Adventures in Movie Posters, part 281

After “Freelance” (“barely a movie,” raves Brian Tallerico at RogerEbert.com), our next crack at the would-be rom com resurrection is “Anyone but You,” starring Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell, and slated for a Christmas release. I believe that both Sweeney and Powell have the juice. In fact, Sweeney, by this blog’s estimation, gave one of the year’s best performances in “Reality.” I was excited to see “Anyone but You,” albeit in a wait-for-streaming sort of way...until I saw the poster. Whether it’s worse than the awful “Freelance” poster might well be in the eye of the beholder, but it’s bad. Don’t judge a movie by a poster, and all that, and I’m trying real hard not to, I swear, but also, man, it’s so, so easy. Look at this thing.

Let’s start at the top here and work our way down. Because the reversed names, as in the wrong name is above the wrong person, gets us off to a rocky start. I mean, it’s nice to see Sydney Sweeney come before Glen Powell, and I would like to believe that Powell, who from my perch thousands of miles away in flyover country seems like a decent fellow, encouraged it. And though I know names being reversed is a regular occurrence, typically tied to contract and marketing flapdoodle, the right hand not doing what the left hand is doing, and all that, it just looks so haphazard and unprofessional. I mean, these marketing geniuses will babble about the importance of first impressions all the livelong day, and then they turn around give me this crap? What’s a dumb blogger supposed to think?! Practice what you PowerPoint!

Given the bare feet and their wet clothes, Sweeney and Powell would seem to have just taken a dunk in Sydney Harbour. Yet, their hair remains conspicuously coiffed, photoshop mixing with marketing so that the feet, so to speak, don’t know what the hands are doing. Speaking of the hands, or more to the point, the arms, them being crossed would suggest the duo being comically at odds. But those facial expressions! What are those?! They’re not at odds! Powell’s expression seems to have been taken from some heartthrob promo photo, not an unexpected plunge into the water, while Sweeney’s appears to have been grabbed from some paparazzi photo of her waiting in line at the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf. Why would you do your star like that?! Besides which, given the wet clothes and the champagne bottle beside them, isn’t the takeaway supposed to be wacky rom com? They don’t look romantically tipsy; they look like two disinterested brats with champagne problems. What in god’s name are we doing?!

As for the tagline...I mean, the tagline could have worked, if they looked like the perfect couple, which they don’t! Because of everything we just said! [Steams comes out of ears.]

Sigh. At least, though, we can all take refuge in the image of Sydney Harbour, or more specifically, the Sydney Opera House, the burgeoning cinematic Tour Eiffel of the capital of New South Wales. At least, that’s how I imagine it, seeing this poster, the Sydney Opera House viewable from every pier, every wharf, every dock, imagining a whole new movie shot for me to obsess over, the Over the Shoulder Eiffel Tower Shot transformed into the Under the Bare Feet Sydney Opera House shot, an image Quentin Tarantino could love. 

Bar Is Closed

It was reported yesterday that the sequel to “Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One,” slated for release next summer in 2024, is now being delayed to summer 2025. This would seem to stem at least in part from the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike, which this blog very much supports. If the next M:I needs to get pushed to the summer of the Brisbane Olympics in 2032 so SAG-AFTRA’s siege of the shareholders ends in victory, I’m all for it. Still, as I have written before, few event movies anymore feel that way to me, but the McQuarrie “Missions Impossible” do. I felt so excited walking to my neighborhood theater to see “Dead Reckoning Part One” this past July. I even waited until Sunday to see it to give myself a few extra days of anticipation. Plus, Tom Cruise could well be breaking into a submerged submarine in the new one just as I have always dreamed! I need to know! Even more than all that, though, well, I mean, like, you know, next year is 2024. That means it’s the American Presidential election. That means I have to wait to see “Dead Reckoning Part Two” until after the American Presidential election. I was counting on this movie to help get me through, man! Even worse, with the way things are going these days, and if the philistines get back in office, you never know, we might not see it at all. 

Adventures in Movie Posters, part 272

You didn’t necessarily need to see the ostensible romantic comedy “Six Days, Seven Nights” in 1998 to know it went bust. No, working in a movie theater that late spring, early summer of 1998, I could see its brewing non-success clear as day in the gargantuan “Six Days, Seven Nights” standee set up in our lobby. Like an old salt who knows when the color of the sky portends inclement weather, that standee predicted rain. It was the air of both Harrison Ford and Anne Heche, betraying the movie’s lack of froth, romantic or otherwise, sight-unseen, and in their holding hands, which looked a little too airbrushed. You didn’t see that standee and think, “Fun!” You saw it and thought, “Are we sure these two like each other?” That came flooding back to me when I stumbled, in an online sort of way, onto the poster for the upcoming “Freelance,” which like so many movies these days, this less-and-less ardent movie blogger didn’t even realize existed.

Thing is, the premise of this comedy/adventure, I sort of like it, an-ex special forces operative (Cena) working as private security for a has-been journalist (Brie) finding themselves in the middle of a coup when she interviews a dictator. “Freelance,” in other words, is “Plane” crossed with “The Lost City,” which is to say, one more spiritual remake of “Romancing the Stone,” even though it can’t be as good because just like air conditioners, rom coms aren’t built to last anymore. But. Like “Six Days, Seven Nights,” hoo boy, I’m getting – wait, what do the kids say? – bad vibes from that poster. I mean, did I say, “The Lost City?” I meant, Photoshop City! Yikes! These two likenesses of John Cena and Alison Brie have just been dropped into some likeness of some tropical locale. I mean, if it’s gonna look fake, why lamely try to make it look real? Just give us the version of a Harlequin book cover. Like “Romancing the Stone!”

Because what even is this? Cena’s expression is defined by a lack of one. If it wasn’t for the gun in his left hand, he could be here to fix the smartphone that is photoshopped into her right hand. (And I guess the smartphone is in her hand in order to denote she’s a journalist? Because this is 2023 and they couldn’t photoshop in a notepad and pen because nobody would know what those were?) They might be in some pool of water, but he’s not even wet, as if he’s not even rescuing her from a lagoon but, like, a wet t-shirt contest at Porky’s in the Everglades. 

