A Brief Overview of Movie Gum-Chewing

With a history as deep and rich as cinema’s, it is nigh impossible to pinpoint any one instant of anything on the silver screen as being The Best In Movie History. Still, most film scholars agree that in movie moments involving gum, among the finest is Rowdy Roddy Piper in John Carpenter’s Reaganomics smackdown “They Live” declaring in the midst of a delicate situation: “I came here to chew bubblegum and kick ass – and I’m all out of bubblegum.” Of course, what’s ironic about this Bartlett Quotation is that Rowdy Roddy Piper does not, as the line implies, actually possess the sweetened sticky substance he so memorably cites, meaning that this classical cinematic example of chewing gum exists merely in the abstract. That’s just as true of “Hoosiers”, where Coach Norman Dale tells defensive specialist Buddy Walker in a critical contest to think of the opposing’s team top offensive player “as chewing gum. By the end of the game,” Dale implores, “I want to know what flavor he is.” Later Dale wordlessly looks at Buddy as if to say “Well?” Buddy replies: “Dentyne. He was Dentyne.”

Yet even when gum is palpably present onscreen, it is often less about chewing or even breath freshening than helping characters out of metaphorically sticky situations. The immortal Bill and Ted, as you no doubt recall, utilized reams of gum with the aid of historical figures to jerry-rig a new time-traveling antenna, and The Rocketeer himself was carefully established as an incessant gum-chewer merely so his gum could be utilized at a dramatic moment to plug a fuel leak. Gum, in other words, is a plot panacea rather than a wad of synthetic rubber. No, you have to look elsewhere for gum as gum, like the famed scene in 1925’s silent film “The Big Parade” where Jim demonstrates to Melisande exactly what gum is and how it is chewed, or “Top Gun’s” Iceman putting the exclamation point on a highly charged conversation with Maverick by smacking his gum with extreme, immortal prejudice.



Those moments, however, betray the inane repetition of everyday gum-chewing. Heck, even the bubbles blown by Phil Connors in “Groundhog Day” and the nameless student in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” as Ben Stein’s economics teacher drones on are mining for laughs rather than honoring the act’s inherent insignificance. And that, the most basic act of gum chewing, has been foremost in my mind this summer movie season. And it has been foremost in my mind because whereas at this point once upon a time we would be a week, maybe two, into the summer movie season, we are now two months, maybe three, into the summer movie season. And every summer movie I have seen has come tagged with a trailer for “Ocean’s 8.” And every instance in that “Ocean’s 8” trailer of Cate Blanchett chewing gum has superseded every damn thing I’ve seen in every single one of these ostensible summertime Entertaining Thrill Rides.

Imperceptible gum-chewing

Mind you, Blanchett chewing gum is the not the point, which only makes that much better. She is not really even chewing, just sort of nibbling, lightly, as if she is too elegant for such uncouth chomping. We will have to see the finished product, of course, but these glimpses would suggest she might enter the pantheon of great movie gum-chewers, like Rod Steiger in “In the Heat of the Night”, whose gum-smacking exists on the exact opposite plain of Blanchett’s, or Al Pacino in “Glengarry Glen Ross”, whose precision chewing mirrors his character’s vocal inflections. But then, as good as Pacino and Steiger are, and as good as Blanchett appears to be, none of them and no one else can ever compete with Christopher Guest in “This is Spinal Tap.”

You remember his Nigel Tufnel, of course, who spends the majority of Rob Reiner’s heavy metal mockumentary shredding guitar and chewing gum. Seriously, the gum is always there and getting chewed, mostly to no point and purpose which is perfectly representative of chewing gum’s reality. But then, in the film’s most famous scene, Nigel explains to documentarian Marty DiBergi how his band’s specially crafted amps go to 11. “Why don’t you just make ten louder,” wonders DiBergi, “and make ten be the top number and make that a little louder?” And well, how about I let the late great Roger Ebert explain what comes next: “Nigel is so baffled by this notion that he almost stops chewing his gum.” You know your gum-chewing is spot-on when it goes unnoticed until you stop.

Paterno

HBO’s “Paterno” opens with its eponymous character, former Penn State football coach Joe Paterno (Al Pacino), earning his record 409th collegiate football victory. If coaches typically stalk the sidelines, however, Paterno wound up coaching in the a skybox that day due to a pelvic injury, a fact the movie honors and which inadvertently makes for a stirring visual, evoking a king viewing his fiefdom from on high. That fiefdom is expressed by director Barry Levinson blending images of Paterno and his assistant coaches on the sideline conferring with (yelling at) players with raucous fans in the stands, TV production people behind the scenes beaming the entire spectacle across the continent, and school administrators conferring in a stadium hallway. It is a sequence summarizing college football’s cacophonous, far-reaching nature, suggesting it is so much more than what happens on the field.

That, of course, is what led to Paterno’s kingdom crumbling despite his record number of wins, when in late 2011 former Penn State defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky was indicted on multiple accounts of child abuse. In the aftermath, questions emerged of how much Joe Paterno knew and when he knew it, though in the rush to get those answers and in the subsequent fall of both Paterno and the program he had built, the heinous nature of Sandusky’s crimes and his myriad victims too often became clouded over. And if you wish the pain inflicted on the victims might have been lingered over more, Levinson does not ignore those affected, spotlighting Aaron Fisher (Ben Cook), Victim One. We don’t really get to know him, but we do see what he goes through, a bout of bullying at school communicating what was risked by coming forward in a place where the football coach was deity that could do no wrong.

