo-mo shot of so many holiday-themed chocolate confectionaries being poured into a bowl. As they were, I felt myself pulverized by flashes of holiday memory, of a gold-colored Anderson Erickson eggnog carton, of the blue Royal Dansk Danish butter cookie tin my grandmother would bring each December, of Holiday Greetings from Budweiser, in one breath laying bare how Christmas is inextricably intertwined with consumerism.

Best Laugh: Nicole Kidman, Babygirl. As I noted in my review, when another character humorously suggests she always assumed that Kidman’s character was raised by wolves or robots, Kidman’s laugh in response sounds robotic, a real live human being chortling in A.I. It’s a vocally fried chuckle on the level of Meredith Marks, which I understand might not mean anything to most of you but trust me, in the space of that laugh, Nicole touches the face of God.

The Ruffalo (most unsung performance in a movie this year): Hailey Gates, Challengers. As Helen, with whom lothario Patrick (Josh O’Connor) goes on a blind date solely in the hopes of getting a place to sleep for the night, Gates’s character is there to emphasize Patrick’s cruelty and provide a counterweight when the woman he really loves, Tashi (Zendaya), unexpectedly appears. But Gates makes all that count so much more by turning her character into a living, breathing human by effusing an insecurity that borders on tragic. It’s truly a supporting turn and the true supporting performance of the year. 

Best Metaphor: American Star, American Star. Granted, the 1940 ocean liner SS America that wrecked off the coast of Fuerteventura in the Canary Islands in 1994 and was just lying there to be gaped at for three decades before finally disintegrating and collapsing into the sea last year, might be an obvious metaphor for a hitman (Ian McShane) aging out of that life and life altogether, an anvil dropped on the head more than merely on the nose. And yet, in the conveyance of this metaphor, and the grave resignation with which McShane receives it, that gargantuan nature is itself an apt metaphor for how it made me feel when at movie’s close, the ocean liner just...disappears. Is that the world, I wondered, passing me by? (Don’t answer that.)

Acting!

Rob Gronkowski is a fine football player, a future Hall-of-Famer, but his acting, well, it’s a less hall of fame worthy if you go by his commercials for USAA co-starring Sam Elliott that I have been repeatedly forced to endure the last five months during college football games. It’s Oscar nomination day, a day when acting becomes paramount, or more precisely, good acting becomes paramount, and yet, rather than write about any of the nominees, as one traditionally might, I could not stop thinking about Gronkowski and Elliott and how those USAA ads succinctly summarize good acting and bad acting 30 or so seconds at a time.

Academy members like to reward performances where you can really see the performance, figuratively speaking, which is why actors in biopics, or actors putting themselves through some sort of palpable physical transformation, frequently earn nominations, and why Hollywood’s resident experts on acting as being, like, say, Sam Elliott, rarely do. But then, they are all professionals, and whether the acting is more ostentatious or unobtrusive, they have sanded away the rough edges. Gronkowski, on the other hand, is all rough edges; in each of these ads, you can see the performance, literally speaking. He knows he is on camera and overcompensates for it, like Jack Donaghy with two coffee cups, so that you can virtually see him thinking his lines as he says them, causing them all to come out stiff. And because he is concentrating so hard on his lines, he never relaxes his body, causing it to also be rendered stiff, both details amalgamating into an unfortunate embodiment of wooden acting. 

I don’t mean to drag Gronk, I really don’t, because he’s an amateur and he’s not really trying to do anything other than get paid for shilling something. It’s just, his poor acting becomes such a useful counterpoint to Elliott. Opposite the stilted Gronk, you will never more clearly see how effortless, how natural, Elliott is as an actor. Gronk is like seeing a suit that is still being tailored, a performance that is all pins and sewing tape, whereas in Elliott’s performance, all those pesky seams disappear. And if you say, well, Sam Elliott is just playing himself, hey, so’s Gronk, and he can’t do it, can he? 

Possible Complete Unknown Headlines

The Bob Dylan biopic directed by James Mangold who directed “Walk the Line” (2005) which half-killed the musician biopic was released on December 25th. Its title, “A Complete Unknown,” was, of course, pulled from the Dylan song “Like a Rolling Stone,” and many of reviews of “A Complete Unknown” have, inevitably, turned their headlines into strained puns of Dylan songs and song lyrics. “‘A Complete Unknown’ leaves Dylan’s mystery blowing in the wind,” says The Washington Post, and “Don’t Think Twice,” says Rolling Stone, “Timothée Chalamet’s Bob Dylan Biopic Is Alright.” Sheesh. I think we can do a little bit better than that.

Possible Complete Unknown Headlines 

It Ain’t This Movie, Babe 

It’s Alright, Ma, It’s a Movie, and a Movie Only

I Dreamed I Saw Weird: the Al Yankovic Story

Overexposed, commercialized, handle Chalamet with care

I ain’t gonna work on Disney’s farm no more

Business is a business and it’s a movie most foul 

Send this movie out for some pillars and Cecil B. DeMille

Presence

“(Alain) Delon is not so much a good actor,” David Thomson wrote of his performance in Jean-Pierre Melville’s immortal French noir “Le Samouraï” (1967) for Criterion in 2005, “as an astonishing presence.” That’s not to downplay the ability of Delon, but to emphasize his gift, of knowing how to exist before the camera in order to harness its power rather than over-exerting himself to try and seize it. That gift was not entirely innate, though. As he recounted to British GQ in 2018, the director of his first credited role in “Send a Woman When the Devil Fails” (1957), Yves Allégret, gave him the lesson that would crack the code: “Listen to me, Alain. Speak as you are speaking to me. Stare as you are staring at me. Listen as you are listening to me. Don’t act. Live.” Delon lived in “Le Samouraï” just as he lived five years earlier in “L’Eclisse.” I’d seen that movie before I watched it in a Roman COVID hotel in 2021, but lemme tell ya, that movie comes across like absolutely nothing else when you have been stuck in the same tiny room for two weeks in the Eternal City. His presence there is altogether more powerful when at the end…director Michelangelo Antonioni takes it away.