What’s more, their facial expressions, his lack of one and her more panicked one, look less like a comedy/adventure and more like something…serious? I mean, it does say right there above the title that Freelance is from the director of “Taken,” an action/thriller. That means it is also from the director of “Peppermint,” and “The Gunman,” humorless both, and “From Paris with Love,” described by the late Roger Ebert as “mostly bang bang and not kiss kiss” which does not bode well for a comedy/adventure.

But the writer of “Freelance,” it turns out, is from the staff of Jimmy Kimmel Live! You’re pairing a Kimmel writer with the director of “Taken?!” What is this, Coverdale/Page?! 

Wait! As if this confounding recipe required one more unlikely ingredient, do you see whose name is also on the poster, getting the boost of the classic “and” credit? Christian Slater! I mean, what?! This could be anything! This could be “Broken Arrow”; this could be “Kuffs”; this could be “Dawn Rider”; this could be Arkansas Dave Rudabaugh at a Sonny Chiba triple feature! NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING!!!

And though I’d be smart to walk away, to paraphrase Pop Culture Conqueror Taylor Swift in my desperate gambit to inject some relevance, here, right at the end, and not see “Freelance” come October 27th, rom coms like this, they’re quicksand.

Revised Official Heart of Stone Rankings

Having watched and reviewed “Heart of Stone” (see yesterday), it is time once again to revise the Official Heart of Stone rankings. 

1. Heart of Stone, Taylor Dayne.

2. Heart of Stone, The Rolling Stones.

3. Heart(s) of Stone, Bruce Springsteen.

4. Heart of Stone, Cher.

5. Heart of Stone, Dale Watson.

......

227. Heart of Stone (Harper, ’23).

Trailer Enquiry

Warner Bros. announced last week that it was pushing “Dune 2” from a fall 2023 release, at least partly because its stars cannot promote given the ongoing Hollywood labor strike, undoubtedly because while the studios are all in on ChatGPT they have yet to manufacture an assembly line of S1m0nes to walk the red carpet. The much-anticipated epic will now be released in spring 2024. That seems to suggest the powers-that-be assume the strike will be over by then though I fear they underestimate, still, how the WGA and SAG-AFTRA rightly see this labor strike in existential terms, perhaps because the studio bigwigs’ HUD is designed to filter the whole world, human beings included, through the bottom line. What big release will be pushed next, who knows, though it seems to me the industry’s ostensible stewards would be content to put every big release on ice before they give anyone else even the tiniest piece of the pie. As such, while we wait for the movie season to be called on account of greed and stupidity, let’s continue to hone our trailer reviewing skills. 

My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3. Though for me, Nia Vardalos will never be better than the comically overenthusiastic way she pronounced “penne arrabbiata” in her one episode of the forgotten, unforgettable turn of the century ABC sitcom “It’s Like, You Know,” yielding a classic Chris Eigeman withering look in return, I have nothing but love for her going back to the “Greek Wedding” well as many times as she damn well pleases. I hope she makes a fourth one even if, like the second, I don’t see it (which I won’t). Speaking of which. Watch trailer here.

Expend4bles. So, let’s see, if you were keeping track, and honestly, I wasn’t, Stallone and Statham and Dolph and Randy Couture are back while Harrison Ford and Arnold Schwarzenegger and Antonio Banderas and Jet Li and Terry Crews and Rhonda Rousey and Wesley Snipes are not. That could have been because something happened to those characters, no idea, didn’t watch it. As for this one, casting Megan Fox as the token female is apropos and admittedly even clever, in an if The Expendables designed a virtual woman a la “Weird Science” it would probably look like Megan Fox sort of way. Mostly, I’m just happy to see Andy Garcia, even though my people are still trying to get ahold of his people to star in my own action comedy The Indispensables, for whom we also are happy to have Mr. Snipes if Expend4bles is not. In closing, we can only hope that Expendable5 includes a Hologram George Peppard. Watch trailer here.

Retribution. I apologize for missing this Liam Neeson entry in our annual Middling Thrillers Only movie preview, but I swear - I swear - I saw no information about it back then and am strongly suspicious this was entirely filmed, edited, and released in eight months, evoked in Neeson’s character’s name: Matt Turner. Our Matt Turner is a father ferrying his two kids to school when he gets a call that a bomb is inside his car and will explode if he stops and gets out. It sounds a lot like “Speed,” I know, but for those very few following along at home, it also sounds a lot like Pedal, which I have mentioned before, my quarter-century old screenplay about a bomb strapped to a tricycle that I’m still shopping around. I mean, remember the scene in “Hollywood Homicide” where Harrison Ford is riding around on a kid’s bike? Imagine that, except it’s grizzled Liam Neeson riding around on a trike for 90 minutes. Take the plunge, Netflix; I’d sell Pedal for one pan con bistec at El Mago de las Fritas just to see it. Watch trailer here.

The Retirement Plan. For the annual Maui Invitational early-season college basketball tournament (please consider donations for Maui residents affected by the recent wildfires) the coaches typically opt out of their usual sideline attire for Hawaiian print shirts. It’s a festive and fun touch, if also a funny one, because hey, these are college basketball coaches, volcanic Napoleons all of them, meaning that when their occasionally imperfect players personally slight them by making the wrong pass, or the clearly partisan referees malign them before the eyes of God by making wrong calls (that were probably right), and they blow a gasket and burst a vein, they are doing so in Hawaiian shirts, epitomizing the very antithesis of aloha. And that is how Nicolas Cage comes across in this trailer. Though he appears to be playing a father with a secret, action-packed past brought out of retirement to protect his daughter, I am choosing to read the fury in Cage’s turn as an innate commentary on the difficulty of coordinating the heart and mind within one’s self when present-day America has turned the notion of retirement into something like a pipe dream. In fact, I am reluctant to see the movie so as not to spoil my possibly incorrect reading. Watch trailer here.