We meet Fisher through Sara Ganim (Riley Keough), the reporter who broke the story for Harrisburg’s Patriot-News. Keough is convincing in her air of being both sort of overwhelmed by the scope of the story but also hyper-focused on getting it right. Her storyline suggests “Spotlight”, but there is little on-the-ground reporting shown, more just expository scenes in the office with her editor. Even so, what comes through is the idea that this information was just sort of lying out in the open with no one acting. She did not stand by; she seized on it.

Levinson relegates Sandusky entirely to the movie’s periphery, punting on the notion of why this monster did what he did, as if Levinson either suspected the audience would not be able to take it or because Levinson decided he could not take it himself. “Paterno” also struggles to show why no one did anything, limiting the conspiracy of inaction among high-ranking Penn State officials to clumsily shot flashbacks that betray the movie’s TV origins. In theory this inaction ties back to the community, but the community’s rendering is “Paterno’s” most egregious failing. I’m not sure if this was due to budget constrictions, but we see no towering shot of the 109,000 football seat stadium or wide frames of the campus and its students to see all that has been brought to bear in Paterno’s name. All we see are a few kids at some party Ganim attends and a few non-descript tight shots of angry students at a bar and on the street. What causes the community to unite in defiance when Paterno is canned never becomes clear, just sort of presumed, as if everyone already had the basic outline entering the movie.

For as little time as we spend in the community, we spend a lot of time inside the Paterno home, which is where the movie shines. A scene in which the Paterno family resorts to Googling to find a crisis manager emblemizes how they are so insulated within their castle walls that they are ill-equipped to manage such a volatile situation. And no one, we realize, is more ill-equipped than Paterno himself, a fact connected both to his age and his obsession. If a series of soppy, made-for-TV-ish flashbacks are meant to gradually evince how Coach Paterno did have the facts in front of him the whole time, Pacino’s performance away from these narrative embellishments is proof enough of Paterno’s negligence, willful or otherwise.

If occasionally, when his voice rises, Pacino sounds like Pacino, he mostly buries himself in the part, evincing an eternally distracted man unable to wrap his mind around what is happening. The movie’s most disturbingly affecting scenes find Paterno at home as his family squabbles, stranded on the edge, hearing but not listening, which, in close-ups, allows Pacino to make a feast of confused, wandering eyes. Cruelly, he can’t grasp what the fuss is all about, not with another game looming. stick to sports. Can’t I, you sense him thinking, just stick to sports?

Solo: A Star Wars Story

The seminal Han Solo moment occurs, I’d argue, in “The Empire Strikes Back” when the smuggler cum rebel leader, being pursued by the Imperial Starfleet, sets two-seven-one – you know, piloting the Millennium Falcon directly into an asteroid field. It was brilliant and reckless, but also unpredictable. He knew how to calculate coordinates to make the jump to light speed, but he still flew by the seat of his pants. That’s why in “Star Wars” Solo could so memorably go in an instant from not just wanting to hang around while Ben Kenobi de-activated the tractor beam to yearning to stay put when Leia’s rescue is proposed. And if narrative rules dictated that he’d turned back up in the end to help save the day, it still felt spur of the moment because of the way Ford played the part and how the character’s groundwork was laid; you could never really be sure what he’d do.

In “Solo: A Star Wars Story” you are almost always sure of what Han (Alden Ehrenreich) will do. That’s because this is an origin story, of sorts, and other films in the franchise have referenced events – the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs, the card game that won Han the Millennium Falcon – that must happen, forcing director Ron Howard to slalom between story points rather than telling it his own way, like Robert Towne being assigned mandatory action scenes for his “Mission: Impossible 2” screenplay. This lends “Solo’s” proceedings a pre-programmed air decidedly, distressingly at odds with the eponymous character’s spontaneity.

These obligations are made doubly frustrating because “Solo” thankfully forgoes the bothersome way in which “Force Awakens” and “Last Jedi” forewent quoting movie genres in the manner of Lucas’s original to only quote Lucas’s originals themselves. “Solo” begins as a kind of “American Graffiti” plunked down in a “Blade Runner” world before giving way to a war movie and then brief dalliance with “The Defiant Ones” in demonstrating how Han met his Wookie co-pilot Chewbacca (Joonas Suotamo) before finally settling into an old cowboy picture, right down to the bad guys going good to help the burdened locals. But though the genre-hopping is welcome, the rendering is less joyfully kitschy than summer movie functionality. More room to narratively maneuver might have helped, and a brighter visual palette might have helped too. Much of “Solo” is shrouded in darkness, like the Millennium Falcon reveal, where what little we see mirrors what little we are shown, the movie not even reveling in the legendary ship’s liftoff. This gloomy photography inadvertently underlines the movie’s odd languor, save for isolated spirited bits, like the cape closet of Donald Glover’s appropriately debonair version of Lando Calrissian, which is destined more for eternal GIFdom than cinema lore.

If the story leans hard into what we already know, however, Solo himself is not always familiar. If he famously remarked “I take orders from just one person – me”, it is therefore perplexing how frequently this Solo acts out of the interests of others. Indeed, that famous surname is revealed as something lesser and dumber than you probably thought, as disappointing a reveal as learning the genesis of, say, “Catfish” Hunter’s nickname. No, this Solo does it all out of love for Oi’ra (Emilia Clarke), who is introduced in the movie’s opening alongside Han trying to flee the Corellia coop. He gets out; she does not. As such, all Solo’s schemes connect to her potential rescue, though eventually they link up in real time when he finds himself in the employ of a bland baddie (Paul Bettany) whose right hand woman turns out to be none other than Qi’ra.

