Friday's Old Fashioned: W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings (1975)

As W.W. Bright (Burt Reynolds) watches the fledgling country band Dixie (Conny Van Dyke) and her Dancekings, of whom he has appointed himself manager, in a manner of speaking, play to no one but a bartender in some small dive, he asks said bartender: “You think they got anything going for them?” She replies: “The best thing they got going for ‘em is you, that combination of horse manure and sincerity.” W.W. takes this in and, after the bartender has moved along, reasons aloud, “You know, she’s right.” Yes. She is. There might be an alternate version of “W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings” out there, the one that screenwriter Thomas Richman apparently intended that did not make it to screen, which so vexed Quentin Tarantino that he cites it as a reason he wanted to write movies, where the plight of the Dixie and the Dancekings and their ascent to the Grand Ole Opry is paramount. But that’s not the version director John G. Avildsen put on screen. No, this version, which is both busy, underscored by Avildsen indulging in every dissolve in the book, and laconic, mirroring its low-pressure leading man, is a star vehicle, totally and truly, opening with Reynolds as W.W. cruising down some country road in his 1955 Golden Anniversary Oldsmobile Rocket and right past a billboard declaring “Christ is coming soon.” W.W. smiles and you can’t help but think he thinks that sign portends his own arrival. Not many actors could get away with it, but Burt Reynolds’ combination of horse manure and sincerity carries the day. No one’s God complex ever looked so charismatically aw-shucks.

“W.W and the Dixie Dancekings” is such a star vehicle, in fact, that it allows a good half-hour of its star, playing a Tennessee con artist cum mostly good guy, to just sort of wander around from problem to problem, place to place, person to person, as if trying to determine what kind of movie he wants this to be. At one point he squires some young lady we don’t even see him meet to the drive-in where they watch “The Sun Also Rises” allowing him to opine on Errol Flynn. We never see W.W. watching “Adventures of Robin Hood”, probably because no self-respecting southern man would be caught dead watching men run around tights, but W.W. seems to model himself after Robin Hood anyway, robbing S.O.S. gas stations and only S.O.S. gas stations, evading capture by tipping the attendant and effusing charisma, an extension, of course, of Reynolds’s own movie star wattage.

That alone might have been compelling enough for a standalone movie, especially given the eventual presence of John Wesley Gore (Art Carney), a one-timed lawman turned devout Deacon, hired by the S.O.S. chairman (Sherman Lloyd) to ascertain who’s been plundering all their filling stations. Though little about “W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings” suggests reality, and thank God for that, this sequence between the Chairman and the Deacon, with thunder rolling outside and the dialogue pitched to a hammy boil, still feels, as Deacon Gore himself does, like broad caricature compared to everything else. It’s as if Deacon Gore, so fanatical in his Biblical obeyance, so devoted to vengeance against those whose devotion to God is suspect, has come marching in from a complete different movie, which, come to think of it, might well make it just right, as if he really was in another movie, got wind of W.W.’s antics and decided to re-cast himself to keep order over here.

In the end, W.W.’s reasons for turning to robbery have less to do with any kind of ideals than a helpful set-up for when he needs quick cash to help spur success for the Dixie and the Dancekings, whom he only encounters one night after escaping the clutches of a state trooper. But by bringing the band into the scheme, W.W. implicates them too, which gives Deacon Gore the chance to swoop in and put them all away, and right before the requisite Grand Ole Opry climax, a musical number which is refreshingly low-key, befitting the weekly concert’s barn dance origins rather than the over the top Opryland it’s become. W.W., however, intervenes by taking the fall, which brings us back to that “Christ is coming soon” billboard, as if this con artist is coming clean by sacrificing himself for the greater good. That doesn’t quite happen, however, because the movie lets him off the hook. It does, one might argue, because of a deus ex machina, but then the deus ex machina is Burt Reynolds. He is the star of the movie; the movie is the machine; he is its god.

and then he was done

So Daniel Day-Lewis retired from acting. His announcement bore shades of notoriously demure professional basketball player Tim Duncan who last summer announced his retirement with but a press release. Day-Lewis also went the press release route, handing it off to Variety which published the notice in full. “Daniel Day-Lewis will no longer be working as an actor. He is immensely grateful to all of his collaborators and audiences over the many years. This is a private decision and neither he nor his representatives will make any further comment on this subject.” It is almost Ron-Swanson-ish in its brevity. What else does anyone need to know other than he’s discontinued acting? All other details are irrelevant.

Throughout his legendary career, after all, Day-Lewis was often aloof and fiercely private, though that admirable insistence on maintaining privacy in a profession that put him so squarely in the public eye made it never-endingly easy for that privacy to be errantly transcribed into mystery and that mystery to be errantly transcribed into lunacy. Indeed, his infamous dedication to Method Acting was often portrayed with a lunatic bent in the press, nearly every article or interview with Day-Lewis dutifully recycling the myriad stories of his exhausting preparation and the almost disturbing commitment to remaining in character, all of which provided material for so much comic fodder, which is why every fourth tweet in the wake of his retirement on Tuesday cracked some variation of a joke about Day-Lewis retiring to research a role about an actor retiring.

Granted, he often harmed his own cause by remaining so engimatic on the subject, half-deflecting queries of his process, then sort of offering some vagaries as mock wisdom, mostly expressing his discomfort with having to try and elucidate with words something that he quite simply just did. And his non-acting dalliances, apprenticing as a carpenter and a cobbler, often for years at a time, were also strictly off the record, only furthering the already expansive allure surrounding him.

By shrouding his process in secrecy and by famously being so selective with his roles, each performance he did give felt larger than life, both in the lead up and in what was eventually rendered on screen, which is why it’s so easy to think of him in terms of the towering Daniel Planview or Bill the Butcher. But he could be quiet too, often with an edge, like “Last of the Mohicans” where he was something like an immovable object in the face of a westward expansion, or lacing Abraham Lincoln’s folksy wisdom with just right the amount of political spin, or occasionally with a tenderness, like in “The Boxer”, where for all the rope-jumping and in-the-ring punching he did, he nevertheless played the part so inwardly, like a man who had let all the rage just dissipate from his body until nothing was left other than the last few gentle embers of his soul.

As an actor, I suspect Day-Lewis considered himself as a craftsman, not unlike the carpenter and cobbler he very much became. And for a craftsman, whatever trade he or she might ply, the quality of the finished product is paramount and the only commentary one needs on the process and career behind it. As such, the performances of Daniel Day-Lewis are frozen on film, their quality self-evident. What else do you need to know? He acted, rather righteously, now he doesn’t. All other details are irrelevant.

We're Gonna Die (a theatre review)

Art, as “Manhattan’s” mononymous Yale once opined, is nothing if not a working through, which Young Jean Lee’s play “We’re Gonna Die” so invigoratingly demonstrates, opening with the Singer of a punkish New Wave band played by the literally (figuratively) ablaze Isa Arciniegas in the Haven Theatre production helmed by Josh Sobel I saw here in Chicago, sauntering on stage and launching not into song but confessional. And while she does eventually kick out the jams, each one is precipitated by a monologue as soul-bearing as it is comical. It suggests an episode of VH1 Storytellers told from a therapy couch. But see, that actually sells “We’re Gonna Die” short because even if it probes the psychological depths of the Singer, it is not a morose personality study or some methodological exploration of the songwriter’s process. It captures, in a way I never really dreamed possible outside the live music experience itself, the way in which rock concerts – whatever the band, whatever the venue – become rhythmic church services of sorts, where sins are ineffably confessed and forgiveness is melodically tendered. By the end, when this production is hurling balloons into the air and dropping confetti from the ceilings, whatever was weighing you down when you walked in has been miraculously lifted.