Vacation Friends 2. Wait, what? Is this like “Leonard Part 6?” Is this a movie billing itself as a sequel when, in reality, no movie preceded it? Because, reader, I tell you, I swear to you, right here, right now, so help me movie gods, I had and still have no idea about there ever being a first “Vacation Friends.” Watch trailer here.

Bottoms. I confess, I judged this one by its title, imagining something cut from the “American Pie” series, “American Pie Presents: Bottoms” (how low can we go?). But that was partially because I had somehow failed to realize that “Bottoms” was directed by Emma Seligman, who directed 2020’s “Shiva Baby,” which I loved, and starred Rachel Sennott, “Shiva Baby” herself, and Ayo Edebiri, a potential silver screen Vanderquigs, the dreamiest of duos. More than, though, this trailer is infused with some unexpectedly surrealist touches, like the football players wearing their uniforms through the whole movie, apparently, never mind the always welcome presence of Charli XCX on the soundtrack. And while I must wait to, like, you know, see “Bottoms” to render any judgements, I can’t help but wonder if it got the un-prized late August release because the dopes in charge of distribution were too confused by what they saw and gave the order to dump it. Watch trailer here.

Trailer Enquiry

With the Hollywood labor strike still ongoing and which we hope takes as long as it must for the WGA and SAG to get every damn thing they want even if it means all we have to watch are Rizzoli & Isles re-runs and Hallmark Christmas movies made with stars of the British Columbia dinner theater scene, it’s difficult to forecast what the movie release schedule will look like this fall and winter. As numerous outlets have reported, studio bigwigs are already pushing some of their biggest 2023 offerings to 2024 all while kvetching that stars they were all prepared to write off as immaterial to AI facsimiles of stars are now the only thing that can help pitch the product at upcoming film festivals. Even so, movie trailers continue coming down the pike and we here at Cinema Romantico (feeling less romantic every day) thought reviewing a few a fine idea since soon trailers might be all we have left.

Poor Things. Described by no less an authority than Wikipedia as “a surrealist science fantasy comedy-drama,” that’s a tongue-twisting explainer that feels right in step with its director, Yorgos Lanthimos, whose previous work, like “The Favourite” or “The Lobster,” you either enjoy, nay, appreciate or want to point a crucifix at, like Lanthimos is a vampire. Dude’s provocative, is what I’m saying, and is why I like that the teaser for his latest concludes with Mark Ruffalo getting smacked across the face, as if Lanthimos is the slapper and we, the audience, the slapped. Watch here.

The Marvels. Much like the trailer for “The Eternals” (which I did not see) showcased how Angelina Jolie’s innate Movie Stardom is being wasted by an industry that increasingly only concerns itself with CGI and shareholders, the trailer for the forthcoming “Marvels” in concert with 2019’s “Captain Marvel” makes me concerned that we also might be wasting Brie Larson’s screwball comedy chops and I wish I could take her in a time machine back to the 80s and create her own “Working Girl” and see what she’s got. Of course, once studio execs get wind of my time machine, they’ll go back in time and then use 80s Melanie Griffith and Harrison Ford and Sigourney Weaver and Joan Cusack to make 2023 movies and there is no telling what havoc this will unleash. Watch here.

Heart of Stone. When I compiled my annual THRILLERS ONLY movie preview for 2023, I noted that there was next to no information for the upcoming Gal Gadot vehicle “Heart of Stone.” And here’s the funny thing, I realized the trailer had screened at my showing of “Barbie” only when the title flashed on the screen right at the end. I literally don’t remember a thing about it, like I blacked out as it was happening, or maybe was just so disinterested that my brain shut off of its own accord, or perhaps even that the trailer wasn’t real in the first place and just flashed up the title to make us all think it had just been shown and that when it finally debuts on Netflix (where I will still watch it because I’m an idiot) everyone will watch it without realizing they have not even watched anything and somehow it will still get a 92% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes.

Next Goal Wins. I can’t decide if I find Taika Waititi’s in-trailer joke about being an Academy and Teen Choice award loser charming or a calculated attempt at charm which renders it charmless. But I confess the part where Michael Fassbender says, “We’ve worked too long and hard for this,” in tandem with the sort of half-assed triumphant way he stands there when he says it, is side-splitting because his voice makes him sound like someone reading lines from a moderately successful college basketball coach’s book on leadership from an easy chair with potato chip crumbs on his shirt and on the pages. I can only imagine this line reading will be the highlight. Watch here. 

Priscilla. The only thing Sofia Coppola does better than make movies, it seems, is concoct teaser trailers for those same movies.

Alien Superstars

Currently on display at the Norton Simon Museum

Michael Mann recently released a sequel to his second of four magnum opuses “Heat” (1995) in novel form. Among other storylines, “Heat 2” apparently details what transpired after Chris Shiherlis’s initial escape from authorities in the wake of his gang’s big bank robbery gone wrong as well as what led to his and Charlene’s marriage in the first place. And, I don’t know, reader, I just don’t know. The image of Charlene (Ashley Judd) from her balcony waving Chris (Val Kilmer) away, and that breath Judd breathlessly takes in the moment, like she’s taking in their whole existence one last time, isn’t that a perfect final image? Why do we need to expand on it? Never mind that they are Mann’s characters and he can do what he wants with them, I’m the “Before Sunrise” fan, one of the originals with his “Before Sunrise” VHS tape bought at Suncoast Motion Picture Company, who thought the 2004 “Before Sunset” sequel showing what Jesse and Celine were up to 9 years later was an atrocious idea, an insult, how dare they. Then I saw the movie in the theater and swooned so hard I went back to the theater a week later and saw it again. So, really, what do I know? I will probably read “Heat 2” and I will probably love it.

But I’m not here to talk about “Heat 2.” No, I’m here to talk about a Tweet from Michael Mann himself about “Heat 2” including an image from “Heat.” This Tweet.

That Tweet stopped me short. I was going through Twitter like the Joker of Tim Burton’s “Batman” going through Vicki Vale’s portfolio – “Crap, crap, crap, crap, crap” – until he gets to the good stuff. I saw that photo of Judd and Kilmer as Charlene and Chris and I just looked at it like the time I looked at Monet’s Regatta at Argenteuil at the Musée d’Orsay and tried for, like, 15 minutes to walk away and just…couldn’t. I mean, look at it! I know part of this stems from the youth and beauty of Ashley and Val given the former’s severe injuries from falling in the Congo and the latter’s health issues, including losing his voice, so severe they seem to suggest his recent nigh wordless appearance in the “Top Gun” sequel was his movie swan song.