Another movie not indebted to inflexible backstory might have made Qi’ra more the point. How exactly she winds up in a life of such high class crime might have made for a riveting concurrent storyline, though here it’s mostly brushed over because the movie’s focus must remain rooted to Han. What’s worse, Clarke’s goodie-goodie aura strains belief that her character would have fallen in so close with such a nefarious character. She and Han, really, are just so…nice.

From this point of view, the through-line of “Solo: A Star Wars Story” suggests the eponymous smuggler’s hardening worldview. After all, Tobias Beckett (Woody Harrelson), captain of the plundering crew that Han joins, spends much of the movie issuing time-honored reminders about trusting no one because everyone will betray you. And Han is betrayed, fairly often, no double cross more memorable than the one in which our beloved smuggler steps forward, makes a theatrical bluff, and then steps back when the bluff is sort of cosmically called. But then, if all this is intended to alter his worldview, setting us up for the cynic of “A New Hope”, the performance of Ehrenreich never brings that notion home.

If Ehrenreich was given something close to an impossible task, trying to replicate a role made famous by someone who wasn’t playing a part so much as a version of himself, the 28 year old actor nevertheless comes through by not really trying to be Ford. If anything, Ehreneich’s Solo is more Rick O’Connell in “The Mummy”, a scamp rather than a scoundrel, one who never really stops having fun even when the stakes are theoretically dire. On those terms, the performance succeeds, even if Ehrenreich’s gentlemanly version of devil-may-care intrinsically deflects the movie’s attempts to harden his heart. And so even as the prescribed beats are hit, Eherenreich still manages to take the movie as it comes at him, making you wish the “Star Wars Story” thing had been scrapped to just let him fly, well, solo.

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Firemen's Ball (1967)

The eponymous “Firemen’s Ball” of Milos Foreman’s 1967 Czech New Wave comedy of errors is intended to honor the 86 year old ex-chairman (Jan Stöckl) of a small Czech town’s fire brigade. But we do not see the chairman as the movie opens, eavesdropping instead on the firefighters’ committee lamenting how they forgot to honor the chairman more appropriately a year earlier on his 85th birthday, signaling not only the organization’s inherent haplessness but how their haplessness, and selfishness, will repeatedly take center stage over the person they are ostensibly honoring. Indeed, the chairman becomes something less than a hero in the film’s rendering, more like a recurring butt of myriad unintentional jokes, all the way up to the end where his big speech is undercut by the ceremonial axe with which he is to be presented going missing at the all-important moment. This reveal is fairly obvious and yet, to a modern viewer such a foregone conclusion is in lockstep with Foreman’s critique of the country’s Communist experience. After all, only a year after “The Firemen’s Ball” was made, Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia.

“The Firemen’s Ball” betrays its political commentary by forgoing even cursory attempts at spotlighting individual personalities to instead focus on the two opposing masses. There is the noisy reverie of the ball-goers and then the squabbling, dithering firefighters committee whose overblown sense of power is comically exposed as the party gradually goes awry. And when Foreman does cut to an individual, he makes it count, not only with the honored, theoretically, chairman but in the film’s concluding shot, which is draped in a humorous melancholy. Occasionally Foreman even picks out individuals amidst the crowd, like the young man who seems to be the date of a woman who winds up in the ball’s ersatz beauty pageant. This young man’s disheveled hair and jaw in hand air demonstrates a complete lack of interest in the whole affair, bringing home its pointlessness, which the aforementioned ersatz beauty pageant makes even clearer.

The beauty pageant reveals itself as less an exercise in finding a proper presenter than an excuse for the committee to ogle women. In the manner of so many big-headed men, however, they are disappointed in the appearance of the contestants, not that the contestants seemed entranced by the big-headed men. The women mostly stand there with stone-faced disinterest or giggle like they know the whole ordeal is a joke, while the fire brigade keeps looking toward the door, hoping someone else will show up, two parties entirely un-committed to a process playing out only because of pointless ceremony. This transpires simultaneously with the ball’s raffle prizes being stolen right under everyone’s nose, which the brigade seems determined to pin on the attendees, though it eventually becomes clear that the brigade’s own also has its hand in the cookie jar, demonstrating the innate corruption within a civic institution that is nominally for good. But that institution is never put on notice any more than the pivotal moment mid-ball when a rural home catches on fire.

Being that I bring everything, including movies, down to movies, this movie moment could not help but remind me of the moment in “Roxanne” when Steve Martin’s updated de Bergerac, fire chief C.D. Bales, sniffs out a fire and leads the rescue mission. There a bumbling mass of idiots steps up to save the day, which is quintessentially American, always believing the best about ourselves even when experience, history and gut intuition tell us not to, a comedy suddenly giving rise to whimsical heroism. In “The Firemen’s Ball”, however, set in the cold-hearted, communist-ravaged post-war Europe, comedy gives way to something blackly comic. The firemen get their firetruck caught in the snow, and are forced to try and douse the fire with the same snow that prevents their putting out the fire in the first place. And as the old homeowner watches his house burn down, he is overcome by a nighttime chill, moved closer to the fire by the firemen to get warmed up by the blaze, an irony so wicked that you laugh through tears.