I was thinking about all this on Sunday afternoon, the day Delon died in Douchy, France aged 88. I had gone to the Albany Park neighborhood with My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife for tortas and the place was showing some middling action thriller, the kind that is somehow nondescript despite so many gaudy colors and flashy edits, playing on Spanish language TV. I wasn’t paying attention until, suddenly, Bruce Willis appeared. It must have been one of those movies, though which one, who knows, Willis may or may not have made under some measure of duress as his memory started to go given how, as far as I saw, he was barely in it, hardly spoke, and seemed to just be in one location. (His character appeared to be kidnapped, possibly, and tied up.) But even in this, whatever it was, never mind the plot, when Willis showed up, you could detect a change in the air. Just in existing, he imbued the camera with a presence beyond all these other yammering youngins around him who were trying so hard to act.

Delon is gone, and Willis is gone in his own way, and I’m left wondering when actors of the next generation will decide to live again. 

Hazards in Headline Writing

Not an image of Gena Rowlands in The Notebook.

Gena Rowlands died last week at the age of 94. She was perhaps best known for blazing trails in a series of films like “Faces” (1968) and “A Woman Under the Influence” (1974), an unmatched performer and a patron saint of American independent film. Or perhaps not. When news of her death first emerged, the headlines of numerous news outlets, like CBS and NBC and USA Today, deemed Rowlands as the star of “The Notebook (2004).” That was a nice film, a sweet film, a film to watch on your phone while you’re relaxing on the beach, but I mean, c’mon, this would be like deeming Parker Posey, who thankfully will never die, as the star of “You’ve Got Mail.” Many, including the actor Carrie Coon, took to the social media platform Still Referred to as Twitter to voice incredulity: “We lost Gena Rowlands,” wrote Coon, “but also our dignity, as headlines trumpet: actress from ‘The Notebook.’” This caused others to voice incredulity that Coon would knock a movie so many loved, and that was, in fact, directed by Rowlands’s son, Nick Cassavetes. Coon riposted further incredulity that people could not hold two truths at once. Indeed, the news outlets that mentioned both “The Notebook” and “A Woman Under the Influence” probably got it right; each one has a place. Maybe we just need copy editors to have a fuller grasp of film history.

The hullabaloo made me think of Sarah Vowell’s piece for This American Life in the 90s, eventually collected in her book “Take the Cannoli,” in which in advance of Frank Sinatra’s death she implored television networks to refrain from peppering their future Ol’ Blue Eyes obits with snippets of “My Way,” “the most obvious, unsubtle, disconcertingly-dictatorial chestnut in the old man’s vast and dazzling backlog,” an unworthy testament to the monumental singer’s career. (I know that when Bruce Springsteen dies, which he won’t, the television news networks will play “Born to Run,” of course, and that’s fine, even if I have always fantasized about them playing the first verse of “The Price You Pay” instead.) They did not heed her call. The dead might well be happier dead, as the esteemed philosopher Harry Lime once noted, but it’s only natural to want to properly honor the legacy of a mountain-mover like Rowlands. Or like Faye Dunaway, whenever her time comes, which I hope is not any time soon. 

Indeed, what this minor hubbub really did was reinforce my now semi-long-standing apprehensiveness in regard to Dunaway. The obituaries themselves will be fine, no doubt, as they were with Rowlands, but even if her own mountain-moving work was, I dare say, more universally known than that of Rowlands, it was so long ago that even if “Dunston Checks In” wasn’t enough of a box office hit to get cited, I can still imagine oblivious copy editors summarizing Faye Dunaway as “Hollywood star who read the wrong Best Picture winner at the 2017 Oscars.” If I see that in the headline - if I see that in the first paragraph of the eulogy - then there’s gonna be trouble.

In-Advance Analysis of the Twisters Soundtrack

The summer of Glen Powell rolls on. It’s almost July, meaning we are about to flip the calendar from “Hit Man,” starring Glen Powell, to “Twisters,” starring Glen Powell. The former was a success, and the latter also seems all set for success if the rowdy, gloriously goofy trailer is to be believed. I still can’t believe that “Twisters” might well, in fact, be believed but, man, here we are. I think it’s the moment when the Daisy Edgar-Jones character says “I don’t chase anymore” that makes me believe. I’ll judge it when I see it, of course, but boy, a line like that gives me hope that “Twisters” knows what it’s doing, that it gets it. But here’s what I worry “Twisters” doesn’t get – the soundtrack.

The original “Twister” soundtrack, as we have written before, epitomized the fun-loving 90s proclivity of soundtracks as grab bags, a little country and a little rock ‘n’ roll but a little alternative and a little pop and even a little New Age too. The “Twisters” soundtrack, on the other hand, appears not to be a little bit of country so much as just country. I mean, ok, fine, but you’re telling me the Daisy Edgar-Jones character doesn’t listen to Taylor Swift? Or maybe somebody else on the Billboard Hot 100 that we could have more easily convinced to record a song for “Twisters?” Chappell Roan, maybe, pride of Willard in southwest Missouri, not far from the Tornado Alley border? I’ll bet she understands the terrifying power of a rotating column of air.

More than that, if the marketing department insists the “Twisters” soundtrack must be exclusively country, I’m disappointed once again by the lack of Johnny Cash considering everyone describes a tornado as sounding like a train and because of those famous alternating bass notes, every Johnny Cash song is “steady,” to quote June Carter of “Walk the Line,” “like a train.” And if they don’t sound like a train in the manner of a cyclone, necessarily, then, I don’t know, man, how about you call up Sheer Mag and pay ‘em to write a song that does.