The Singer’s first confessional concerns a youthful encounter with her Uncle who inadvertently and unknowingly indoctrinated her into the meanness of this world. She explains she turned this harrowing memory into a song which she then performs, mirroring the structure of the whole show, monologue/song, monologue/song. And the rawness and occasionally deliberate unwieldiness of the monologues only works to spotlight how a great song can condense and elucidate what we feel. And the songs are premium all the way through, though they gradually rise in not only quality but meaning, emblematic of any great concert’s ascending route, and filled out by a backing band (Spencer Meeks on guitar & bass, Sarah Giovannetti on drums, Jordan Harris and Elle Walker on keyboards) that could have held its own in the heyday of The Pyramid Club.

The band is present for the whole show, even throughout the Singer’s stories, mostly listening but occasionally chiming in with peanut gallery annotations or comical drum fills, which seemed to me not necessarily planned themselves but just sort of implemented in a Do It When The Spirit Moves You kind of way. This underlines how any great show is spontaneous and wholly original unto itself even if the setlist never varies. Unintentionally this was further illustrated when Arciniegas momentarily got her foot tangled in the microphone chord, grinned knowingly and then carried on, because a great frontwoman is never deterred.

Arciniegas is a great frontwoman. She’s doing that thing, that thing that Bruce Springsteen does in concert, where what he’s saying might obviously be something he’s said many times before but nevertheless effects the power of a preacher’s scripted sermon. Arciniegas, after all, is ministering to the congregation, truly, moving to the edge of the stage and appealing directly to the audience, holding us in the palm of her hand as she lifts us up. The stories she’s telling, while no doubt partly pulled from Young Jean Lee’s own life, are universal, evoking life events familiar to all of us, and that universality is part and parcel to the best concert experiences when everyone in the room is standing up and singing together. And so when the Singer’s concluding monologue inevitably broaches the thorniest subject of them all – namely, death – the show achieves the zenith of universality, holding up everyone’s darkest fear and then just sort of blasting it back with a zero fucks cannonade, jubilantly illuminating how live music not only gives you life, it takes the edge off death.

Some Drivel On...Contact

Director Robert Zemeckis has never shied away from look-what-I-can do technical pizzazz and the opening sequence of “Contact” (1997) is no exception, an outer space set shot that begins at our peaceful blue planet and then pulls back, back and back and back, through the vast reaches of our solar system, past all the planets, including Pluto (which was not excised from the version currently streaming on Amazon Prime leaving me to obviously assume that “Contact” still considers Pluto a planet), and then out of our solar system and into the furthest reaches of the galaxy, as all the while accompanying radio broadcasts grow older and older, as evocative an illustration of distance equaling time as you will cinematically encounter. What really astounds, however, is the scene’s capping shot, when the camera, still moving backwards, seems to emerge from the eye of the main character, Ellie Arraway. “Contact” was just as much A Carl Sagan Film as a Zemeckis film, given that Sagan wrote the book on which the film was based and consulted on its production, and Sagan was a S.E.T.I. advocate, a man who believed in looking, searching for what was out there, a sensation evoked in this shot and throughout by Zemeckis’s oft-fluid camera, like a later shot that starts outside of Ellie’s youthful home before the camera drifts up, finding her through a bedroom window as she sits at her desk with a shortwave radio.

There are other moments, however, particularly later when the movie moves ahead to adult Ellie, with Jodie Foster taking the acting baton, when the camera calms down and focuses, giving way to the stillness of Ellie with a pair of headphones simply listening, suggesting an inner peace that comes from escaping the omnipresent noise of earth for the soothing white noise of space, like a galactic thunderstorms CD, or something. At the same time, however, it is suggestive of a potentially dangerous escapism, tied back to the death of Ellie’s father (David Morse) in the opening scenes and how she goes to her radio transmitter trying to make contact with him through the heavens. This moment is in the wake of a minister telling Ellie that her father’s death means having to accept God’s will, which Ellie refuses to do, discussing it in strictly pragmatic terms, reasoning that if they kept her father’s medicine downstairs he might have lived. Foster lets this hard edge inform her entire performance, where for as much wonder as she gets searching the stars, she has a different streak down here on Earth, good-hearted still, yes, but also combative and rigid in her own science-friendly, liberal worldview.

That worldview is put to the test in the wake of First Contact. Because First Contact brings everyone out of the woodwork, from good ol’ boy politicians (Rob Lowe) to Christians cum terrorists (Jake Busey, doing a fine impersonation of his dad) to the President’s National Security Advisor Michael Kitz (James Woods) to the President’s Scientific Advisor David Drumlin (Tom Skerritt). (Because this was 1997 the President is played by Bill Clinton by editing archival footage of Clinton press conferences into certain scenes. This prompted blowback from the White House, perhaps because it so effortlessly, unintentionally underlines how political press conferences are rife with so many banalities they can be used to say pretty much anything in any context. We continue.)

Many of these supporting parts are written fairly one-note and that, frankly, is just fine, evocative of how such an event causes everyone to retreat to his/her corner and close ranks. In a way, it’s difficult to argue against anyone’s viewpoint, if you allow yourself to see the situation specifically through that person’s eyes, even Drumlin, merely operating on his own behalf, a narcissist to the very end. And that becomes a source of extreme vexation for Ellie, who struggles to see this through anyone else’s eyes, marking her as credibly compelling, a character forced to confront her own insecurities and her belief system’s limitations, a nifty contrast against the limitless expanse of the universe.

This is brought home in her relationship with Palmer Joss (Matthew McConaughey), “a man of the cloth, without the cloth.” This, more than any scientific inaccuracies, which any scientist would be happy to go long on for you, might be the film’s weakest point. Though the questions of science v theology that their relationship engenders are compelling, the chemistry between Foster and McConaughey never comes off. Foster, frankly, plays more to the cosmos in terms of a muse, and even her late father, which means that when the movie has Joss repeat verbatim a line that Ellie’s father says and then Ellie immediately moves in for a kiss, well, like, you know, yikes. And it is almost entirely undone by a late movie moment when Joss, placed on a committee to determine who among a group that includes Ellie will be sent into space to possibly meet these extra-terrestrials, admits he voted against Ellie going because, as he says, “I don’t want to lose you.” For this, she kisses him. I wanted her to punch him in the face.

But, after ample rigmarole she does go. And where she goes is through a wormhole to Vega where she meets not aliens but her father, which is to say she meets aliens who have taken the form of her father and of a childhood dream, of sorts, to say hello, which plays like an advanced civilization’s nod to us Earthlings as boats against the current. Afterwards, an obligatory inquiry of faith, literal and figurative, must and does occur, though its conclusion is an open end, allowing for both sides, religion and science, to intrinsically, if heavy-handedly, emerge and strike something like a truce. It’s rather wonderful. And after first seeing this movie for the first time, on the cusp of adulthood and with so much hope in my heart, 20 years ago in the summer of 1997, I now find myself thinking that the odds of finding extra terrestrials are no doubt better than us American earthlings meeting together on middle ground.

The Mummy

In his tentpole movie roles Tom Cruise often has a supernatural quality resistant to vulnerability. In the exquisite  “Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation” his otherworldliness is played for a joke. When a certain bit of potential derring-do requires his character to hold his breath underwater for over three minutes, Simon Pegg’s Benji Dunn comically, incredulously remarks “You can do that.” Of course he can! And he does! Tom Cruise is invincible! So it only makes sense, I suppose, that Tom Cruise would need, in this era of cinematic superheroes, his own superhero movie. But what if Marvel or D.C. Comics or whoever else has no need for your services? You find another way in obviously, and so here is Cruise in the re-boot of the Universal Monsters film franchise “The Mummy”, transforming it something less than a project based on a version of the 1932 Boris Karloff character and more the superhero origin story of Cruise’s Nick Morton. I might even be tempted to call Cruise’s move a little brilliant if not for the fact that “The Mummy” is so rarely enjoyable.