The Ultimate Neil deGrasse Tyson Rebuttal

As devoted frustrated longtime readers know, this blog’s #1 nemesis is Neil deGrasse Tyson. Not because Neil deGrasse Tyson holds the feet of climate change deniers and various other troglodytes to the fire, qualities for which we significantly admire Mr. deGrasse Tyson, but because of his nincompoop-ish need to constantly nitpick movies not for aesthetic or thematic deficiencies but for failure to adhere to the most stringent (i.e. pointless) scientific realism. Lord, how this grinds Cinema Romantico’s gears. And we are not alone. We are not alone because last month at The AV Club Sean O’Neal winningly, simply decreed “It would be awesome if Neil deGrasse Tyson would shut it.”

This stemmed from Mr. deGrasse Tyson’s following Twitter declaration: “In my day, the word ‘Awesome’ was reserved for things like curing Polio and walking on the Moon, not for food or TV shows.” Oh, for God’s sake. Put me in a sack and throw me in the Hudson River. If you don’t think the banana pudding at Hattie B’s is awesome, if you don’t think Phil Hartman as David Brinkley on that old Saturday Night Live Bush/Dukakis debate sketch is awesome, then what the hell are we even doing on this stupid blue rock? This tweet, at least, was apart from the astrophysicist’s usual fixation on movie plot holes, but still…..he is, as ever, despite always and forever being light years smarter than this blog, a complete idiot.

Anyway. I have been reading Alexander Walker’s 1978 book, The Shattered Silents, about Hollywood’s fairly brisk transfer from silents to so-called talkies. In its rush to transition, studios became fearful of actors with tenuous voices, over-correcting by focusing on performers’ speaking voices, disregarding everything else, like all-important presence, reducing screen acting to mere elocution. To do so, studios consulted voice specialists and university professors, like Ray Immel, Dean of the School of Speech at USC, who, per Walker, expressed of those (un)willingly in his charge that their “vocal capacities should be determined by tests specially devised ‘to eliminate the human element’”, which is one of those advisories that can only be proferred by absolutely brilliant people that have no idea what’s going on.

A film director of the era, William C. deMille was so un-taken with this overthought school of thought that he unleashed a withering screed: “If David of the Old Testament had been obliged to figure out Newton’s law of gravitation and then laws of centrifugal force governing the stone he was about to hurl, as well as the relative density of the skull he was about to hurl it at, I wonder if he really would have hit Goliath.”

Needless to say, I stopped reading. I wanted to cut and paste that deMille quote right then and there use it to rebut every deGrasse Tyson bellyache about improper starfields in “Titanic” and how “Gattaca” wrongly cites Pluto as a planet even though everyone knows that “Gattaca” merely saw the future where grousers like deGrasse Tyson have been overruled on their Pluto-Is-Not-A-Planet horse hockey. After all, as The Shattered Silents goes to show, when Hollywood gave too much power to specialists in the wrong field, everything went to pits. And no doubt if deGrasse Tyson was put in charge of a movie production, the product rendered would no doubt wind up as “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls” for the periodic table tie crowd, not to mention if the dude had been around during Biblical times he totally would have pulled a “Well, actually” on Samuel.

Battle of the Sexes

The famous Billie Jean King v Bobby Riggs tennis match at the Houston Astrodome in 1973 was billed as the Battle of the Sexes, the moniker which Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris’s 2017 chronicling the same event, inevitably, takes as its title. Indeed, the actual tennis match of it, the specifics of it, the how and why King routed Riggs in three straight sets took less precedence than the match’s social backdrop. As such, Dayton and Faris’s movie is more interested in the social backdrop too, allowing it to assume center stage, transforming nearly scene in “Battle of the Sexes” into a referendum on feminism and/or male chauvinism. That inevitably means much of the dialogue functions less like free-flowing exchanges of thoughts than principled statements, no character more egregiously than Ted Tinling (Alan Cumming), who might have been King’s fashion aide-de-camp in real life but here is more like a platitudinous observer. “Times change,” he says to King. “You should know you just changed them.” Tell that to Serena Williams, G.O.A.T., after John McEnroe said she’d be 700th best on the men’s circuit. Don’t you wish she could have sent a patented forearm missile straight into his receding hairline? I digress.

“Battle of the Sexes” builds its world through King (Emma Stone) and Gladys Heldman (Sarah Silverman) confronting tennis tournament chairman Jack Kramer (Bill Pullman) over his refusal to make the winning prize money equal for women and men. In the movie’s light, Kramer represents the sexist status quo, denoted by the rocks glass he almost always has in his hand, usually in a wood-paneled room. And while the character has virtually no dimension, I nevertheless liked how Pullman played the part, blinkingly with a halting way of speaking, like being in the presence of women truly brings him physical pain.

As such, King and Heldman in conjunction with several other women form their own non-dude league. They are poorly compensated, reduced to staying at fleabag motels and working hard on their own to promote the venture, all of which suggests its own movie, frankly, like an old school version of the NWSL or WNBA. But this storyline merely runs concurrently to that of King’s eventual opponent, Bobby Riggs (Steve Carell), introduced in a long shot through a window which emblemizes how he is presented throughout, all alone in wide frames, working to underscore what a sad-sack this self-proclaimed chauvinist really is.