Nothing, though, makes me more upset than the presence of a Luke Combs song in the movie trailer. Should Luke Combs have a place in “Twisters?” Maybe. I’m open to it. But. What does the Glen Powell character say in that same trailer? “Sometimes the old ways are better than the new.” And you’re telling me that guy listens to Luke Combs? Not a chance. My guy is a hard country neo traditionalist, 100%. If I was curating the soundtrack, he’d be pointed straight toward the titular twisters with George Strait on full blast. 

He Is His Hair

As I near 50, the physical wear and tear of middle age seems more acute with each passing day, one creak eternally giving way to another moan, and yet, despite it all, I still have my hair. I’m lucky, I know, and I don’t intend to rub it in, I truly don’t, because hey, if I could trade my hair for a mere average mouth of teeth, I would seriously consider it. But nope, hair is what I got and it’s what I still have, and so I’ve tried to take advantage. I’ve aimed for a European soccer player look for most of my 30s and 40s, and now have been trying to reconfigure that look into Timothy Olyphant from “Justified: City Primeval.” Looking a few years into the future, however, when my hair undoubtedly will start to thin somewhat, I’m thinking the windswept style of Daniel Day-Lewis might be a better tack. And beyond even that, I find myself thinking that Michael Douglas would be a good hair idol. Because of throat cancer, Douglas almost lost his voice, and losing a voice that rich would itself be tragic, but as he nears 80, he’s still got his hair, and what hair it is. I did not see “Ant-Man and the Wasp” (2018), but I did see Michael Douglas’s hair in “Ant-Man and the Wasp,” and cosmetologically, the dude still brings it. 

I thought about this over the weekend while reading Matthew Garrahan’s interview with Douglas for the Weekend Financial Times. Douglas is currently starring in an Apple TV+ miniseries as Ben Franklin who, as Garrahan notes, did not wear a wig, unlike most founding fathers, meaning Douglas could still show off his hair. “Jack Nicholson always accuses me of being a hair actor,” Douglas told Garrahan. “I find a lot of my character through hair.” As evidence, Garrahan cites the actor’s slicked back look as Gordon Gekko for “Wall Street” (1987) and crew cut in “Falling Down” (1993). These might be two of the more blatant examples, but they also demonstrate the wide variance in Douglas’s movie hair, how he can transition from Coach Pat Riley to peeved peon without missing a beat, the length he’s willing to go to get under the coiffure of his character.

He does not simply excel at broad leaps with his hair, however, proving equally successful at subtler shades. In “Haywire” (2011), his hair is like a G-man play on the Gekko look but styled with a little more volume, as if shady ostensible civil servants and greedy corporate raiders are separated by mere degrees, and his “Haywire” hairstyle is contrasted against his role as the chief executive of government in “The American President” (1995) where he opts for a tamped down but distinguished grey. And that distinguished grey is juxtaposed against his role as America’s drug czar in “Traffic” (2000), tamped down, distinguished, and with a nearly identical part but conspicuously colored, as if the face of the war on drugs has not quite figured out how the war on drugs is not what it really appears to be.

Between “Wonder Boys” (1998) and “King of California” (2007), and with the help, respectively, of hair stylist Joseph Coscia and hair department head Jennifer Bell, utilized key distinctions in scraggly grey haircuts to evince a messy literary professor and then a conspiracy kook.

In “Black Rain” (1989), Douglas plays a requisite on the edge cop named Nick who at one point proclaims, “Sometimes you should forget your head and grab your balls,” which fair enough, except as his hair evinces, he thinks about his head a lot, an intense mullet that renders the part as close as Michael Douglas has ever come to portraying a Michael Mann protagonist. And though his cop, also named Nick, three years later in “Basic Instinct” has got some troubles too, his hair is far more reined in, a means to underline how he lets it down and comes unglued when his character encounters Sharon Stone’s.

With his wig in “One Night at McCool’s” (2001), Douglas was essentially playing Liberace before he played Liberace in 2013’s “Behind the Candelbra,” and if I’d had a Letterboxd account in 2001, not that I have one now, I would have written a review that went something like, the whole movie should have been made in the image of Michael Douglas’s hair. Perhaps that’s a good rule of thumb for any movie; if Michael Douglas starred in this, would it be worthy of his hair?

Like “Romancing the Stone” (1984) and its subsequent sequel “Jewel of the Nile” (1985), not as good as the original save for Douglas’s coif, convincingly playing the cover of a romance novel come to life by ensuring that you could hear his mane of hair roar. It’s funny, as a recent New York Times article by Bob Mehr remembering the late Diane Thomas, who wrote “Romancing the Stone” remembered, Douglas, who also produced, originally wanted Jack Nicholson for the part. But for all his qualities, in that role, Nicholson’s hair would not have been up to snuff. You can almost imagine Douglas saying, “You wish you were a hair actor, Jack.” 

One Perfect Moment

It might seem strange to consider Tony Gilroy’s “Michael Clayton” (2007) in conjunction with Wim Wenders’s “Perfect Days” (reviewed yesterday), even if, like me, the former is a movie you are thinking about all the time. “Perfect Days” is a contemplative drama in which nothing much happens. Indeed, nothing much happening is the point. It is a portrait of mindfulness, of a man, Hirayama (Kōji Yakusho), fully aware of and present in the moment, and how he seeks to remain that way each successive day. “Michael Clayton” is a fast-moving crime thriller with a jigsaw plot structure and an eponymous character (George Clooney), a law firm fixer, who is anything but mindful, his mind always churning instead, eternally on the clock, evinced in the opening scene’s early morning consultation. He is dealing with familial strife stemming from a deadbeat brother, and a bar business that went bust in part because of his deadbeat brother, and a mob debt on account of the bar business that went bust, and trying to wrangle one of his firm’s lawyers who has gone off the deep end, or maybe just come to see the light, making a case against his biggest client who, in a way, Michael starts making a case against too, all of which comes to a head during a fateful drive through the country roads of upstate New York in a car with a bomb wired to the GPS by two corporate hatchet men who are tailing him, or trying to, and trying to find the right moment to trigger the explosion. 