Its unenjoyability stems directly from a kind of inadvertent More Becomes Less philosophy, where the myriad writing credits suggest a focused original concept that erupted into an out-of-control cinematic bloomin’ onion. For if its official basis is the Karloff black & white original, its real basis is the Stephen Sommers 1999 “Mummy” reboot, less horror and more action/adventure, even though its conspicuous lack of breezy execution is more in line with Sommers’ atrocious 2004 “Van Helsing.” The latter suffered from monster overload and so does this version of “The Mummy”, stretching to even make room for Dr. Henry Jekyll (Russell Crowe), who occasionally goes Hyde, a non-Universal property that, seeing as how little we get to know him, seems to suggest a move for the next movie in line. Director Alex Kurtzman has made his bones in the business as a producer, a role given to Ideas rather than artistic follow-through, and it shows as he struggles to coalesce this preponderance of material, resulting in a lurching cinematic behemoth which is why more times than I could count he fell back on explanatory voiceovers laid over montages, emitting strong whiffs of editing cover-ups.

The unwieldy story opens with a monologue and montage, in fact, recounting the ancient tale of Princess Ahmanet (Sofia Boutella), set to become Pharaoh until her father has a son, stealing her birthright, the impetus for her giving her soul to the Egyptian God Set for a special dagger with an extra-special gem to kill her father and his son and then sacrifice her lover as a means to give Set bodily form. Alas, she is stopped pre-sacrifice, arrested, mummified, and entombed alive, while the dagger’s gem finds itself re-located to England. It is the tomb that Nick Morton (Cruise) and his sidekick Chris Vail (Jake Johnson), military contractors cum grave robbers, discover in present-day Iraq and remove from its resting place which, as it must, arouses Ahmanet to mummified life to unleash unholy terror trying to finish the job at which she failed so many centuries ago.

This is not an uninteresting opening. That Nick and Chris find the tomb at all is owed to an airstrike on an insurgent stronghold, just as the all-important gem to Ahmanet’s dagger is discovered in London on account tunnel construction, little seemingly throwaway plot details that actually underline the intrusion of man into an ancient world where they do not belong. To that point, the shots of Nick and company descending into The Mummy’s prison, where mercury floats in the air, evokes modern men out of time, and vice-versa. The film’s most comical line, in fact, for good and bad, is Ahmanet in the present day explaining her age-old evil: “It was a different time.”

That sentiment might be challenged by Jenny Halsey (Anabelle Wallis), archaeologist, obligatory love interest for Nick and member of Dr. Jekyll’s Justice League-ish anti-evil contingent, who enters the picture by literally punching Nick in the face for his roguish behavior, though that is pretty much the high point of her fieriness, as she gradually morphs from Marion Ravenwood into Willie Scott. In the second half of the film Jenny is reduced to doing nothing much more than following Nick into cavernous, ominous rooms and saying his name over and over and over. “Nick?” she’ll say, as if she’s afraid of the dark.

Though Ahmanet is not afraid of the dark, her character is essentially shunted there anyway, taking a backseat to Nick, who takes the form of her lover in the present day so that she can slay him to unleash Set on the here and now. That it does not go quite as planned goes without saying, though, of course, it is part of “The Mummy’s” broader plan all along, wherein Ahmanet, for all the power she possesses, is nothing more than a conduit to conferring supernatural status on Nick to make him, for all intents and purposes, a superhero in order to no doubt propagate so many superhero sequels. Alas, Tom Cruise’s greatest supernatural feat would be getting a sequel to this stinkbomb greenlit.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Fail-Safe (1964)

Late in Sidney Lumet’s “Fail-Safe” (1964), long after the group of six American bomber planes have infiltrated Soviet airspace with the intention of dropping their payload on Moscow, not long after The President (Henry Fonda) has openly offered a self-inflicted retaliation against New York City to the Soviets as something like a peace offering to hopefully prevent Soviet retaliation and the genuine outbreak of WWIII, The President, sequestered in a bunker deep in the White House, leans back in his chair and remarks to his Russian Translator (Larry Hagman) about the weather. “Looked like rain earlier,” The President says. It’s a jarring moment, meteorological small talk as nuclear war threatens, and while it easily could have slipped into comedy, intentionally or unintentionally, Fonda doesn’t let it, playing a man not so much suddenly distracted as a man just deliberately looking for a little momentary distraction, to get his mind right by letting it settle on this one ordinary thing. It is a human moment and interjected into so much madness, and it is very important.

“Fail Safe” was released not long after Stanley Kubrick’s seminal “Dr. Strangelove”, which played nuclear holocaust for farce, albeit truthful farce and Fonda said that if he’d seen “Dr. Strangelove” prior to filming “Fail Safe” he wasn’t sure he could have played his own version of The President straight. It’s a good line, but I’m not sure I buy it. Not just because Fonda was a titan, mind you, but because of moments like Fonda’s President ruminating on the weather, remaining slightly yet monumentally human against all the doomsday odds. After all, the impetus for so much comical tragedy in “Dr. Strangelove” was a human losing his marbles and the escalating impossibility of other humans correcting that human’s misdeeds because all the other humans prove to be blithering, pompous idiots too.

“Fail Safe” yearns to maintain a human connection. You see this partly in the brief set-up, which takes time to introduce characters outside the Washington sphere, like the wife and children of Brigadier General Black (Dan O’Herlihy), though just as acutely, and much more strangely, in the half-liaison between national defense advisor Professor Groeteschele (Walter Matthau) and Ilsa Wolfe (Nancy Berg), some sort of abstract version of a socialite, who meet at what is apparently a pre-dawn cocktail party (which in its mere existence suggests some sort of beltway netherworld worthy of further exploration) where he is holding court and she watches, smoking, from afar.

Later, when Groeteschele goes to his car, Ilsa is embedded in the front seat, and a morning drive turns into something like nihilist erotica, where the thought of the annihilation of all living things seems to excite her, itself suggesting another alternate movie where Ilsa might make like Jeanne Moreau in “Elevator to the Gallows”, just wandering the District, a pensive pursuit beyond rationality, indifferent to the surrounding chaotic world. She is attracted to him because of his seemingly cavalier attitude toward the Cold War, but when she makes a move on him, he slaps her. He says “I’m not your kind”, which is not a sexist riposte, even if Matthau lets a sexism burble up from his character anyway, but an explication of how he is less aroused by war than conditioned to think rationally about it.

That rationality remains on display throughout, from the ground to the sky, where the bomber pilots infiltrating Soviet airspace, despite the palpable desperation in their eyes, know they are duty bound to forge ahead. The fail safes put in place by men are, in the end, too good to overcome, a nasty irony in which “Fail Safe” does not so much delight in as reluctantly, if frightfully, surrender to. The majority of people on screen here, while made to confront the error of their ways, are portrayed as fundamentally decent, which becomes the greatest tragedy of all. If “Dr. Strangelove” argued that if, left to idiots, we would incinerate ourselves then “Fail Safe” argues that even if we are left, mostly, to levelheaded thinkers we still might incinerate ourselves.

The 25 Best Michael Shannon Films of the 21st Century So Far

Last week, as you may know, Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott, esteemed film critics at The New York Times, published a list provocatively titled The 25 Best Films of the 21st Century So Far. It, as such lists will, sparked other critics to construct their 25 Best Films of the 21st Century So Far, and then other critics to construct their 25 Best Films of the 21st Century So Far, on until forever. And whereas lists like this should be good conversation starters or nice additions to an ongoing cultural discussion, mostly they are just triggers for outrage, which is a real shame, because, as Richard Brody, highbrow New Yorker critic who has thankfully never not owned his love of lists, notes in the introduction to his 25 Best Films of the 21st Century So Far list: "one reads different critics for different perspectives and different tastes."