Let’s set aside youth, however, and just focus on beauty. I don’t mean to be shallow here but…they’re beautiful. They are the mystical Beautiful People. They’re the kind of couple you ogle as a couple yourself from across the way, saying things like, “Now that is a beautiful couple.” They’re like Beyoncé and Jay-Z that time at the NBA Finals where the second half had already started but America’s Royals got shepherded to their courtside seats anyway and for a minute there you couldn’t even pay attention to the best athletes in the world because these Beautiful People had just wandered on to your screen. They’re like the chorus of Beyoncé’s “Alien Superstar”...“too classy for this world.”  “Heat” deserves an NPA rating because of this image. No Puritans Allowed. Mann dresses them both in black, emphasizing their features which in the scene’s 35mm lighting seems to coat them in the patina of their beauty. Some people glow and Charlene and Chris glow.

But. But! Chris’s lips are ever so slightly apart, suggesting he is speaking, yet looking slightly past her, as if uninterested in her reaction to whatever he’s saying. But her reaction makes the frame. Her face is quizzical, her eyes in a squint that might be confusion or might be disbelief, giving the frame an unexpected tension. Her posture is relaxed, rhyming with the spaghetti strap of her era-appropriate dress tumbling off her shoulder, but the relaxation taken in tandem with the expression transforms it into something more akin to boredom, a bored dissatisfaction, whatever he’s saying an unwitting metaphor for everything that even their beauty cannot cover up. 

Fake Runaway Jury End Credits

My friend Daryl recently introduced his girlfriend to John McTiernan’s 80s pop culture classic “Predator” and noted how magical it would be to see “Predator,” here, now, in 20-freaking-22, after Major Alan Dutch Schaefer became Governor of California, for the first time. And if there is a lot in “Predator” that I wish I could see for the first time a second time, there is nothing I wish I could see all over again than the end credits, the ones where all the major players are re-introduced. It’s not dissimilar to what “Top Gun” did a year earlier, though “Top Gun” merely if gloriously recycled images from the movie itself and “Predator” seemed to have its actors strike poses specifically for the end credits. 

Like so many other elements modern movies simply do not have enough of, this concluding joie de vivre is one of them. Occasionally, you’ll catch movies doing it, like “Kill Bill.” “Top Gun: Maverick” just did it too, of course, though too much in the manner of a self-serious torch song music video than an Old Milwaukee commercial from the 80s. Really, the only way you could have improved the last two “Mission: Impossible” movies would have been by referencing the “Predator” end credits: Tom Cruise grinning from ear to ear at the camera while hanging from a helicopter, Ving Rhames tipping his fedora to the camera as he eats gelato, Vanessa Kirby smiling at the camera while singing karaoke, and so on. Even more than that, though, what I’m picturing with such end credits is – what else? – the preeminent middling thriller of our time, “Runaway Jury” (2003).

“Runaway Jury” is set in New Orleans and so I’m picturing us swapping out whatever schlocky musical score was used over the end credits for Fats Domino’s “Let the Four Winds Blow” instead. Our fake “Runaway Jury” end credits begin with Nick Searcy bent over at a cigarette vending machine where he gets a pack of Marlboros, removing one as he turns toward the camera with a shit-eating grin. 

Jeremy Piven pops a fistful of TUMS and dutifully acknowledges the camera.

Jennifer Beals finishes swearing the oath in the jury box and then turns to the camera and smiles.

Jennifer Beals nudges Nora Dunn who has fallen asleep in the jury box and who gets it together just enough to sort of half-look at the camera and sort of smile.

Mingling with the Benson family in a Superdome luxury box, Bruce Davison is startled by the camera’s presence, chuckles, and offers salutations by raising his cocktail glass. 

Playing tuba in an all judges (all in judges robes) jazz band, Bruce McGill leans back from the mouthpiece, turns to the camera, and roars with laughter. 

Dustin Hoffman stands up from the attorneys table to issue an objection, only to catch sight of the camera, to his right and a little low, and smile.

I love that scene when Rachel Weisz is taunting Gene Hackman on the trolley, chewing her pen cap as she does (what actorly business!), and so we would have kept her on set that day an extra ten minutes to shoot an end credits-specific scene where she chews her pen cap and then whips her head around toward the camera and winks.

Given Gene Hackman’s noted irritability he probably would not have wanted any part of this exercise. As such, we would work that into the proceedings and have his character angrily waving the camera away and then putting his hand over it, like a politician claiming his exact quote was somehow misquoted and now trying to ward off the pesky media.

Finally we come to John Cusack whose character Nicholas Easter is set up as a gamer, meaning we will see him in a gaming chair playing some game and then looking left toward the camera and smiling the smile of the leading man. 

In a perfect world...

The $290 Million Question

Over the weekend the trailer for the loquaciously titled “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One”, the 2023 sequel to the twin peaks of twenty-tens pop moviemaking (“Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation” and “Mission: Impossible – Fallout”), was leaked to Twitter, resulting in nothing less than social media rapture. Depending on the source, this trailer would make you believe in God, was better than sex, or deserved the Palme d’Or. I missed the leak, alas, but saw the preview on Monday after its official release and yeah, it’s good. I recommend having smelling salts on hand for the Christopher McQuarrie M:I devotee in your life. The trailer, it’s gut-busting globe-trotting rapid-fire spectacle where Rebecca Ferguson wears an eyepatch and wields a freaking sword, McQuarrie appears to dial up a variation of Buster Keaton’s biggest trick play, Shea Whigham (!) shows up for half a second, and Tom Cruise runs, cocks his head like he’s getting off the ring stool before the 7th round when he has decided it’s time to finally just go ahead and knock the other guy out, and hurtles off the edge of the earth into the abyss aboard a motorcycle as if it’s the end of “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.” [Sucks down a whole bottle of water.] 