The contrasts extend further than the narrative too, and to the character, the performance, the framing. Hirayama is frequently seen alone in “Perfect Days,” but he is not alone, whether reading in his small apartment by lamp, or eating alone at a noodle bar, a picture of contentment. In images of Michael Clayton alone, on the other hand, he is the furthest thing from. When he’s sitting at a police precinct, waiting for the off-the-deep-end attorney he is struggling to corral, Clooney puts his chin on his hand, staring into space, and you can practically see his mind on everything. One of my three-hundred favorite moments in the whole movie is when Michael is in his office and on the phone with a client and says “Let me get a pen,” even though we can see he already has a pen in his hand, and as he momentarily lowers the phone, pretending to go find a pen, he comes across as a bone-weary man trying to steal a moment for himself in a world that won’t let him have it.

There is one moment ostensibly confounding moment in “Michael Clayton,” “the case of the three horses,” as a Roger Ebert Answer Man column put it the year of the movie’s release. This moment occurs at the climax, when Michael is driving around upstate New York, and suddenly pulls off to the side of the road, and gets out of his car, and ascends a small hill, all because he is riveted by the semi-surreal sight of three horses all on their lonesome in the early morning light. It’s true that Gilroy has planted little seeds in the narrative to make this make literal sense for the message board-styled critics, but it’s also true that you could not so much interpret this moment a thousand different ways as project what you think this moment means a thousand different ways, as Googling “Michael Clayton horses meaning” will attest. But a movie is only “exactly what is shows us,” as the esteemed Ebert also once noted, “and nothing more.” And what we have is an unmindful man who, for the first time all movie, becomes fully aware of the moment, and only the moment, and as his car going up in flames over his right shoulder illustrates, that newfound mindfulness saves his life. 

Leo's Special Sauce

Kaleb Horton wrote a fantastic profile of the singer-songwriter Jason Isbell for GQ that published last Friday. And though it is more than worth reading in full, especially if you’re an Isbell fan, or even if just curious about what acclaimed singer-songwriters are like these days, there was one passage of special fascination to the blog. Because Isbell starred in Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon,” which we reviewed yesterday, and shared some scenes with Leonardo DiCaprio. Leo is an actor who often comes across guarded in interviews, not that I necessarily blame him, and through nothing more than a rather comic episode of flatulence on set (not his), Isbell provides as unique a window into Leo’s acting process as you’re probably ever gonna get. You should read the whole story at GQ, which we link right here so click, but below we have quoted Isbell’s tale of Leo’s process in full. 

“So one night, after I'd done a couple scenes and been kind of anxious and stressed about it, we got to the scene where my character [Bill Smith] and Leo’s character [Ernest Burkhart] were in the house. My biggest scene in the movie. We're sort of talking shit to each other, and our wives and sisters are at the dining room table, and it keeps cutting back and forth between the two of them and me and him.

"We did that scene for three or four hours, and we kept riffing and getting more intense. And sometimes I would hear Marty laugh from the other room because I was just being like a redneck getting in a fight.

"And at one point we're standing up, in each other's faces. He's telling me he's gonna shoot me. Blow my fucking head off. And it's dead quiet. There's about 30 crew people in the room. And it's a tiny house.”

He leans in closer. His voice gets low and somber, like he’s about to reveal a secret to his FBI handler.

“And somebody on the crew farts, and it's very loud. And it's particularly funny because you could tell that whoever did it had lost a great battle trying not to fart. You could just hear in the pitch of it, that they were doing everything they could possibly do. And then because everybody in there is the best in the world at their job, nobody laughed. Nobody stood.

"And immediately, I thought of Farticus. You know, Spartacus, but I am Farticus. Leo and I start laughing at the fart. It's funny. Having never done a movie before, I think we're just gonna laugh for a minute and start over.

"But somewhere in that laugh, Leo folds it into his character. All of a sudden, it's Ernest laughing at Bill. And in that moment, I thought, this is why one of us has an Oscar, and one of us is me because I just got outgunned; I was laughing like an idiot. I was no longer a character, but he was still Ernest. It taught me about taking acting seriously, because he never even left character. He was laughing in character. It was impressive.”

Swift the Great and Powerful

The only thing that you, extremely frustrated Cinema Romantico reader, want to read less than a Golden Globes take is a Golden Globes take 48 hours after the Golden Globes already sunk to the bottom of the pool at the Beverly Hilton. If you want us to refund your click, no problem, just email the technical administrator at [email address not found]. It’s just, I’m intrigued by them, the Globes, that is. Well, not so much about the awards themselves as the celebrities, which have always been the true point of the Globes, or more precisely, a celebrity.

Because if Golden Globes host Jo Koy hadn’t thrown his writers under the bus mid-foundering of his opening monologue at this past Sunday’s awards show, I would have felt sorry for him. Anymore, hosting an awards show is an exercise in flop-sweat futility. Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, the modern exemplar of hosting, I would contend, and nobody’s fools, have seen the writing on the wall and now won’t go anywhere near it except in those occasional years of host-less Oscars when they briefly play faux hosts. Even in the old days, hosts were frequently doomed, but the backlash would arrive in more manageable waves. In the era of social media, it’s all at once, a firehouse of vitriol, evoked in how Koy palpably could tell in real time just how bad he was bombing. That would have been bad enough. I mean, it’s one thing for Twitter to render judgement, it’s another for Taylor Swift, who in a delicious twist went from The Golden Globes-iest to the Globes’ preeminent arbiter of taste when Koy, perhaps trying to right the ship, perhaps momentarily blacking out from in-over-his-headedness, joked about the Globes having fewer shots of Swift than an NFL game.