Carell has often excelled at injecting blowhards with pathos, and whether or not you think Riggs is deserving of pity, he is given some by the actor anyway, the chuckle-infused big personality clearly masking woe. The movie never quite makes clear whether all of Riggs’s intolerant ramblings are marketing ploys or his real attitudes, and in Carell’s hands, the one-time tennis great often comes across more like an out of touch old man than someone weaponizing sexism. The closest the movie gets to demonstrating what his behavior has wrought is through Elisabeth Shue as Rigg’s wife Priscilla. Granted, her character has little to do, mostly just sitting on the couch and listening to her spouse hem and haw. But Shue invests those moments dignity by quietly letting us see just how much his act has worn her down and left her indifferent to his self-ascribed fate opposite King.

King’s own complicated love life is threaded through the narrative too, re-ordering and condensing some events. Her marriage to Larry (Austin Stowell), more professional than romantic, is compromised by an affair with her hairdresser, Marilyn Barnett (Andrea Riseborough), though the movie prefers watering down the oft-explosive complications of this triangle, punting on the opportunity to truly examinethe era’s LGBT persecution. These scenes are best when everything is left unspoken, like King meeting cute with Marilyn by way of just a few looks, attraction at its most elemental, or how Larry tenderly applies ice to his wife’s weary knees. The latter happens in a scene where both paramours appear at King’s hotel door at the same time, the stuff of thousands of bad rom coms. But the way this goes, with her husband acknowledging the truth simply from his air, and yet helping his wife anyway, conveys multitudes of truth about the complex, difficult, yet still loving nature of their relationship.

This sequence, however, doubles as one of the few moments also addressing the tangible effects of tennis. In most every other regard, tennis is less about the physicality required than the off the court emotions. This is most explicitly connected to King’s sexuality. Upon questioning it, her court on the play struggles, which we are shown less than told about, and in advance of her eventual defeat of the braying Riggs, when the chips are down, Marilyn’s re-appearance at Larry’s urging suggests that love helps Billie Jean win, reductions of King’s talent that feels insulting.

As King, Stone nails the social awkwardness but is never really allowed to revel in the character’s command of a tennis court. There’s a great line when Marilyn says it must be intoxicating to be inside King’s skin, hinting at how we all feel whenever we watch a top-tier athlete, making us wonder what it must be like to do the things they do. But we only get to see that once, really, in the actual Battle of the Sexes showdown, which Dayton and Faris thankfully linger over, showing it pretty much as it was. Grace Lichtenstein famously wrote off the actual match as “an inconsequential, made-for-television, silly matchup…it shouldn’t have been a landmark anything.” Ah, but sports has a way of laying everything bare. And whether it was merely made-for-television or not, to watch Bobby Riggs get throttled by Billie Jean King is to see time pass an old, hapless white guy by.

The Commuter

“The Commuter” is the latest in the newly bustling subgenre of Liam Neeson Finds People thrillers. The first entry, “Taken” (2008), was mostly mindless vigilantism in the name of a father’s love. “Non-Stop (2014), while narratively absurd, at least tried to forge something close to a self-loathing anti-hero. Jaume Collett-Serra’s “The Commuter” (2018), meanwhile, initially strains to – strike that! – succeeds at creating an atmosphere of dread, opening with more than passing nods to reality by explicitly referencing crooked cops, the financial crisis and exorbitant student loans. This is the mire in which Michael MacCauley (Neeson), an ex-cop now reduced to peddling life insurance, finds himself when a mysterious woman on his commuter train promises him $100k to find someone before the end of the line – find someone, that is, and kill him/her. And the further the ride goes, the more “The Commuter” loses touch with the tone of its effective opening, which makes you wonder why the opening exists as is in the first place. If you want to be “just a movie” then be one!

That opening is a whirling montage of innumerable mornings in which Michael wakes up, goes about his routine, and then takes the commuter train into the city. The swift edits contrast clothes and weather, demonstrating the change of days and seasons, time unstoppably rolling by in the literal blink of an eye, as news pours from the radio and TV, always there and on top of him, while conversations over coffee and breakfast with his wife and son exposit backstory, yes, but also elicit a feeling of how life’s most pressing moments are not necessarily given proper attention or weight, just brushed over in the post-dawn blur. It is the best passage in the movie; the second verse of Dylan’s “One Too Many Mornings” finding life, glorious life, inside a B-movie.

It frankly would have been enough all on its own to trigger the movie’s eventual mystery. Nevertheless, the backstory keeps coming, recounted in Michael’s life insurance pitch to a young couple where he blends sales tactics with his character’s history, blatant yet no less delightful dialogue, before – wait for it – he gets fired. That leads him to drown his sorrows at a bar with his old detective partner (Patrick Wilson), a scene where the two men lash out at any number of issues you might find in a quick scan of your morning newspaper. If Michael’s anger at his lot in life feels familiar, Collet-Sera also uses this moment to freshen up an old visual tactic – namely, the jerky, handheld camera. As Michael unloads, Collet-Sera cuts to shots from his side, jerking the camera so violently, even more so than later when the commuter train is out of control, to underscore a life, ahem, off the rails.

All this seems to be setting up Michael for a sort of neo-noir when Joanna (Vera Farmiga) sits down across from him on his train and makes an offer that she tells him he can refuse, if he wants, but if he doesn’t, then he’s in, all in. I kept imagining a world-weary Bogart, first with an incredulous smile than a gradual descent into darkness, so close to the edge and then willingly let himself be pushed right off it. Neeson, however, will not let himself be pushed, taking the cash Joanna offers, but only half-heartedly, less a character decision than a narrative trigger, sadly, that transforms “The Commuter” into a puzzle to be put together as Michael goes up and down the rows of the train trying to ferret out the person he needs to find lest bad things happen to his family.