However. The question before us today is not whether the “Dead Reckoning” trailer has opened your eyes to God, is better than sex, or worthy of a Palme d’Or. No, the question, as it is with any superb trailer, is this: is it better than “The Bling Ring” teaser? You know, the one in which Sofia, her majesty, virtually invented TikTok by remixing her own movie into a minute-long series of impeccable memes that concluded with its own version of a motorcycle descending into the mist with a convertible burning rubber into the heart of Californication.

Answer: No. No, it is not better than “The Bling Ring” teaser. Next.

All My Favorite Things in the (second) House of Gucci Trailer

This is why I’ll be there opening night (I will not be there opening night): Lady Gaga, as Patrizia Gucci, glowering across extravagantly decorated rooms. 

Well, you have to have at least one shot of Gaga dancing. You don’t include at least one shot of Gaga dancing and the marketing department is going make you recut the whole thing. 

“It’s Gucci,” says Al Pacino as Aldo Gucci, “because I say it is”, in a manner to suggest we will be getting, like, “Devil’s Advocate” Pacino more than, like, “Donnie Brasco” Pacino which is exactly how I would want it. 

Speaking of which...holy crap. Pacino switching on his virtual megaphone while Jared Leto, as Paolo Gucci, is over there looking like he’s auditioning for “Super Mario Bros.” This is like a faux-Renaissance painting you would see in a Wes Anderson movie, or something. 

Unflattering screenshot, I know, apologies, Gaga, I hope you will forgive me. But. When she says the capping line of the trailer - “I don’t consider myself a particularly ethical person” - she does this thing when she says ethical, like she’s biting into it, gleefully laying bare her contempt for the whole concept of ethics. 

It is, as they say, a motion picture and so you really have to see this image in motion. But when Gaga lets her head fall back onto Adam Driver’s shoulder..... [gif of an exploding star] This is the cover of her theoretical future Italo Disco album with Giorgio Moroder that they already should have made. 

Salma Hayek getting a mud bath speaks for itself. 

Life goals

Lady Gaga going all Lorraine Bracco as Karen Hill, looking she just got cast on “Real Housewives of New Jersey”, is one of those Stop And Remake The Whole Movie In This Image moments. 

Have I told you? I haven’t told you. My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife and I are going to Rome in a couple weeks. I’m looking forward to many things, obviously, though drinking espresso, just stopping at random bars while we’re out strolling to down an espresso before continuing our leisurely stroll, is high on the list. And every time I sip an espresso in Rome - that’s Rome, Italy - I’m going to imagine I’m sipping it like Lady Gaga in the “House of Gucci” trailer, like in the space of that cup the moment is eternal. 

Pitch Meeting: Goldfish

You have probably seen the story, the one about goldfish being deposited into lakes and growing to sizes seemingly impossible for small specimens mostly known, perhaps, for being starter pets of children who generally forget they even have them in the first place. If people are being cautioned against this, I thought, then perhaps it is time for a cinematic cautionary tale, a la the 1980 horror movie “Alligator”, which memorably warned us against flushing alligators down the toilet. And so. 

I thought about young Raina Shockley in Judson, Ohio improbably winning a rigged carnival game where she somehow manages to land a ping pong ball in a fish tank, winning the goldfish swimming therein. A burgeoning environmentalist, however, and not wanting to keep a goldfish cooped up in one of those scrawny tanks, she decides of her own volition to release the itty bitty freshwater fish into nearby Buttle Lake, bidding it a fond farewell, to live its best fish life. A sweet moment, however, grows ominous as the camera pulls back to reveal the nuclear reactors bellowing smoke just behind the quietly lapping water.

Flash ahead a couple decades and Raina (Abbi Jacobson), having grown up to be an ecologist and having not been to her hometown in years due to Reasons To Be Written Later, is reluctantly summoned back home by a Fish & Wildlife Service Agent Gary Hadwin (Burl Moesley) after strange doings out at Buttle Lake. On what seems like a routine excursion, Gary is eaten alive by a goldfish the size of a 1980s Buick Station Wagon, which follows Raina ashore, improbably able to breathe on land (“like the Northern Lodgepole,” observes Raina), and flaps away.

Raina and Judson Sheriff Joe Wheed (Michael Shannon) are then forced to pursue this nuclear waste-fueled goldfish as it flaps from lake to lake, wreaking havoc along the way, seemingly bent on reaching Lake Erie, and seeming to recognize Raina. “That’s impossible,” says Sheriff Wheed. “Everyone knows goldfish have no memory.” “That’s a fallacy,” explains Raina. “They have memory up to five months. And if its memory was nuclear powered, there’s no telling how far it might go back.”

Their pursuit, meanwhile, is complicated by the unwelcome presence of both Howard Faberghanz (Kevin Corrigan), president of the local Nuclear Power company who claims he is just here to make amends to the community but secretly wants to sell the goldfish to a Detroit fishmonger for a hefty price, and Stan Jervis (Bruce McGill), calling himself the best big game hunter in the Midwest until it becomes clear he just works the gun counter at the local Cabela’s.

Space Jam: Dirty Work

(AP) July 27, 2027 – Even with Warner Bros. beaming the newest entry of their “Space Jam” Warner-verse series into the North American night sky on Friday and Saturday evenings so that people could watch from the comfort of their own backyards and through sunroofs if they happened to be stuck in traffic, “Space Jam: One on One” slam dunked the competition to earn $52 million this weekend. Zion Williamson, Bugs Bunny, and Yosemite Sam did not have to say their prayers in stopping the two-week run of the seventh Spider-Man reboot, “Spider-Man: At Great Length”, as king of the box office. This despite earning a 0% critic approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes for a movie in which Williamson plays the Gopher from “Caddyshack” in winner-take-all game of one on one.

The fifth film in the series was so successful that Warner Bros. immediately announced plans for a sixth, “Space Jam: Dirty Work.” A well-placed source inside the studio says this movie, too, will take place in the Warner-verse, where John McCabe of “McCabe & Mrs. Miller” arrives in the town of Presbyterian Church in 1902 to not merely open a brothel, like the 1971 Robert Altman film, but to erect a rudimentary basketball court to spearhead a gambling venture.