After being forced out of college basketball coaching, more or less, the late horse’s ass Bob Knight took an analyst job on ESPN, and once broke a cardinal rule of live tv by taking a big swig of his drink in full view of the camera to dismiss what he saw as the whole frivolous affair. And whether it was the joke’s simple lameness, or its implication that she’s thirsty for the camera, when CBS cut to Swift after Koy’s crack, Swift pointedly did not laugh, did not even smile, she just coldly took a drink of champagne, dismissing him with a sip. The host could have literally said “I’ll show myself out,” walked right out stage left and never returned and no one would have blamed him. Indeed, it was only made worse later when Jim Gaffigan presented an award and cracked a joke at which point the camera cut to Swift roaring with laughter. She was like Johnny Carson, in other words, the way he would wave a comic he liked over from the stage to the couch on the old Tonight Show, yet more biting, more demanding. She became the NFL’s foremost unofficial brand ambassador in 2023, and here she became something like a real-time pop cultural kingmaker, all ye who aim jokes her way beware. 

The tabloids reported that after “Barbie” won for Box Office Achievement, which Swift’s “Eras Tour” was also up for, she left. That’s probably why the cameras never returned to her table. She’d rendered judgement on their whole show too. Like a Gucci-clad Daniel Plainview, she was finished.

Actors I Was Most Happy to See in Oppenheimer

No, not them.

Finally finished the Barbenheimer double feature even if it took me, like, you know, five weeks instead of two days, and long after the viral phenomenon reached fever pitch, meaning my critical judgements are well past their expiration date. And anyway, critical judgements? Ew. Gross. Haven’t you heard, we critics are “old news” according to MovieTok which, and bear with me here, fellow old-timers, are people who review movies, not critique them, underlined, via the short form video platform TikTok that yutes consult most mornings like you, me, us, middle-age fossils used to consult the morning papers. And though the MovieTokkers position themselves as a kind of vanguard, and so does The New York Times profile where I read about them, vanguard suggests “a group of people leading the way in new developments or ideas” and as best I could tell, save for the platform itself, these self-proclaimed positive reinforcers sound like old news themselves, the same sort of semi-corporate shills that were paramount during the long gone age of Hollywood’s studio system, myopic cheerleaders as opposed to those viewing art as something to consider, to wrestle with. My young Monet-hating friend at The Met in February, apparently not the hope for the future I had thought, would be so disappointed in her mindless peers. (Disclaimer: me, myself, I love Monet, but I adored my young Monet-hating friend for having an opinion.) This all seems to suggest a future art world akin to a future food and beverage world where every restaurant is Taco Bell and everyone is happy about it because no one knows you can get, say, the ocean trout wrapped in puff pastry, and while that disheartens me, like a lot of things these days, it’s also making me more comfortable with the thought of my eventual death. 

Woah. Got dark. Welcome to the party, pal. Anyway. What was I trying to say? Right. Yes. I gave “Barbie” a positive notice on Monday and should follow up with my “Oppenheimer” review today except…my “Oppenheimer” review is going to be negative. Sorry, kids.  And so, I can’t offer a compliment sandwich, a la my MovieTok adversary Megan Cruz, where “negative opinions” as the NYT helpfully explains, are “preceded and followed by more positive remarks.” But I can offer a compliment amuse-bouche, a small savory compliment served before I harsh everybody’s buzz. Because if nothing else, Christopher Nolan filled his cast so far to the brim, that the biggest thrill for me was seeing unexpected people appear in smaller roles. 

Actors I Was Most Happy to See in Oppenheimer

1. Olivia Thirlby. I’m not a betting man, never have and never will be, and among the many reasons why is that had I been a betting man, I would have bet back during the late aughts that Olivia Thirlby was going to be a star. Oh, not a Julia Roberts kind of star maybe, more like a star in the arthouse galaxy, but an actor to be reckoned with, so to speak, nonetheless. But it never seemed to happen. To wit, the first Google question when you enter Thirlby’s name into the search bar is literally What Happened to Olivia Thirlby? They don’t know and I don’t know either; sometimes gravity just doesn’t collapse, and your star isn’t born. Maybe she didn’t even want it which, hey, I would respect. True, she’s not in “Oppenheimer” much and when she is, Nolan is not really providing any space for her to give a performance. She is merely representing; she could have just hung a Lilli Horning placard around her neck. Still, when I saw her, I internally gasped. And I externally gasped when I consulted her IMDb profile afterwards and realized she is in another 2023 joint opposite...

2. David Krumholtz. Once, long ago, at an annual Hollywood Meeting, I made a motion to enact a rule wherein every movie produced in Hollywood or a by a Hollywood-adjacent independent studio would be required to cast at least one person who was also in “Slums of Beverly Hills.” (This could also be accomplished if Hollywood would enact one of my other proposed rules and simply cast Marisa Tomei in everything.) My motion was dismissed 2,447-0. Christopher Nolan, though, bless his heart, honors my proposed rule in theory by casting Krumholtz, who repeatedly turns up to imbue an often cold, clinical movie with warmth.

3. Harry Groener. Graduating from Mayor of Sunnydale to Democratic Senator from the great state of Wyoming.

4. Scott Grimes. Christopher Nolan recently revealed his adoration for Will Ferrell’s “Talladega Nights,” one of the greatest movies ever made, which just goes to show that even if Nolan’s movies are not always to my taste, he is a man with great taste, nevertheless. And seeing Scott Grimes show up in Oppenheimer, I couldn’t help but wonder if Nolan has a soft spot for “Critters” too.

5. Michael Angarano. Love it when the “Snow Angels” band gets back together. See Also: #1

So many moments lost in time, like tears in rain.