Exactly. And you don't come to Cinema Romantico in the wake of The 25 Best Films of the 21st Century So Far lists to get our 25 Best Films of the 21st Century So Far list. That's not how we roll. So here's this list, assembled in absolutely no particular order whatsoever, instead.

The 25 Best Michael Shannon Films of the 21st Century So Far

Shotgun Stories. If Shannon has perfected the Dimensional Hothead then this might be the first performance where he nailed it, portraying a short-tempered southern man who wants to overcome Who He Is but will never cow Where He Comes From.

Premium Rush. If you are playing the stock villain in a bike messenger thriller you'd be forgiven for simply showing up and collecting your paycheck as you go through the motions. But Shannon, bless his heart, not only plays something, a weasel convinced the whole stinking world is out to get him, he wraps that something up with all kinds of comically terrifying emoting. This performance is proof positive that, if born in a different era, he would have been perhaps the greatest silent film villain of all time.

Nocturnal Animals. There is a moment where Shannon, his character's health revealed to be much less than tip-top and unable to stomach food because of it, is told to eat something. The way in which Shannon vehemently shovels a forkful of food into his mouth says more about the burden of enduring pain than any twelve hundred disease of the week movies combined.

Midnight Special. The Kid With Special Powers is the point here, which Shannon plays straight to, playing down because every move he makes is all about the kid.

Elvis & Nixon. His Elvis is majestic, by which I mean it is not majestic at all, a purposeful Vegas impersonation of Elvis at a time in Elvis's life when Elvis had, more or less, become an impersonation of himself.

They Came Together. I hated this movie. I mean, I really hated it. But when Michael Shannon came tearing in bearing his classic Shannon rage face for his, like, six second cameo, man, that was still the best.

Frank & Lola. I watched this on my laptop while my girlfriend was watching something else on TV, marking us as a truly modern American couple, and when I burst out laughing she turned to me and asked "What's so funny?" I replied, "Michael Shannon was just staring at this guy."

The Runaways. It's sorta like Paul Giamatti's Eugene Landy melded with R. Lee Ermey's Gunnery Sergeant Hartman if he was in a futuristic 80s rock opera.

Return. As the spouse of a soldier returned from Iraq, Shannon emits an aloofness hinting at his character's secret, but he also knows this is Linda Cardellini's movie through and through and simultaneously, quietly cedes the stage.

The Missing Person. One of the best comic bits that isn't really a comic bit at all of this century is Michael Shannon as an exhausted, irritated private detective trying to buy a cellphone that "takes pictures" while the cellphone store guy keeps trying to upsell him. My girlfriend knows this scene all too well even though she hasn't seen it because I quote it all the time in my terrible Michael Shannon impression. "I just [beat] want a phone [beat] that takes [beat] pictures."

Complete Unknown. For whatever issues this movie might have had, I still kind of loved it, and I loved Shannon in it, the way he burned not so much with anger at the betrayal of Rachel Weisz's character as envy for what she has gone and done.

Take Shelter. It's absurd to call any one Shannon performance the "best" since nearly every performance he gives is, in its own way, stone cold solid, but no Shannon performance, we can be sure, is better than "Take Shelter", where he's playing a father and a husband with something like a cosmic itch he can't scratch, loving yet terrified that his love alone won't be enough. I always think of Shannon in terms of the moment in this movie when he is standing beneath a lightning strewn sky that may or may not be real and rhetorically asks "Is anyone seeing this?" I feel like that so often when I'm watching Shannon. I want to turn to strangers in the theater and ask, bewildered, "Is anyone seeing this?"

Bug. Delusional and unhinged yet so righteously true to what might not be true that he just sort of swoops up and then carries along Ashley Judd's character in his wake, and, in turn, Shannon & Judd themselves become accomplices in pushing past The Great Barrier.

Mud. He's barely in this modernish Mark Twain adventure but makes his couple scenes as a single father count, playing totally erratic yet still, somehow, in the moment of truth, emotionally present for his son.

The Iceman. People are always seeing a movie they didn't like and saying something to the effect of "I just didn't care about the main character." In "The Iceman", as a vicious, vicious hitman, Michael Shannon, understand, does not care that you don't care about his character.

8 Mile. Playing Kim Basinger's abusive boyfriend, there's a lot of cliché inherent in his rage though he transcends it by communicating in the spaces in-between how if you just poked your thumb into his heaving chest, he would probably just topple over.

Freeheld. Shannon is sort of giving the Denzel Washington performance in a much, much worse "Philadelphia", though that's also selling him short because he's doing his own thing, allowing resentment and surprise not to erupt but just sort of burble and then evaporate in the name of of tolerance.

Revolutionary Road. Michael Shannon can see through your shit. That's what nearly every interview with Shannon reveals. And that's what made him so perfect to play John Givings, who's there specifically to see through April and Frank Wheeler's shit and call them on it. And, as everyone knows, when Michael Shannon calls you on your shit, the trumpets sound and the walls collapse.

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead. The thing Michael Shannon does when he says "'Sorry' ain't gonna pay the bills, Chico" is, on certain days, the funniest thing in the history of the world.

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. If takes someone special to look at turned-up-to-eleven Crazy Eyes Nic Cage with calm suspicion and not get blown off the screen. Shannon does it.

World Trade Center. It takes a certain kind of commited zeal to play a real life guy - Dave Karnes - who just kind of felt himself spiritually summoned to Ground Zero and went with the flow. Shannon has that zeal, not playing it outwardly with great elan but inwardly, like it's something he cannot explain, doesn't particularly care to but must abide by nevertheless.

99 Homes. If Charles Darwin had vaped and been around during the 2008 Financial Crisis.

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. We are only including this one, which I have not seen, because Shannon said he fell asleep while trying to watch it which is just so righteous.

Cecil B. Demented. As one part of a pack of movie anarchists, or thereabouts, this early career role has always made me ponder an alternate reality where Shannon took fewer and less bigger roles and remained more underground, like a more intense Michael J. Pollard.

Pearl Harbor. So here's a story and I swear it's true. When I saw this movie in the theater way back when, I came out of it, dazed and depressed, remembering only two things. I remembered Alec Baldwin saying "Leave your goddam hula shirts at home." And I remembered this guy, this guy I didn't know, this guy at the Pearl Harbor air force base who, when Josh Hartnett walks up and asks "Y'all pilots?" said "We're working on it. It's a lot of switches and stuff." Except he didn't, like, completely say it; he kind of, like, mumbled it, but mumbled it in this way that was sort of subtly calling Hartnett's character on his uppity shit although I don't think Hartnett's character (or Hartnett himself) even realized that's what was happening. God, did those mumbled lines resonate. A few years later I realized that Michael Shannon was the guy who mumbled.

The Best College Football Movie Is Not Rudy Dammit

Apologies for the click-bait-ish headline, which we try to avoid here, but the subject of college football movies, given my adoration of the sport despite its infinite foibles, is a sore one at this blog. The subject of college football movies was raised yet again last week when a reader asked Stewart Mandel, senior college football columnist at FoxSports, to name his favorite movie related to the sport. I quote Mr. Mandel in full:

So, I’ve noticed something recently with these “greatest sports movie” arguments. People tend to fall into two camps. You’re either partial to the campy Hollywood ones with a feel-good ending, or, you’re partial to the “edgy” Hollywood ones that aren’t particularly good but aren’t as overtly cheesy. 