In the movie, the source says, McCabe will kidnap various Looney Tunes characters and force them to play daily against revolving teams of miners, gunfighters, and drifters in contests upon which everyone is invited to wager and that, given the timeframe and relative infancy and lack of understanding about the game, are less like basketball than mud wrestling. Fed up, the Looney Tunes make a wager with McCabe, that if they beat his most fearsome lineup (one likely to include Zod, Ursa, and Non of “Superman II”), they win their freedom. The Tunes proceed to enlist Hall-of-Famer Dennis Rodman as a mentor in the ways of getting down and dirty, throwing elbows and bending the rules to your advantage when no one’s looking. 

The late Anthony Mason will also play “himself” as an A.I.

The Cannes Brûlé Palme

The story goes that on March 29, 1743, King George II stood up during the chorus of George Frederic Handel’s Messiah, prompting the crowd to do the same, history’s first standing ovation. Of course, as James Bennett II noted in noting this for WQXR in 2017, “the reason for that ascendant, magisterial behavior” was lost to time. Was it reverence, restlessness, something else? Who’s to say? Whatever the reason, apocryphal or not, the story is nevertheless instructive. Not simply because the King stood but because everyone did. That might be because as the King does so do you or else, tyranny, in other words, which is the word Jesse McKinley used, or his headline writers did, in a 2003 piece for The New York Times detailing the phenomenon, deeming it “The Tyranny of the Standing Ovation”, where even the most subpar Broadway shows could be labeled as successes simply because they got standing ovations every night. “Now the standing ovation is de rigueur,” McKinley quoted Liz Smith saying, meaning required by etiquette, unofficially expected, cosmically contracted, which is precisely why I am suspicious of so many standing ovations. If the performance moves you that much, then stand, go for it and God bless. But if it didn’t, don’t, otherwise, what does it mean? Squat, that’s what, just a blasé automatic exercise, like the encore at concerts. When I saw Lissie at Lincoln Hall in 2013, she apparently judged our concluding applause unsatisfactory and did not emerge for an encore. If I was disappointed, I was honestly even more impressed. Make it count! 

That brings us to Cannes, the prestigious annual film festival in the south of France. Cannes is essentially a burger topping bar when it comes to standing ovations. What good is a burger if you can’t slap fried mac cheese on top it, or an entire mackerel fillet, or put the burger inside a root beer float, bun and all? Standing ovations at Cannes don’t even register on the applause scale if they don’t last some excessive amount of minutes. At this year’s festival, Matt Damon’s “Stillwater” received a five-minute standing ovation while Wes Anderson’s “The French Dispatch” received a nine-minute standing ovation. But these ovations hardly compare to the Cannes standing ovation record, an absurd 22 minutes for “Pan’s Labyrinth.” Nicole Kidman’s “The Paperboy” earned a 15-minute standing ovation in 2012 which naturally prompts the question of why that splendidly pulpy performance of Kidman’s didn’t earn her a second Oscar. (Probably because these ovations are meaningless.) Michael Moore’s “Bowling for Columbine” got a 13-minute standing ovation while his “Fahrenheit 9/11” was the runner-up to “Pan’s Labyrinth” with a 20-minute ovation, two times that seem to suggest the Cannes cronies simply want to come across more liberal than YOU. Leos Carax’s “Annette” received a five-minute standing ovation this year, putting it on par with “Moonrise Kingdom” and “Inside Llewyn Davis”, not to mention “Stillwater”, among others, though “Annette” had something the rest did not.

Kyle Buchanan did an amusing “anatomy” of “The French Dispatch’s” standing ovation, taking us through the entire nine minutes to demonstrate the inherent absurdity of these exercises in deliberate excess. But “Annette’s” Adam Driver, captured for posterity by Ramin Setoodeh, sort of deconstructed the standing ovation in his own way, lighting up a cigarette a few minutes into the applause and then exhaling into the camera’s lens, seeming to symbolically suggest that all this was merely them blowing smoke up his own ass. Just as good, however, is his co-star, Marion Cotillard, glimpsed in the background and reaching a point where, honestly, she just doesn’t even know what to do with her hands anymore, awkwardly rubbing them together like they’re covered in hand lotion with this pursed lips quasi-smile of a guest who is ready for the damn dinner party to be over. 

And that is why even if a photo from Cannes in which the respective fashion spirit animals of “The French Dispatch’s” Timothée Chalamet, Wes Anderson, Tilda Swinton, and Bill Murray clashed so amusingly and mightily that social media memed it into oblivion, the winner of Cinema Romantico’s not-famously un-exalted Brûlé Palme, a variation on Cannes’ prestigious Palme d’Or, awarded each year to Cinema Romantico’s favorite Cannes Film Festival attendee, goes not to that quartet but the duo of Cotillard and Driver, bless their souls, not so much standing up to the tyranny of the standing ovation as, in true French fashion, casually dismissing it as so much crap. 

Adventures in Movie Trailers, Part 343

A few things you should know. I’m starting to suspect Disney is Cinema’s #1 enemy. I, like Dr. Indiana Jones before me, hate snakes. I didn’t even really like amusement parks and amusement park rides all that much when I was a kid. “The African Queen” is not one of my preferred Bogeys. And yet.

Well, wait a second. Before the yet. Let me say.

This might, like, 89.9% have to do with Emily Blunt, who typically does right even if the movie she’s in goes wrong, and we might well look back on this moment as the one signaling the industry officially breaking my brain, and I don’t want you to judge me, and I really, really (I cannot stress this enough) want you to read the question mark I’m deliberately choosing to end this forthcoming ostensible declaration. And that declaration, so to speak, is this:

I want to see “Jungle Cruise”?

A Word on The Princess Bride Remake That Shouldn't Happen, But If It Did.....