Tom Cruise Takes the Dare

“A guy lays down a dare,” Brian Flanagan (Tom Cruise) opined in the quasi-immortal “Cocktail,” “you gotta take it.” Cruise took his own character’s advice to heart, it would appear, by taking this blog up on its dare. After all, loyal frustrated followers will recall that two years ago in May 2021 when we first saw images of Tom Cruise hanging from a train in the then-upcoming, since-released “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One,” the blog had no choice but to wonder what Tom Cruise could hang from in “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part Two.” We offered several recommendations but concluded by proposing he hang from a submerged submarine while carrying out an underwater break-in, an implausible scenario we had once imagined for an Angelina Jolie vehicle but decided to pass off to Cruise given his determination to push the action movie limit to the extreme. Well.

We don’t want to spoil anything, exactly, when it comes to “Dead Reckoning Part One” for those yet to see it, but suffice to say that its ending seems to suggest events in “Dead Reckoning Part Two” will necessitate…Tom Cruise breaking into a submerged submarine?

Cinema Romantico is just happy to know that Hollywood is finally taking our most incredibly absurd action movie ideas to heart, even if it means our blog might be bugged, and look forward to “M:I 9 – Honorable Vengeance” in which Tom Cruise rides a barrel over Niagara Falls.

Misty Watercolor Memories

It’s such a muddy line between harmless and harmful nostalgia. One minute the Super 70s Twitter account is light-heartedly rhapsodizing about, say, the Denver Broncos’ Orange Krush uniforms and the nonpareil godforsaken glop they wear today and the next minute it’s essentially saying football would be better with more brain damage. And so I proceed with caution in talking about the recent Dan Kois piece for Slate in which he interviewed a number of people about what life was like at the turn of the century, the year 2000, which somehow still felt so far away just a few years before that Conan O’Brien could create a whole tongue-in-cheek futuristic sketch about it and that now feels so far away it might as well be a faded picture with an inadvertent thumbprint from a drugstore Kodak disposable camera.

Kois interviewed several people roughly his age, which is to say people who were roughly 27 in the year 2002, about how they lived, worked, and played. I was 25 in the year 2002, so close enough, and remember watching “whatever happened to be on television” because that’s all there was, being utterly unreachable after work hours (no tech bro can tell me that wasn’t better than the always reachable hellscape we have now), and how after work plans often consisted of just going to the same place. Indeed, that’s how the bar at Don Pablo’s (!!!), the defunct Tex Mex chain, became our regular afterwork hangout. Because it was adjacent to the same office parking lot where I worked, and I got off at six whereas everyone else got off at five so they would just go there and then I would eventually walk over. 

More than any of that, though, what interested me from Kois’s piece were the anecdotes of how we used to watch movies, or moreover, how we used to decide what movies to watch. As an abject hater of phones from back in the day when they came with chords and were attached to the wall, it is a vicious, vicious irony that life and movie-going has become so inextricably tied to them. Let me reminisce, for god’s sake, I need this.

How We Used to Decide What Movie to See

Moviefone. We did not have Moviefone in central Iowa, and anyway, as an abject hater of phones, as previously stated, I never liked going this route of getting a movie time unless my hand was forced. If life is a generally a paradox, as I have come to discover, then it’s a big one that as much as I have always detested phones, being eternally yoked to a phone is both depressing and salvation, the former for all the obvious reasons and the latter because I can text instead of talk and buy movie tickets rather than having to call for movie times.  

Video Store. It’s true that in some respect streaming has improved the home movie experience in so much as entities like The Criterion Channel, bless it, mean that if, say, they have a Jean Harlow month you can just pick from all the Jean Harlow movies instead of having to pick from whatever scant Jean Harlow movies your local video store might possess if, cross your fingers, they have any in the first place which if it’s Waukee Video circa 1992 they probably don’t. But just as there is something far more gratifying in physical record shopping than in the algorithm of Spotify telling you what you want to hear, there was something gratifying in showing up at the Blockbuster on Friday night only to discover that all 50 copies of what you wanted to rent are already checked out and forcing you to peruse the aisles, on a self-imposed deadline, of sorts, because you couldn’t search Netflix to infinity, you had to choose before you left the store. And if this is how you sometimes wound up renting “Crimson Tide” again, hey, I wasn’t complaining.

If you know, you know.

The Mall. Oof, two levels of longing here. Sometimes, after spending a few hours at your local mall and having inspected every cassette in Musicland, demoed all the gizmos and gadgets in Radio Shack, and lost interest in the overpriced detritus of Spencer’s Gifts, you might decide to check out a movie. This is how in the summer of 1994 I wound up seeing “I Love Trouble” at the Forum 4 attached to Merle Hay Mall. Because if you were 16 or 66 in 1994, it was easier to see a mid-budget romantic comedy starring Julia Roberts in a movie theater than a superhero. We really did have everything, didn’t we?

Just Showing Up. Though I’m a big believer of living in the moment, I’m not the biggest fan of just rolling up to the movie theater, checking the marquee, and picking something to see, chiefly because the list of movies I want to see each years tends to be long and regimented. On the other, I admire the people just rolling with movie times because they are putting the movie-going experience first. And besides, my favorite movie-going experience from my time in Arizona was a spur of the moment, on the premises, I-need-to-see-a-movie-right-now-because-it’s-hot-and-I’m-miserable situation. You never know.

Newspaper. There are still print movie ads, of course, even in the newspapers long since shredded by the Gannet vultures. But they are dispiritingly functional, condensed to just the theater, the movie, nothing like those glorious miniature movie marquees in print, which transformed the arts and leisure section into a treasure map on which virtually every spot was X. 