“The Program” falls into the latter category. It’s full of lazy clichés about seediness in college football, but it’s undeniably entertaining. And it’s hard to argue with a film that includes both Halle Berry AND consummate ‘90s babe Kristy Swanson. It’s no “Blue Chips” as far as the “exposing the shocking underbelly of mid-‘90s college sports” genre, but it’s pretty good IF this is your preferred type of sports movie. 

Me? I’m campy. I love “Hoosiers.” I cried the first time I saw “Field of Dreams.” If “Remember the Titans” comes on TV, I’m not turning it off. 

And to that end, the greatest college football movie is … “Rudy,” of course. It gets me every time. They’re not really going to put him in the game, are they? No way! And he gets the sack! Unbelievable! Ru-dy! Ru-dy! 

Also, highly underrated college football recruiting parody: “Johnny Be Good.” Anthony Michael Hall as the hot-shot quarterback, Uma Thurman as his girlfriend, Robert Downey Jr. as the best friend. Find it. Late-‘80s gold.

Ugh. It is not simply that “Rudy” is, as the esteemed Charlie Pierce once poetially put it, “a passel of unreconstructed mythopoeic bullpucky even by the standards of the university in question, which are considerable”, though it absolutely is. And it is not simply that even to I, an avowed Uma-ite, and adorer of much 80s brie, “Johnny Be Good” is just a bridge too far, though this is most assuredly true. And it is not that I necessarily dislike “The Program”, which Mr. Mandel’s writer cited as his own favorite college football movie, though I would not necessarily deem it any great shakes. It’s just that, well, c’mon, man.

Perhaps it is asking too much for a college football columnist to spend his free time seeking out classic film, but nearly every Best College Football Movie listicle you come across, even those assembeled by people who, in theory, should have a historical grasp of the game they cover, seems to have no concept of a pre-1980s movie era. Like, college football was much more popular pre-WWII, and just after, than it is now. Back then, before the real rise of professional football, before the advent of the NBA, college football, was probably America’s second favorite sport after baseball. This means that the Golden Age of cinema is rife with college football movies, from The Marx Brothers’ “Horse Feathers” (1932) to “The Spirit of West Point” (1947) which starred Army Football’s fabled Glenn Davis and Doc Blanchard as themselves. But the best of the bunch, and the best college football movie I have ever seen, is 1933’s “College Coach.”

Centering on a fictional university that is going broke and hires a win-at-all-costs Coach (Pat O’Brien) to field the best college football team in the country to put fannies in the seats to bolster business, with players getting preferential treatment and noble professors who object to athletics superseding academics essentially being instructed to go along or get out, “College Coach” echoes the incredibly faulty moral line on which college football runs. That sounds edgy, and it is, even including the death of a football player, a problem that still plagued the sport in the 30s, though director William Wellman, despite working in the pre-code era, when he could have been as dark as he wanted to be, brilliantly opted to dress the whole thing up in the pomp & pageantry emblematic of the sport’s gaudy surface.

There is rampant rah-rah music, even a few musical numbers, a lot of coachspeak blarney, and a narrative hinging, as it must, on One Big Game. In other words, Wellman filters his edginess through camp, an illustration of how the former is so often obscured, then and now, because of the latter, shattering the barrier that Mr. Mandel attempts to erect between the two categories, proving that a great sports movie does not have to be one or the other; it can be both. You just have to be, like, you know, willing to watch a movie in black & white where people talk in those pesky Mid-Atlantic accents.

Band Aid

As “Band Aid” opens, the union of hipster SoCo couple Anna (Zoe Lister-Jones) and Ben (Adam Pally) is disintegrating, this decay initially tied to problems recycled from old sitcoms, like dishes in the sink and a stock un-therapeutic therapy scene where the casting of “Parks and Recreation” stalwart Retta as the therapist  unintentionally emblemizes the small screen sensation. Even so, Anna and Ben’s bickering, while often more comic than nasty, evokes something like a couple that once got off on giving each other shit and now gives each other shit because they are maritally worn out. The hook here, however, is that once our flailing couple sets one of its arguments to music on a whim, a constructive creativity accidentally emerges, evoking a somewhat less commercially viable “Rumours”-era Fleetwood Mac where romantic combustion yields ventilation by tuneage.

This happens at a children’s birthday party where Ben takes up a kiddie guitar and strums a couple chords while Anna adds primitive percussion. This setting is not incidental. If in recent years the phenomena of the Manboy, adult males still beholden to the free care life they led as children, has become synonymous with the cinema, in “Band Aid” Lister-Jones, who wrote and directed (and produced), has concocted something like the Childish Couple, a husband and wife who have tied the knot but are not truly committed to each other or to a self-sustaining lifestyle, preferring to get high and maintain their self-inflicted rut, which means their journey will be as much about emotional growth.

This is meant, I think, to be underlined in the eventual drummer of their band, next-door neighbor Dave (Fred Armisen), a recovering sex addict firmly committed to an abstinent lifestyle despite some fetching friends, a subplot suggesting commentary on the sex and drugs of rock ‘n’ roll being rendered sexless that Lister-Jones cannot quite finesse into anything other than a strange outlier to the A plot. Then again, Dave is refreshingly not a forced conduit to Anna and Ben’s change. No, the change in our central couple must come from them, even if Ben does get a kick in the pants from his mom (national treasure Susie Essman), established as grating before we meet her and learn she is something like a sage, explaining that men struggle to see woman, underlined by what Ben terms “the thirty second delay” where idiot males vanish into the vacuousness of their own minds for thirty seconds at a time. This delay is one of the movie’s most pertinent thoughts, but might have done better with a little visual ingenunity as opposed to a brief citation.

What’s more, beyond the thirty second delay “Band Aid” cannot quite figure out how to spur its characters’ transformation from Childish Couple to truly committed aside from a series of timeworn narrative devices such as Ben sprinting to see Anna’s solo acoustic showcase like he is the neglectful father racing to see his daughter’s school play. It left me wondering if traditional resolution was even in the movie’s best interest. “Band Aid” is most enjoyable mid-songs where Anna and Ben trade lyrical scorn with coy smiles, luxuriating in where everything went wrong rather than trying to patch it up, as the camera glides from her to him and back again, evoking similar shots in “Walk the Line” of the immaculate onstage sexual tension between Johnny Cash and June Carter.

Johnny and June wound up together and happy, of course, and “Band Aid”, bless its heart, wants the same for its couple. But then, neither Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham nor Christine McVie and John McVie wound up together in the end. And while there is something commendable in the movie’s willingness to admit the pipe dream aspect of this whole singer-songwriter enterprise, I found myself wishing that Anna and Ben would have followed up their fed-up muses even further, all the way to the crash and burn.

All This Panic

Jenny Gage’s documentary “All This Panic” chronicles the lives of seven teenage girls in Brooklyn, some of whom cross paths, some of whom don’t, over a period of three years, on the cusp of, as one person in the film puts it, young adulthood. The film runs a swift seventy-nine minutes, which isn’t too short but just right, evocative of teenage lives that when you are in them might often feel endless but when seen from afar, or after the fact, go by so quick. Those lives are often demarcated by certain life events, like prom, like graduation, and while those events are mentioned in “All This Panic”, they are never seen, merely gabbed about beforehand before ensuing scenes make it quietly clear those events have already passed, subtly cutting into their supposed societal potency. No, the epiphanies here are smaller, sometimes non-existent, perceptively picking up on lives that are still being formed, emblemized in the film’s most prominent visual motif, in which the camera allows these girls to come into and fall back out of focus in the same shot, over and over again.