At this point, every detail begins locking into place, with AC going out in one train car allowing for a space where Michael can confront people one on one without Collett-Sera and his assistant director needing to wrangle with extras, while even Michael’s established preference for reading literary classics is less a trait than a clue. It’s all clues as the guessing game overtakes any sense of Michael’s established emotional and financial straits, and nearly every relationship proves itself to be a fake out. The whole enterprise is diversionary, I suppose, and there is actually some nice humor mined from the escalating insanity, where passengers don’t necessarily just behave as if they are in a movie but truly on a train that appears to have been overrun by a lunatic. Still, as the movie progresses, the more the portentous atmosphere of the first reel turns out to the biggest fake of all.

This comes home in the final scene, a confrontation between Michael and Joanna that I will not explain in full, suggesting that she is orchestrator of this whole ordeal. If she is then everything in “The Commuter” is more or less the product of some grand conspiracy rather than any kind of societal reality, inadvertently reminding us that there is always – always – someone to blame.

A Toast to Kylie on Her 50th

This blog needs no excuse to write about Kylie Minogue. I mean, we are not shy about trying to find excuses to write about her, of course, concocting all manner of inane hypotheticals to work her way into this space. We have written less about all these “Star Wars” sequels and spinoffs combined than we did about Kylie Minogue’s 60 second appearance in “San Andreas.” Dwayne Johnson, after all, is like The Rock he is sometimes called, like a whole hulking planet, one you see right up close, whereas Kylie is like a star, so small yet so bright. And maybe that’s why the movies have never been able to contain her; the screen amplifies everyone, and if you amplify Kylie too much at one time, the sheer wattage would blind you.

Even so, in her scattershot silver screen appearances she has mostly always imbued them with her patented brand of je ne sais quoi. “Moulin Rouge” is high, believe you, me, before Kylie appears as The Absinthe Fairy for a walk-off sing-along, but, like when the Harlem Globetrotters used to bring out a ladder to extend themselves higher than the basket itself, she briefly takes Baz Luhrmann’s epic higher. “Bio-Dome” is pretty low, and while Kylie turning up might not be enough to save the proceedings – she isn’t a good enough actor if only because she really isn’t an actor at all – she still offers a brief pop diva redemption. She doesn’t necessarily need to offer her musical skillz because her glowing, figuratively gold flake dusted presence is enough, like an embodiment, say, of Elvis’s “Return to Sender” popping up amidst the dreck of “Girls! Girls! Girls!”

That infusion of her specially made angelicized (sic) electrolytes, however, just as ably describes her aura across the entire cultural, pop or otherwise, spectrum. Consider this Scissor Sisters performance at Glastonbury where Kylie emerges from the wings to sing along on “Any Which Way.” I mean, the Scissor Sisters could have handled this on their own, obviously, but Kylie becomes this kind of black-clad additive burst, a mini, in-set fireworks show of gyrations, sing-alongs and overall Kylie-ness. There is a remarkable Rufus Wainwright quote in The Guardian from a dozen years ago when he says Kylie is the gay shorthand for joy. I cannot comment on the gay part, but I do know that Kylie is my own shorthand for joy, and this Scissor Sisters’ cameo exemplifies it. Of course, she is shorthand for so much more.

I knew about Kylie for a long time, of course. I was listening to Casey Kasem when “Locomotion” was on the Hot 100; I watched the Sydney Olympic Closing Ceremonies when Australia’s real Queen turned up to sing. But I never really heard her until “Can’t Get You Outta My Head” and “Love at First Sight” invaded American airwaves in 2002. I had a serious earworm relationship with those two songs. But then, I have, like, 75 earworms a year; these songs had staying power. More than staying power, though, they had a deeper meaning that took years not so much to extract as simply…emerge. That meaning, in retrospect, took shape when I left a Jewel concert in the summer of 2002 at the Des Moines Civic Center and heard “Love at First Sight” emanating from some downtown after hours establishment.

It’s a little embarrassing out here in the iPhone-enhanced future to admit how much I once enjoyed Jewel, but these were the late 90s and the early aughts, and, as they say, it was a different time. And I was a different person. I was a twenty-something idiot, one emotionally, physically rambling about who kept screwing up the railroad switches of life. I didn’t know where I wanted to go, what I wanted to do, or who I was, which are all ancient, boring refrains, assuredly, particularly for us moronic white males, but then that’s why I heard Jewel singing “But your heart like grape gum on the ground” and nodded along while drinking Keystone Light from a can and being self-consciously sad.

I enjoyed the Jewel show that night in Des Moines (she was funny – like, acerbically funny in-between songs, whether you want that to be true or not), but I remember thinking as notes of “Love at First Sight” wafted through the summer air afterwards that I enjoyed them more than anything I’d just heard; I realized I enjoyed “Love at First Sight” more than any song I’d heard all year. So I dug up Kylie’s back catalogue, listening to “Light Years” (2000) and “Rhythm of Love” (1990), which had a lightness of being, one that agreed with some part of me I was struggling to access, and this effortless, glorious sense of being nothing more than what they were.