Definitely Not Cult Classics: UPDATED

The nine remaining readers of Cinema Romantico will recall that about a month and a half ago we attempted to determine some movies that are Definitely Not Cult Classics in an everything-is-accessible film environment where virtually any movie is considered a cult classic. And though we paused in the middle of this post to question some of our own selections ourselves, one we did not question was still questioned by Friend of the Blog Brad. He noted that the 1990 comedy/thriller [TIC, terminology is correct per Google] “Men at Work” about a pair of garbagemen (Emilio Estevez, who also wrote and directed, and Charlie Sheen) who unwittingly find themselves playing amateur detectives in a political cover-up was a cult classic. 

Wikipedia does not list it as such, which was our only source of (un)official confirmation, but a cursory Google search does find sites like Horror Geek Life deeming “Men at Work” as a “cult comedy,” though based on what, I couldn’t really tell. Maybe this Reddit thread? Maybe, as Friend of the Blog Brad noted, any movie with Keith David is sort of grandfathered into cult status. What put it over the top for the staff here at Cinema Romantico, however, forcing us to officially revise our Definitely Not Cult Classic guidebook was a year-old podcast episode. 

I have been winding my way through Rob Harvilla’s 60 Songs That Explains The 90s podcast, which has been upgraded to 90 songs while retaining the now-technically incorrect title (the kind of disregard for marketing cohesion that I totally respect), and I only just made it to episode 62 about Tag Team’s no introduction needed “Whoomp! (There It Is).” Harvilla includes a long but not in any way superfluous preamble about the controversial, to put it mildly, Miami rap outfit 2 Live Crew, touching upon how their track “Move Something” appeared in “Men at Work.” Indeed, the toxic waste dumping plot revolves around a cassette of an incriminating conversation that inadvertently gets switched with a cassette containing “Move Something” instead. “There are multiple scenes,” Harvilla notes, “of bumbling, aggrieved white dudes getting very confused and angry when 2 Live Crew starts playing.” 

This is very funny. And though “Men at Work”, as Odie Henderson notes in his review at the one-time blog of my former home Slant, is disappointingly afflicted by the era’s prevalent gay panic despite also holding something of an anti-police stance oddly within the space of the very same gay panic subplot, I applaud The Estevez Brothers for also subtly lambasting censorship the very same summer in which a Florida judge ruled 2 Live Crew’s 1989 album “As Nasty as They Wanna Be” to be legally obscene. (Eventually, this bozo ruling was overturned and, thankfully, Florida has gotten ahold of itself since then.) And if cult movies can be about breaking taboos and committing transgressions as much as having devoted followers form around them, then I would like to think “Men at Work” heartily qualifies as one.

Adventures in Movie Promotional Photos, part 112

In discovering yesterday’s image from the (not) “Twister” premiere, I naturally was led to images from the (L.A. Edition) “Twister” premiere (how many premieres did this movie have?), all helpfully catalogued at Go Fug Yourself. I never got past image 13. Cuz, damn. The 90s are back, even if they are not back for people my age, people who lived through the 90s, but while this image is from the 90s, this look is timeless, which is to say immortal, which is to say infinite. In this image, Wesley Snipes is, like space, beyond the observable universe, and so beyond observable fashion, something you, me, we cannot begin to comprehend. And so, I got to thinking.

You might have heard the recent news that Glen Powell is in talks to star in the (semi) long-awaited “Twister” sequel. And I get it. In a mostly movie star-less landscape, Powell is one of the Hollywood young guns who seems like he might have the juice. This blog loves Glen Powell and has said so! But seeing that image of Wesley Snipes at the (L.A. Edition) “Twister” premiere put me in mind of turning the “Twister” sequel into the long-awaited Wesley Snipes comeback. And though the “Twister” sequel is apparently going to be called...can you guess?...can you?...“Twisters,” like, hey man, despite its title, the first “Twister” had multiple twisters, both across the whole movie itself and in one sequence where the sky sprung two tornadoes at once. So, while I understand sequels are all about higher concepts, how exactly is “Twisters” a higher concept? We can do better, so much better, and I’ll tell you how. 

Mike Merriweather (Snipes) is a legendary storm chaser who has seen more tornadoes than anyone. “He’s done everything,” says one grizzled meteorologist, “short of ropin’ a twister.” But when Mike chases a conspicuously erratic tornado one May afternoon in northwest Oklahoma, he suspects it of being...alive? “It’s like that tornado knew me,” growls Mike. Naturally, this gets him laughed out of the storm chasing community, left to watch The Weather Channel in disgrace in fleabag highway motels. Until, that is, a madman scientist (Michael Shannon) is discovered to have implanted the Oklahoma sky with Artificial Intelligence. When an outbreak of robotic tornadoes threatens the entire state, the National Weather Service calls upon Mike once again for the biggest storm chase of his life, one that ends with him, yes, ropin’ a twister. 

Was that so hard?

Adventures in Movie Promotional Photos, part 111

A little while back, Chicago was besieged by inclement weather, severe thunderstorm warnings and tornado watches. So, as the local news breathlessly broke down the Doppler, I did what I often do in such situations and Googled “Twister.” Maybe it was streaming, I thought, and maybe I could watch a little before the tornado siren sounded and I fled to the cellar. But I never got that far. No, what I saw instead was an image captured lo those 27 years ago. This image:

At first, I assumed it must have been snapped at the “Twister” premiere. But the premiere took place in Oklahoma, where the movie is set, and astute readers will notice the baseball cap sported by Woody Harrelson (who is not in the movie) as belonging to the city of Atlanta’s baseball team. Indeed, just behind Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton (who are in the movie), with a hand on each of their shoulders, is Jane Fonda (who is not in the movie) who in 1996 would have been married to Ted Turner, owner of Atlanta’s Major League Baseball organization. Indeed, this, as it turned out, was the “Twister” premiere...with a twist. That is to say, it was the “Twister” premiere benefitting Jane Fonda’s G-CAPP (The Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Power & Potential), held at Atlanta’s Fox Theater one day after the “Twister” premiere in Oklahoma City. 