Gage’s other prominent visual motif is innumerable shots of the girls in repose, often sun-dappled, smiling as if they are lost in a thought, or furrowing their brow as if contemplating something heavy, sometimes seen riding the subway, sometimes seen laying in the grass, sometimes seen slumped on their beds. No matter the circumstance or locale, however, each one is lyrical, a little like polished Instagram posts, which was no doubt deliberate and which I mean as a compliment, these girls presenting themselves to the world in a certain way when it is not necessarily indicative of how everything looks behind the curtain. Indeed, Gage favors cutting between confessional kind of monologues or exchanges between friends and more poetic interludes playing like extensions of those Instagram posts.

Lena puts on a birthday party for herself, partly as a covert, or maybe not so covert, means to try and get together with a certain boy. It does not go as planned. So Gage goes back and forth between a quixotic party scene and Lena’s after-the-fact examination about what actually happened. Olivia, who has only just come out of the closet, talks about that life-changing decision while Gage pairs it with shots of Olivia surfing, as if she is facing who she is head on when, in reality, she admits she has not even revealed her sexuality to her parents, is not sure when she will, and that she will have to learn how to “deal with it.” That last line, one of many earnest revelations peppered throughout, destroyed my heart, the thought that someone still, today, here and now, is made to think of being gay as something to be dealt with rather than merely Who They Are and So What?

Though Olivia’s parents are not seen, other parents are, not merely off screen apparitions but integral parts of these girls’ lives. Sage, who plans on attending Howard University, which makes her happy because she won’t be the minority, which is underlined by how she is the only African-American girl in this revolving cast, has a strict, if loving, mother with whom Sage frequently spars over matters small and large. Ginger, who speaks in the abstract about becoming an actor, spars with her father over her less-than-impressive ambition. “All This Panic” does not refute the parents’ perspectives even as it empathizes with Sage and Ginger’s dig-your-heels-in disagreement, which is born less of what’s best for them than youthful agitation, an ancient battle difficult to see from both sides when you are in the midst of it, but that “All This Panic” crystallizes by letting us look through the looking glass both ways simultaneously.

If there are central characters here, it is Ginger and Lena, the former forging college and the latter striking out for it, though perhaps simply because this is real life, one decision is not necessarily portrayed as so much better than the other, with both girls, as the film concludes, still searching for something, whatever that is, and thank God “All This Panic” doesn’t claim to know. The concluding sequence, with so much left unsettled but such excitement and apprehension about what is still to come, becomes a kind of refutation of so many teen movies, fictional or otherwise, that impress the absurd need to have it All Figured Out so damn soon. “All This Panic” just lets these girls be themselves.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Command Decision (1948)

At one point in director Sam Wood’s “Command Decision” a character is heard to remark “Where did I ever get the idea that this war was against the Axis?” It evokes “Platoon’s” Chris Taylor’s fairly on-the-nose explication “I think now, looking back, we didn’t fight the enemy; we fought ourselves.” “Command Decision” does not exist at such a tumultuous extreme, echoing the disparities of WWII and Vietnam, at least in terms of American commitment to the cause, but both films nonetheless get across how in-fighting goes hand-in-hand with war, no matter its original intent. Indeed, while “Command Decision”centers on American daylight bombing raids deep into dangerous Nazi territory, the on screen battlefield is not high in the sky but strictly limited to the big board, to quote General Buck C. Turgidson, in the war room, with strategic decisions hashed out in grave detail in offices as well as a kind of drawing room extension of the war room where various American commanders squabble over cigars and brandy while standing at attention in front of a fireplace.

While this partially lends the film a feel of How The Sausage Gets Made, the overriding tone is less angry than pragmatic, the heroism stemming from a gruff attitude of just having to get on with it, the whole business, that is, where war is never simply Mine vs. Yours, no matter how much officers like Brigadier General Casey Dennis (Clark Gable) might want it that way. No, Dennis must answer to Major General Kane (Walter Pidgeon) who must hack his way through the red tape of Washington while all of them must navigate the printed minefields of the press, represented here by Elmer Brockhurst (Charles Bickford), who constantly lurks just outside Dennis’s door as a reminder that public relations never cease, not even in the face of bombing Nazi facilities deep in German territory constructing special fighter jets.

The maximum danger of these missions means the question becomes whether saving lives in the short-term outweighs expending lives in the long-term, a decision that has less to do with human interests than military interests, and which gets hashed out in so many scenes set in so many static rooms going long on lengthy monologues and bouts of verbal sparring. This belies the film’s theatrical roots, based on a play by William Wister Haines, and Wood has little interest in gussying up this silver screen version with bells and whistles, generally content to place his solid stable of actors on screen and let them go, allowing for the true drama to emerge in the words and decisions, and moments when actors evince the weight these words. By confining the action and keeping the bomber crews off screen the danger of the latter merely becoming pawns of the plot, argued-over collateral damage, emerges, but that does not happen. They remain paramount.

One scene finds Dennis and Kane, along with Brigadier General Garnet (Brian Donlevy), quarreling when the sound of bombers cut through the air. Dennis checks his watch. He realizes the fleet of B-17s that departed that morning on a daylight bombing raid are returning. The three men move to the window and then outside, near the control tower, watching as the bombers return from their raid in the distance, evoked in stock footage and long range shots of the planes looking so tiny on the horizon. Eventually, however, as several of the planes struggle to make it home, we hear the pilots’ voices over the air control tower speakers. And when Dennis realizes one of the planes has a novice at the controls, well, the Brigadier Genral gets on the horn to try and talk the plane down.

That we only see Dennis, never the pilot, is not insensitive but the whole point. In this moment, like a later one, when he sits alone before the big board in the war room, Wood is deliberately transferring personal responsibility to Dennis. He is never made to forget the men under his command because in moments like these the weight of every last one of them is made to metaphorically rest on Dennis’s broad shoulders.

Diane Lane Going to Pretty Places Movies

This past weekend my girlfriend and our mutual friend went and saw “Paris Can Wait.” I did not attend as I plan to watch “Paris Can Wait” the way it was meant to be seen – that is, in 15 minute increments on TNT, which is how I watched “Under the Tuscan Sun”, which I rather enjoyed, and which, like “Paris Can Wait”, starred the incomparable Diane Lane. My girlfriend and our mutual friend gave “Paris Can Wait” positive notices while readily acknowledging its flaws, because a movie like “Paris Can Wait”, where the gastronomical, scenic and sentimental supersede the aesthetic and psychological, is predominantly about consuming empty cinematic calories, and god bless it. My girlfriend, in fact, said she wished for more Diane Lane Goes to Pretty Places movies, and that, as it absolutely had to, got me to thinking. What other pretty places could Diane Lane go to at the movies? It could a series! It should be a series! Let’s pretend it’s a series!

Diane Lane Going to Pretty Places Movies

Diane Lane Goes to Madrid

We will begin with the obvious since Diane Lane going to Spain would be the ideal windup to an unofficial Diane Lane Goes to Europe trilogy. The art would move her, the food would ravish her, the architecture would inspire her, the siestas would revitalize her, and, of course, a Madrileño, probably Javier Bardem in a jaunty hat, would appear on a park bench in a plaza in the mist, with an old Spanish Mastiff at his side, to be at Diane Lane’s beck and call, just as he damn well should be.

Diane Lane Goes to Marrakech

Depressed and disconnected, her life rendered an inscrutable mess, Diane Lane literally and symbolically disappears into the maze of Marrakech, where its bustling wonder buoys her spirits as she finds herself swept along on the current of its community, most notably in the company of a dashing, studious street vendor who espouses the medicinal value of the sardines that Diane Lane consumes as if they are a fishy elixir. At movie’s end, the dashing, studious street vendor bids Diane Lane goodbye, letting go of her hand as she departs the maze, no longer lost.