If she dabbles in genres and personas, what always cements her music as Kylie is, well, Kylie. Like on “One Boy Girl”, a funky number that goes so far as to include a mid-song rap to try and capitalize on the way rap had entered the mainstream in the 1980s. Kylie, however, thankfully, does not rap herself; she leaves that to The Poetess. Instead Kylie becomes something like a milquetoast hype woman, just responding to The Poetess’s rhymes. It’s wonderful, in its own way, with Ms. Minogue not trying to be something she’s not, which she never ever is, no matter what twists and turns her album production she takes, no matter what outlandish costumes she so wonderfully dresses up in. “Did I forget to mention that I found a new direction?” she rhetorically asks on her gold hot pants masterpiece “Spinning Around”. “And it leads back to me?”

I want to make something clear – Kylie was not the catalyst for personal change. That would be unfair, reductive, and, above all, ridiculous. But as I came into my own in the twenty-tens, with Kylie’s “Aphrodite” (along with the aforementioned “Light Years” and “Rhythm of Love” comprising my tri-headed Favorite Kylie Album) there in 2010 to melodically signal land ho!, I realized the spirit of Kylie’s music had always been there, improbably running parallel to my chicken-scratched journey, even though I could not always hear it, waiting for my mind to pick up the frequency of my self. It’s why I’ve never stopped listening to her.

I’ve had a lot of musical flings in my times, bands I fiercely cherish for months, even years, and then just sort of drift away from. Even ones I still love on an emotional level, the music doesn’t instinctively take hold. Not like the title track to “Light Years”, which I can go months, months and months, without hearing and then just fall right back into. That song, one of my 127 favorite Kylie songs, imagines some metaphorical, futuristic rocket ship – “Welcome to KM air” – with Kylie Minogue as the self-professed “purser”, one who promises to take good care of us. I always thought of her that way, as my spiritual caretaker. But now, here, today, on Kylie’s 50th birthday, I realize that’s not quite right.

Kylie’s music is not my purser; Kylie’s music is my pulse.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Seven Days in May (1964)

“Seven Days in May” is both a Constitutional and a conversational thriller. Its opening credits, after all, are superimposed over images of the Constitution, immediately cluing us into the fact that nothing short of the supreme law of the United States of America is at stake. That’s because a coup d’etat has been set in motion in the upper echelons of the military to wrest power away from the President, a plot that one man helpfully detects though he is not initially believed by the President’s top advisors. That seems like a storyline designed to bolster conspiracy theorists, but really this attempt at overthrow is just an excuse to re-underline our American values. Not that Frankenheimer is content to merely dabble in jingoism. This is a tense, eminently watchable thriller, made so not through any sort of traditional action but through chit-chat, though even then, ultimately, that chit-chat is no match for what one character does.

As the movie opens, President Jordan Lyman (Fredric March) has signed a nuclear disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union, causing his approval rating to plummet to a ghastly 29%. He learns this while being warned by the White House doctor about his stroke-level blood pressure, which POTUS shrugs off by citing the weight of the free world. And while that might be a plot point that another movie would loop back around to near the end, here it is just character building. In the aftermath, he goes for a swim rather than the two week vacation the doctor prescribes, though the movie doesn’t even let us see one stroke of this swim, just cutting to him after he’s exited the pool and is already in the midst of another politically charged conversation.

The movie waits for no talking. It is talking that is either tense or faux cordial, where jokes and pleasantries exchanged (sort of) mask the governmental tension running underneath, though occasionally the movie pauses for a big speech. No speech is better than the one President Lyman gives before a flag bearing the nation’s motto, E Pluribus Unum, which he delivers by looking to the heavens, not pleading to constituents for votes but begging on behalf of the American people for justice for all.

The plot behind Lyman’s back is engineered by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General James Mattoon Scott (Burt Lancaster), who not only naturally disagrees with the just-signed treaty, but envisions it engendering the end of the United States when the Soviet Union no doubt refuses to live up to its end of the bargain. That’s why Scott needs to seize control, and Lancaster plays the part as if John Wayne was asked to re-interpret Col. Bat Guano, giving derangement such as patriotic gleam that you can understand why so many would go along rather than cower. And while the movie initially plays coy about Scott is up to, it does not take long for the dots to start connecting, for us as well as for Colonel Jiggs Casey (Kirk Douglas), the director of the Joint Chiefs. He might lionize Scott, but as soon as Jiggs sniffs out what’s happening he goes straight to his Commander in Chief. In the company of a couple more of the President’s confidants, the men devise a plan to ward of Scott’s intended ambush, not all of which is any less un-virtuous than the Chairman’s proposed methods.

Indeed, if most of the conversations here involve men, the couple notable exceptions involve men essentially working women for information, like a drunken old Georgia senator getting a woman in a New Mexico bar to gossip about the secret army base he is trying to find. Then there is Eleanor Holbrook (Ava Gardner), the mistress of Scott, a character that, in the end, is essentially superfluous, though her existence demonstrates the nastiness of Beltway politics when the President enlists Jiggs to press her for blackmail material on the Joint Chiefs Chairman just in case. She’s barely a person. Still, Gardner’s introduction is worthy of the Movie Star she was, lounging in a wingback chair at some political insiders cocktail party If the character is barely allowed to a person that still sort of winds up feeling just right, as Gardner drifts through the movie, tumbler in hand, as the personification of the ghosts of those the political machine chews up and spits out.