But what I am even talking about here? This is all setting the scene and, honestly, you don’t need the scene to be set. The scene sets itself. This photo exists independently of where it took place. It does because of Hunt, of course. And though you can find photos from this same scene snapped just before or after the above photo that show Hunt smiling and seemingly jovial and happy to be there, in the vacuum of this single image, that matters as little as the surrounding context. Because there, here, all on its own, in Hunt’s frown amid this sea of smiles is where the truth emerges.

It might be tempting to ask, who are they looking at? Because clearly, they are looking at someone. (Ted Turner? Speculation!) But whoever is outside of the frame does not affect what is inside the frame, which is perfect all on its own, one moment in time that feels eternal, a split-second in which Helen Hunt, consciously or not, embodies the overcrowded agony of the movie premiere, where rather than standing on a red carpet, you wish to god you were sprawled at home on your couch. 

In Memoriam: Reed Rothchild

Over the weekend, The Video Archives podcast announced that Rick Dalton, who starred in the 1960s television series “Bounty Law” and was egregiously robbed of an Emmy for his guest appearance on “Lancer” prior to reinventing himself as a star of spaghetti westerns overseas in Italy, died at the age of 90. He passed away peacefully in his Hawaii home, per Video Archives, and was survived by his wife, Francesca. It was a sad day. Less reported, however, was the comprehensive story in Popular Science Magazine detailing the disappearance of Reed Rothchild, co-star of the cult movie “Angels Live in My Town” and semi-prominent San Fernando Valley professional magician, a little over five years ago when he concluded a show in the northern California city of Mount Shasta with his patented Vanishing Man trick and then never re-appeared. An unusual search and rescue team of FBI agents, physicists, and paranormal investigators were ultimately left flummoxed. 

The state of California officially closed Rothchild’s missing person case over the weekend. He is presumed dead, though the fortune teller who accompanied state officials at a small, hastily arranged press conference made certain to note that death in this specific case also included the possibility of Rothchild being in another dimension, or possibly The Andromeda Galaxy.

Next Year's Best (Worst) Super Bowl Commerical

Nothing is new anymore, creativity is dead. That’s why “Night Court” is back on TV and you saw Harrison Ford trot out his gruff old bones as Indiana Jones yet again for a commercial spot during Sunday’s Super Bowl. Speaking of which, the Super Bowl was awash in advertisements plundering from movies of the past, throwing nostalgia in our collective faces as much as that one guy, forget his name, born in a feeding trough, died for our relentless dull-headedness, or so they say, can’t remember, it’ll come to me eventually. Anyway. Point is, this, I guess, is what the people want, more of the same, more of what they already had a long time ago, or at least, that’s what the ad execs tell them they want. That’s why Alicia Silverstone was out there cashing in on one of the greatest performances of the 90s to shill for some product I honestly can’t remember (good job, whoever that was!), Sylvester Stallone was repurposing not Rocky Balboa for the 5,000th time but [checks notes] Gabe Walker of “Cliffhanger,” only slightly more rememberable than Kit Latura of “Daylight,” for Paramount+, Ben Stiller went to the “Zoolander” well in the name of Pepsi, Serena Williams was undermining her GOAT status by giving a rote cover version of Al Pacino’s “Any Given Sunday” speech, and a host of athletes (including Serena, again!) and actors kind of remade “Caddyshack” on Michelob Ultra’s behalf. When Leslie Neilsen sat down to plug Coors Light in 1990, he was just Leslie Nielsen, man.

But hey, if these ad execs want to weave nostalgia into ostensible ad gold, baby, Cinema Romantico can dig deeper in the crates than these marketing bros could ever dream. And so, while I’m tempted to recommend an Eddie Kasalivich/Lily Sinclair Amtrak spot or suggest one-upping that Bennifer Dunkin’ Donuts spot with a “Brothers McMullen” Dunkin’ spot instead, and though I will refrain from suggesting a Jackie-O Pascale ad for Intel because that might finally send me over the proverbial edge just as I will eschew proposing Michelob Ultra burrow into the historical obscure by remaking “Wildcats” because, yeesh, leaving an inner city comedy in the hands of some modern mad men sounds like a recipe for absolute disaster, I do have a positively unmissable proposal for Anheuser-Busch nevertheless.

Because remember when the Starfleet gang time travels to 1986 in “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home?” And Kirk meets cute with Dr. Gillian Taylor (Catherine Hicks)? And they go out to dinner at an Italian restaurant? Remember what Gillian orders for them to drink? Michelob, that’s right. Product placement that’s been waiting to be tapped lo these 37 years. Cut To: Super Bowl LVIII. Kirk and Gillian in a fast casual Romulan brewery, raising their glasses to the camera. “Michelob Ultra…the beer of the future.”

What's Going On?

What in the world is going on in this photo Joe Telles snapped for Deadline to accompany Joe Utichi’s piece about the writer/director and co-stars (from left to right, Colin Farrell, Martin McDonagh, Brendan Gleeson) of “The Banshees of Inisherin?”

A.) Did Telles say “Cheese!” and prompt Gleeson to take the direction a bit too enthusiastically, McDonagh to contrarily refute it, and Farrell to half-heartedly obey (“I don’t really feel like smiling”) in a way to which I can totally relate?

B.) Is this each man summarizing his attitude toward the movie promotional process? Gleeson mocking it? McDonagh denouncing it? Farrell remaining neutral because, hey, he’s in the thick of the Best Actor Oscar race here and can’t afford to rock the boat?

C.) Has Gleeson just cut wind? Is McDonagh reacting to it? Are we capturing Farrell the split-second before he realizes it? Does the second photo in the roll feature Farrell scrunching up his nose and screaming “Feck!?”