Diane Lane Goes to Colombia

As a career-oriented event-planner burned out from planning so many extravagant events, Diane Lane flies to Colombia to meet up with an old friend only to end up on the wrong bus, not unlike Joan Wilder, bound for an Andes coffee camp, an event, you might say, she had not planned. Having willfully limited herself to chardonnay and hot water with lemon lo these many years, she finds herself re-energized through the aroma of coffee, and she finds catharsis in roasting and harvesting beans, a process she learns from a handsome local who knows a secret roasting process. Yearning to put on an extravagant event to showcase the handsome local’s secret roasting process, Diane Lane ultimately decides against it, opting for a life apart from events and free of plans, but full of coffee.

Diane Lane Goes to Prince Edward Island

Here Lane would play an Anne of Green Gables enthusiast with bad hair which nevertheless cannot obscure the fact that she is Diane Lane who goes up to Prince Edward Island to see the sites and, sure enough, meets an island native with extraordinarily windswept hair, though oddly no accent, who pokes fun at Diane Lane’s hair to put them at conventional odds before his requisite charms work their obligatory magic, making Diane Lane realize that the beauty of the maritime provinces go far beyond the make-believe.

Diane Lane Goes to Australia

Directed by Jane Campion in an odd break from the bizarre, Diane Lane Goes to Australia opts out of a male love interest as Lane’s in-crisis American travels from Adelaide to Melbourne to Sydney making a new friend at each stop, friends played, respectively, by Naomi Watts, Nicole Kidman and, of course, Kylie Minogue. Impartial critic Nick Prigge is heard to give said movie Five Stars, Two Thumbs Up, an A+, and twenty million gallons of rainbow heart syrup.

Diane Lane Goes to St. Kitts and Nevis

Because Diane Lane is “married to her career”, a friend schedules her a vacay to a singles only retreat on St. Kitts where, alas, the retreat organizers spend too much time trying to play matchmaker and forcing people to attend Compatibility Classes and Aphrodisiac Exercises. Diane Lane incites a revolt and leads rebelling singles who are fine, goddamit, being alone across the water from St. Kitts to Nevis where all the ladies gather together, tell the menfolk to f*** off and party ‘til they drop.

Forgotten Great Moments in Movie History

Last year I made eye contact with Rahm Emanuel. I was walking to the train station in my neighborhood, where the Mayor of Chicago lives nearby, and as I approached from the west, a luxurious black SUV rolled to a stop on the little side street that spills out onto the main street right alongside the train station. A guy in a suit came around to the SUV back door, opened it and out stepped Rahm. His vantage point meant he was looking straight down the sidewalk toward me as he exited and so, for a second, our eyes locked, which prompted me to give my best Chicagoan “Yeah, I know who you are and I don’t care” look. Because he was only a few steps ahead of me, I wound up ascending the stairs to the train platform right alongside him (and his security detail). “And did he say ‘good morning’ to you?” my girlfriend wondered when I relayed the story. “You, his constituent?” “No,” I replied. “He did not.”

Emanuel typically takes public transit one day a week as a kind of offering to the common man, to demonstrate that he, fancypants Mayor, is not so different from us, lowly L riders. That’s why the covert smartphone photos of Emanuel on the El occasionally popping up on social media don’t strike me as an invasion of privacy. He wants you to know he’s riding the train like a regular ol’ joe! The only reason he is riding the train in the first place is to be seen! Is it specious? You’re damn right it’s specious, which I feel like he has to know on some level, and yet there he is anyway. And as I waited up there on the train platform with Rahm, who was drinking coffee and reading the paper, and props to him for still subscribing to a print paper, my mind flashed back to “Batman Begins.”

“Batman Begins” recounts the story of the Wayne family in flashback, wherein Bruce’s father Thomas has contributed to a struggling Gotham City by building a train that’s basically the El in Gotham form. He explains: “People less fortunate than us have been enduring very hard times. So we built a new, cheap, public transportation system to unite the city.” I love that line so much because, as a decade-plus Chicago resident, I have gleefully gone car-less to be an all public transit, all the time kinda guy. I adore public transit. I think our country should put more emphasis on it. Ha! And “Batman Begins” knows it’s hard out there for public transit because in the present day scenes the new, cheap, public transportation has become old, decrepit and vandalized. It’s a dangerous place to be. And yet, there is Rachel Dawes (Katie Holmes), assistant district attorney, riding it anyway, all alone, late at night, getting attacked by muggers.

Narratively she does this so that Batman can swoop in, save the day and tell her he’s on her side. Of course, the plausibility patrol might wonder why in the hell Rachel Dawes is riding such a clearly unsafe train to begin with. But that’s exactly what I love! She is a true believer in public transportation, not taking it, a la Rahm Emanuel, to be seen because who’s gonna see her? Perhaps that makes Rachel Dawes a hero, but I think Rachel Dawes would simply call herself a public servant, not above the plebeians but among them, identical shared passenger strands stitching together the republic, e pluribus unum.

1 Mile to You

Running movies typically center on either the timeworn conventions of competition or the spiritualism inherent in the physical act itself as the seminal running movie of our time “Chariots of Fire” proves by focusing on both, with Harold Abrahams seeking to run everyone else off their feet and Eric Liddell seeking to find God in the rapid movement of his feet. Director Leif Tilden’s “1 Mile to You” is the latter, honing in on a high school prodigy named Kevin (Graham Rogers) whose girlfriend and best friend perish in a bus accident after a track meet. That’s a melodramatic turn in the wake of a fairly realistic opening, a strongly edited track meet that demonstrates how the events themselves often take a back seat to the sort of mixer-ish atmosphere in the infield and around the track’s edges. But then “1 Mile to You”, culled from a novel by Jeremy Jackson, honors its primarily youthful protagonists by going straight YA, and in going YA it chooses to forgo the traditional loneliness of the long distance runner to surround him with all the necessary YA character archetypes. And so if running is supposed to provide clarity, “1 Mile to You” is undone by character and narrative clutter, a contrast to, say, “Without Limits”, Robert Towne’s wonderful 1998 Steve Prefontaine biopic that might have a little too much extra too but still knew full well that its bread was buttered on the track.

I mention “Without Limits” because “1 Mile to You” features that film’s star Billy Crudup metamorphosing nearly twenty years later from the protégé to the mentor, playing Coach K, who naturally takes Kevin under his wing, even as others in Coach K’s sphere seek to ingratiate themselves and potentially profit off this one of a kind talent, the movie’s most intriguing plotline with its best performance. Crudup plays directly to a mantra repeated by characters throughout – that is, “distance runners are crazy.” Indeed, Crudup purposely plays a few notes out of tune, like too many years of 10ks before breakfast have left him a little loopy, but he also stakes out the hard-to-find ground between earnest and selfish, as Coach K yearns to maximize Kevin’s talent even as he senses that what Kevin needs might well be something off the track. Less successful are the paint-by-numbers romantic relationship, where Kevin’s new lady friend looks oddly like his old lady friend, inadvertently suggesting a teenybopper “Vertigo”, which might have been a helluva an angle to play, to a hateful rival, a detour that goes so far as to (unintentionally?) ape Ferris Bueller’s swimming pool rescue of Cameron Frye. Then again, the latter’s less than convincing rendering does underline Kevin’s disinterest in traditional competition, which becomes that much more apparent in how his running is less about winning than exorcism.

The success of running movies, naturally, correlates directly to running, but, appropriately for an already busy movie, Tilden opts not to try and convey anguish and recovery through the act of running but by transforming Kevin’s various runs into stylistic bogs of hazy flashbacks mingling with out of focus dreams, where he visits his girlfriend’s ghost, or something, and chases after the school bus in the moments before it plunges off the bridge, the dramatic concluding race wrapping up with a mental manifestation of that school bus on the track before the bus eventually gives way to a real bus leaving the parking lot that he really runs after. It’s the cinematic equivalent of spangly novel descriptions, literalizing the idea of running as therapy rather than letting the running speak for and do the job itself.