One of this week’s infinite film world brouhahas, which kick up as regularly these days as summer thunderstorms in Colorado Springs, stemmed from Michael Schneider’s Variety profile of Norman Lear, an executive producer on Rob Reiner’s “The Princess Bride”, in which Sony Pictures Entertainment CEO Tony Vinciquerra was quoted as saying “Very famous people whose names I won’t use...want to redo ‘The Princess Bride.’” An offended world rose up in unison to make the same Vizzini joke. What movie from 1987 will the brainiacs who run things want to remake next? “Adventures in Babysitting” – wait, never mind. “Dirty Dancing” – oh, right. Surely not “The Secret of My Success”? Will Carlton Whitfield be a higher-up in the T*ump Organization and Brantley Foster the emergent whistleblower? Sounds topical! In any event, we here at Cinema Romantico are adamantly opposed to a “Princess Bride” just as we would be stridently against, say, a “Spaceballs” remake even if the “Spaceballs” remake was all about launching potshots at the third trilogy. We are against that, right? [Considers.] Yes! Yes, we are!

And yet. If Hollywood does decide to Hollywood and (not) Give The People What They Want by remaking “The Princess Bride”, it will undoubtedly change all manner of details because there is no way they’re turning this project into a Gus Van Sant shot-by-shot homage. And if they do, we’d like to point you to one of our favorite passages from the novel by William Goldman – er, S. Morgenstern – upon which it was based.

“When he was a few paces behind Buttercup, he stopped, head properly bowed. He was ashamed of his attire, worn boots and torn blue jeans (blue jeans were invented considerably before most people suppose), and his hands were tight together in almost a gesture of supplication.”

If you’ve gotta remake “The Princess Bride”* (*do not remake “The Princess Bride”) then please, at least honor the text and put Westley in blue jeans.

What if The Man in Black was The Man in Torn Levi’s?

Posterized

Posterizing is, to some, a great purveyor of the basketballing throwing down such a vicious dunk over such a hapless player that the hapless player is therefore made the butt of the slam dunking joke on a poster, such as this, Vince Carter dunking over France’s hapless Frederic Weis in the Sydney Summer Olympics.

Posterizing is, to some, taking an existing photo and then running it through photoshop to render a little more pictorial funkiness.

But to us, posterizing is when movie poster designers stop thinking in terms of content metrics, marketing demographics and advice from shareholders to just get in touch with their deeper, hidden, more artistic selves and unleash something like this, as electrifying as it is era-appropriate, Diana Prince as Wonder Woman as Sheena Easton. This is an album I would have bought in 1984 just because of the cover.

5 Possible Luxury Movie Theater Futures

My dream vacation, as My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife knows, is Switzerland. That’s not just because of the Olympic Museum in Lausanne (though the Olympic Museum in Lausanne has amplified the dream). When I was tasked with giving a presentation in sixth grade about my dream vacation and chose Switzerland the Olympic Museum hadn’t even opened! No, the first time, I think, I saw an image looking up from a picturesque, snowy Swiss street at the impressive Alps it became my dream, and that dream has only intensified as I’ve aged and realized my propensity for living life by just watching life go by, which is to say sitting at a Swiss street cafe and sipping coffee and staring up at the Alps for hours and hours sounds like my kinda bliss. You know what doesn’t sound like my kinda bliss? The story last week that a movie theater in Spreitenbach, Switzerland has constructed a VIP cinema where theatergoers willing to pay the price can watch a movie in a double bed, an abhorrent business model that has got me rethinking this whole dream vacation scenario (not really).

Cinema Romantico has long decried this growing trend of luxury movie theaters. Reserved seating, plush recliners as seats, dinner delivery straight to your plush recliner is an experience designed to entice possible viewers in a market where moviegoing is, relatively speaking, on the wane. Yet an experience designed to make the movie theater more like home inevitably translates to moviegoers treating the movie theater like home. They take off their shoes; they check their phones; they talk. The scourge of reserved seating only makes it worse. When I saw “First Man” the guy sitting next to me kept ordering food to his seat – soda, nachos, Twizzlers. Here was a movie doing all it could to put you, viewer, in Neil Armstrong’s headspace inside a NASA tin can and here was incessant dinner delivery a couple feet over continually pulling me right back out. People, as I have lamented before, no longer want to meet movies on their terms; they want movies to meet them on their terms. Beds inside a movie theater is a logical extension of this trend. And as the old school movie-going experience, as much a meaningful thing to me as living life by just watching life go by, hurtles toward its end point, it got me to thinking about what other tragic way stations we will find on the way to that end point. What are the next frightening frontiers for going to the movies?

5 Possible Luxury Movie Theater Futures

1. Sur La Table® Cooking Class

If plush recliners and snack trays have strained to turn the movie theater into your living room, and if Switzerland’s beds are straining to turn the movie theater into your bedroom, then it only makes sense for the movie theater to try and become the kitchen. Perhaps by way of AMC Movie Theatres synergizing with Sur La Table® to erect AMC Sur La Table® Movie Theatres where you buy a ticket with friends to make Gazpacho while watching the latest JLo rom com or Liam Neeson opus of revenge.

2. Isolation Booth

Ichiran Ramen in Japan has brought solo dining into the mainstream, creating isolation booths where individual diners sit by themselves behind black curtains to devote full concentration to the act of eating noodles. Ichiran has even made inroads into America, opening a restaurant in Brooklyn. Perhaps they can expand to the art of cinema? Granted, a cinema isolation booth would put a serious crimp in the whole Big Screen Experience, but, seriously man, what twenty-tens whippersnapper wants that? No, our Ichiran Cinema Isolation Booths will imagine a more lavish version of a first class airline entertainment, paying exorbitant amounts for, like, a 10 inch screen and all the movie options you want, going out to the theater to watch one movie for five minutes, another movie for ten minutes, another movie for twelve minutes, and then fall asleep.

3. Luxury Cruise

Why just go to the movies when you can sail away to the movies instead?! Marvel Studios in conjunction with Royal Caribbean® Cruise Line invites you to plan your entire vacation around the movies by taking a cruise aboard our sparkling new Royal Caribbean® MCU where 22 luxury movie theaters will screen all 22 “Avengers” movies 24 hours a day in alternating formats ranging from IMAX to 3-D to Smell-O-Vision!