All these visitations to the past in his mind become self-flagellation of sorts, which would not be so bad, possibly interesting, if these moments were not so often underscored with bits of emo-pop and described by Kevin in dialogue that seems to suggest this mental rabbit hole is more of a sanctuary than a prison, which means the visuals are at odds with what the music and words tell us. There is so much happening in “1 Mile to You” that it can never quite figure if Kevin is running toward something or just running away.

A Quiet Passion

There is a shot near the start of “A Quiet Passion” in which the entire Dickinson coterie of Amherst, Massachusetts is gathered before a fire one early evening. The camera begins on young Emily (Emma Bell), quietly contemplative, before gradually circling the room, taking in the rest of her family at leisure, reading or knitting, silence permeating the room aside from a few crackles in the fireplace and the ticking of a clock. Such silence strands you with your thoughts, which no doubt is where Emily, so famously aloof and isolated, spent much of her time, where the mysteries and paradoxes of the universe can overwhelm, which is where she seems to wind up as this shot concludes, her contemplativeness having given way to a quivering fear, as if she has suddenly become aware of the slow funeral march of time, like there is not enough time to spend it on this sort of quiet contemplation, or as if this sort of quiet contemplation might not be near enough in a life that goes so quick.

It’s a shot emblemizing the approach of director Terence Davies, where the typical trappings of a biopic are jettisoned, his subject’s existence not laid out in some broad overview but conveyed in action and behavior, time not demarcated by titles on the screen but just slipping by, never more acutely or sorrowfully than in the re-creation of Dickinson’s famed daguerreotype, where Emma Bell becomes Cynthia Nixon in the snapping of photo, countless years lost in a literal flash.

“A Quiet Passion” opens not in Amherst but at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary where, after deliberately stranding herself apart from her other repenting classmates, Davies cuts Emily and the pious instructor down to close-ups as they verbally spar, Emily proving she can give as good, if not better, than she gets. It’s not that Emily doesn’t believe in God, but that she questions the manner in which she is asked – nay, demanded – to express her faith. It, in a manner of speaking, is between her and God, no one else, evoking the sentiment of a more modern poet, one Tupac Shakur, who declared “Only God Can Judge Me.” She’s a Victorian Era Riot Grrrl, sort of, submissive to her family and her father (Keith Carradine), evinced by literally asking for permission to stay up and write poetry, never allowing it to interfere with regular life, but also out of her time, glimpsed when she confronts a male publisher about editing her work, a confrontation she takes from the top of the stairs, looking down on him, deliberately staking out the power position.

Her proto-feminist attitude coalesces in her friendship with the Vryling Buffam (Catherine Bailey), a fictional character who is nevertheless mischievously alive. Though Emily is portrayed as close to her sister Vinnie (Jennifer Ehle), the film’s most pertinent relationship is between Emily and Vryling, their scenes together evincing an acerbic “Love & Friendship” drawing room air, delighting in each other’s company and their antagonistic attitudes toward a domineering society. If pop culture often resigns Emily Dickinson to the idea of a dour recluse, here Davies and Nixon reclaim her as a more lively spirit. And though Emily finds herself stricken with affection for a married Reverend (Eric Loren), this affection is based more on intellect than amorousness, “A Quiet Passion” delineating Vryling as Emily’s true emotional equal. And so Emily’s unraveling begins in the wake of Vryling’s marriage, a union not so subtly conveyed as a signing away of the deed to her soul in the name of money and stature, a thought which, Emily, no matter how much she may pine for a marriage of her own, cannot bear.

The rebellious countenance that Emily cuts through much of the film’s early half would seem in stark contrast to “A Quiet Passion’s” back half, where the boxes the world forces women into force her into seclusion, almost exclusively withdrawing into her bedroom. Yet her titular urge remains intact, glimpsed in the film’s one flight of fancy as she imagines a gentleman caller entering the home and coming to her room. This is as fantastic as the imagery of Davies gets, not that his cinematography, done by Florian Hoffmeister, is un-explosive in its habitual stillness.

Far from it, in fact, as Davies and Hoffmeister frequently place Nixon in static frames as she conveys what rises up inside Emily, most effectively with a smile that grows and recedes, grows and recedes, in the middle of monologues and sentences, like the tide, as if the force within her, joy and melancholy, are tugging back and forth at all times. It exudes a sense of great feeling that, if not harnessed in poetry, has nowhere else to go, a constriction of her passion the film impressionistically connects to her health deterioration, as if welled up with so much that she might burst, and which is where she seems to end up as the movie ends on her deathbed in which Nixon does not merely evoke the physical pain of Bright’s Disease but something like an eruption of the soul, a moment shot from above, the God’s Eye shot, harkening back to the beginning, as if it really has come down to just her and Him.

Her family is at her side, of course, yet the film leaves you with Emily’s imposed isolation, a closing shot of the camera descending into the grave evoking a terrifying finality of a coffin’s separation from all living things. An earlier moment, in the wake of Vryling’s wedding, captures it even better, as the camera, positioned at the back of the church, observes the post-ceremony processional and then drifts to the left, finding Emily watching everyone else go. When everyone has, the camera dips just below the rows of pews, making it seem as if Emily is sitting not in a long backed bench but in a boat on the water, a character in a Winslow Homer painting brought to life, left to face the world all alone.

keira knightley walks these hills in a long black veil

The Cannes Brûlé Palme

The 70th annual Cannes Film Festival wrapped up last week. Movies were screened and whatever. We here at Cinema Romantico have never been big festival-goers as we prefer to see fewer films at a time and ruminate on the films we see a little longer. Critical rumination has no place at a festival, of course, at least not for critics, whose obligation is to see and then instantly spew, getting to Twitter FIRST with their capsule cum review, not only diagnosing what might not have even settled in their minds but providing fuel for headlines which too often these days comes across like the most valuable currency in movie discourse. It’s a real shame. Still, for all the unfortunate aspects of film festivals, this blog will never deny our affection for the frivolous bliss of Cannes, which is really all that should matter, and which is what reviewers in their spew should cop to straight away, an ecosphere of silver screen endorphins intended to yield euphoria rather than analysis.

As such, it is in that euphoric state that Cinema Romantico, from the cozy confines of its couch, where we spent our time observing Cannes from afar due to the traditional confluence of the Big 10 Track & Field Championships and the fact that the only outlet willing to grant us accreditation was Horse & Hound, officially bestow our famously un-exalted Brûlé Palme, this blog’s variation on Cannes’ prestigious Palme d’Or, awarded each year to Cinema Romantico’s favorite Cannes Film Festival attendee. Past winners include Kylie Minogue, Bill Murray and Kristen Stewart, and while this year’s recipient of Cinema Romantico’s non-notable Brûlé Palme is, if you have followed this blog for any length of time, or simply seen our Twitter avatar, incredibly foregone, that is, in so many ways, keeping with the festival attitude of mostly going to re-confirm your biases.

That is to say, the winner of this year’s quite insignificant Brûlé Palme is Nicole Kidman.

The what’s-that-then? Brûlé Palme goes to Nicole Kidman because Ms. Kidman, just as she so ably toggles between countless character types, played all Five Roles of Festival Attendee to remarkable precision.

She went alone.

She blended into an ensemble. 

She attended with her significant other, humbly accepting his (rightful) deference. 

She brought a friend.

She fronted a supergroup.

She did it all. Because she can do everything.