4. Swimming Pool

The swim-up bar, as Punch tells us, began in 1950s Las Vegas with the Sands first creating floating blackjack and craps tables and then the Tropicana building swim-up blackjack tables which naturally extended to bars. These swim-up bars, it turns out, precluded modern places like XS in Encore, a whole damn swim club, named, apparently, the hottest nightclub in the world by Condé Nast. Naturally a byproduct of the swim entertainment industry, it seems to me, should be floating movie theaters. You could watch the latest blockbuster from the comfort of floating chairs and mattresses with tiki drinks served to you by the swimming concession staff. Private cabana rooms can be purchased at an upgraded price for just you and your friends. Coral Cove is a superpool with slides, fountains and fun-filled interactive aqua entertainment where families can take their kids to simultaneously screen the latest box office hit.

5. Spa

Movies themselves might provide spiritual nourishment but what if you’re simultaneously on the prowl for some bodily rejuvenation too? Why then you’ll want to check out our Cinemark Spa & Cineplex, the next level in movie-watching luxury, where filmgoers willing to shell out can enjoy a new release paired with an appropriate spa treatment. Watch “Rambo: Last Blood” while getting a thermal mud wrap, see “The Rise of Skywalker” from inside a salt stone sauna, or allow the new Olivier Assayas film to play tricks on your mind while you detoxify your body with a Mahoosuc Coffee Scrub. Valentine’s Day and Date Night packages include a massage for two paired with the newest generic rom com. In the special Serenity Suite complete with aromatherapy you don’t even have to watch the movie at all.

Cinema Romantico's Official 2020 Cinematic Endorsement Remains Up for Grabs

Last November, after conceding in a closely-fought Texas Senate race against incumbent Ted Cruz, who possibly lies about his favorite movies, former Congressional Representative Beto O’Rourke wrote a letter of thanks to his supporters, opening it by indicating his wife Amy and their kids were watching “Last of the Mohicans” in the other room. Loyal frustrated followers know that “Last of the Mohicans” is this blog’s favorite movie, and because this blog gives its cinematic endorsement to one Presidential candidate each election cycle, and because rumors abounded that O’Rourke might well toss his hat into the 2020 Democratic Presidential Candidate ring, this blog was keen to know if Michael Mann’s 1992 indisputable masterpiece was, in fact, O’Rourke’s favorite movie. Alas, we could but merely speculate.

Beto O'Rourke, whose favorite movie may or may not be The Last of the Mohicans

Since that time O’Rourke has officially entered the (very) early stages of the 2020 Democratic Presidential Candidate race. This has only made the status of his favorite movie more urgent. In discovering O’Rourke’s penchant for standing on countertops some have speculated that his favorite movie is “Dead Poets Society” which is an obvious joke and just not helpful, people. We have emailed Mr. O’Rourke at his official website in the hopes of confirming if “Last of the Mohicans” is his favorite movie but have yet to receive a response. We Tweeted at Mr. O’Rourke but our poor ol’ Tweet is still just sitting out there, wasting space, un-commented upon. As such, the imperative answer to the question O’Rourke’s favorite film remains elusive.

O’Rourke’s love of punk music is frequently cited, which suggests his favorite movie might be Penelope Sheeris’s “The Decline of Western Civilization.” He often cites his favorite book as Homer’s “The Odyssey”, which suggests his favorite movie might be The Coen Brothers’ “O Brother Where Art Thou?” In the Vanity Fair profile accompanying his Presidential bid launch, O’Rourke compared his forthcoming campaign to “every epic movie that you’ve ever seen, from ‘Star Wars’ to ‘The Lord of the Rings.’” Even if both these films are epic, though I’d contend “LOTR” is more epic in terms of being a time-wasting leviathan, what, I ask, is more epic than “Last of the Mohicans”? Nothing, that’s what! “Last of the Mohicans” is the apex of epic! True, it’s my favorite movie and I’m biased. But then, if it really was O’Rourke’s favorite movie, would he not have it included it when describing epic movies? I would think so. Then again, he is, at present, in his platitudinous way, playing the part of a populist, and so perhaps he was merely reciting the hits. Who can say? He can, that’s who.

“Just What Does Beto Believe?” asked Politico in early March. I wonder.

Life: In 3 Acts

tfw you’re on vacation

tfw your vacation is winding down

tfw vacation is over

The Winner of Cinema Romantico's (Non-Existent) Pop Culture Bracket Is...

This month is April, which means last month was March, and because it was March, a month dominated by March Madness™ wherein college basketball teams are slotted into a big bracket and made to square off until a champion emerges at month’s end, every content farm on the Internet was stricken with the need to create its own kind of bracket, usually pop culture related, and usually while stipulating that they, like, totally wouldn’t be doing a bracket, man, if culture did not, you know, demand it. These brackets ran the gamut from weirdly arcane (Best Fake Drive-By Truckers song titles, won by “The Summer of Gin & Fried Chicken”) to distressingly banal (Best Brands, won by Häagen-Dazs) to shockingly specific (Best Non-US Capitals Everyone Thinks Are Capitals, won, in a mild upset, by Birmingham, Alabama) to predictably ironic (Definitive Bracket of Pop Culture Brackets, over at Vox, which we are not linking to because c’mon).

Astute readers may notice that Cinema Romantico did not participate in all this bracket madness. This was not necessarily because our blog is above such content bandwagon jumping, not at all, but because, well, like the Villanova Wildcats of the New Big East dispatched teams with such ease throughout real March Madness™ that they essentially rendered the massive bracket as immaterial to their spectacular sharpshooting conquest, this blog’s pop culture bracket had such a foregone victor that pitting others against her was a waste of everyone’s time. Some might say, “Doesn’t that mean your pop culture tournament was rigged?” To which we say, “The universe rigged our pop culture tournament for us.” Even we are not above the universe’s decrees.

So, we congratulate the winner of our pop culture tournament that was never contested because it was over before it was, Nicole Kidman of “How to Talk to Girls at Parties.” They say the Queen’s Birthday is April 21st, but Cinema Romantico toasts its Queen today.