Jigg’s seduction, more or less, of Eleanor is the one moment undercutting his otherwise impressive nobility. That might have been on purpose, though I suspect it is simply a sign of those times, though either way it fuzzes up his character a bit. In either event, Jigg’s nobility is born not so much of verbiage but of action. When he speaks, it is more often jokes made to ward off sensitive inquiries, or deliberate refusals to make partisan political statements. No, he is the one character whose motivation remains strictly interior, as if to him, all the conversation is just white noise compared to the words of the Constitution.

What's the Best Star Wars Line?

Earlier this month, Star Wars Day was observed. That’s May 4th, of course, because, like, you know – heavy sigh – May the Fourth Be With You. If you wonder why “Star Wars” deserves its own day, well, I suspect it’s for the same reason that there is an action figure of General Madine. But the holiday’s origin and reason for continuing to exist is not what we are here to discuss. No, we are here to discuss the actual line of dialogue that, obviously, May the Fourth Be With You is culled from – that is, “May the force be with you.”

This is a famous line. It is so famous that it checked in at #8 on the AFI (American Film Institute) Best 100 Movie Quotes list from 2005. Mike Pesca noted this too in a recent episode of his daily podcast The Gist. He argued, however, that an 8th place finish was far too generous because the line, like other lines on the list, like “Bond, James Bond”, are less examples of great writing than merely ubiquitous, whether within the movie itself or societally speaking. That ubiquitous quality was also cited in “Rosebud”, the famous explanation, so to speak, from “Citizen Kane.” And I have to say, Pesca is right. Is “Rosebud” a better written line than “I always gagged on the silver spoon?” No, it’s not. And “May the force be with you” is not a better written line than…..

Well, that’s the thing. What is a great “Star Wars” line? I mean, a “Star Wars” line that’s really written. The obvious answer here is Leia saying “I love you” and Han replying “I know.” But then, that line wasn’t written; it was improvised by Ford. And most of the great lines in “Star Wars”, the really great lines, are as much about Ford as the writing. Ford may have famously remarked “George, you can type this shit, but you can’t say it”, but Ford could say it. He could say it really, really well.

“I’ve run outrun Imperial starships. Not the local bulk cruisers mind you, I’m talking about the big Corellian ships now.” That Solo line is really just B-movie b.s., but Ford gave it the ring not of a weary actor in a b.s. B-movie but a space stock car driver over beers. He’s even better in “The Empire Strikes Back” quarreling with Carrie Fisher (rip). When Leia accuses Han of making things so difficult, Ford’s “I do, I really do” riposte is just something else, smug acknowledgement of his own smugness. (Smug Runner-up: “ Yes, your Highnessness?”) The best lines in “Star Wars”, in other words, are Harrison Ford line readings which isn’t really the same thing. (Parenthetical shout-out here to Graham Ashley as the immortal Gold Five whose “Stabilize your rear deflectors, watch for enemy fighters” is a righteous line reading steeped in regal theatricality.)

The best written Han Solo line is maybe the smuggler cum rebel General barking at slow-moving C-3PO when quickness would suffice: “Hurry up, goldenrod! You’re gonna be a permanent resident!” I like it because at least you could picture Humphrey Bogart brusquely saying this to some supporting blowhard. Non-Solo speaking, “It’s a trap” might well be a solid choice, an effective, panicked come to Jesus cry. Yet if it is only said once in the movie, it has been repeated ad nauseum in pop culture, repetition in the manner of  “Rosebud”, and not line a where you admire the craftsmanship anyway. I am tempted to cite “That’s no moon...it’s a space station.” Except that line too seems a little less about the words and a little more about the immaculate portentous spin Guinness puts on them.

“Do or do not, there is no try,” as Yoda advises, might be ubiquitous, but it’s also infused with actual wisdom, though it skews a little too much toward classroom inspirational poster for my dialogue tastes. “But I was going into Tosche station to pick up some power converters!” gets laughed at a lot, but it is remembered. Does it not accurately capture a whiny adolescence? Even so, I think we can do better.

Pesca tossed out some options, including “I used to bullseye womp rats in my T-16 back home” and “Only a master of evil, Darth.” Those are solid. And yet, it is not “Only a master of evil, Darth” that leaps to mind when I consider Ben Kenobi observations so much as this: “You can’t win, Darth. If you strike me down I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.”

Obi-Wan, of course, would re-appear in the ensuing two films by way of ghostly hologram, most problematically, sadly in the “Return of the Jedi” where he is made to utter that “certain point of view” line which is one of the worst bits of dialogue in the series, less a punchy observation than narrative evasion. These re-appearances of old Ben Kenobi, in fact, merely undermine his cautioning that “If you strike me down I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.”

Redundancy, Pesca said in quoting an old observation that he tied back to may the force be with you, should not be mistaken for profundity. And that is sort of the whole problem with the recurring ghost of Ben Kenobi. Had the films honored his declaration that being struck down would merely make him more powerful than that sinister Sith Lord could possibly imagine and subsequently allowed the wise Jedi to exit stage left, thereby maintaining his dignity, this line would have resonated so much more, a parting shot echoing across the eons.

Cinema Romantico's Cannes Brûlé Palme is Cancelled

The 71st Cannes Film Festival wrapped last week. As such, this is the week when Cinema Romantico would traditionally bestow its famously not-renowned Brûlé Palme, this blog’s variation on Cannes’ prestigious Palme d’Or, awarded each year to our favorite Cannes Film Festival attendee. This year, however, we have chosen not to bestow our un-exalted Brûlé Palme. I mean, we would bestow it, we absolutely would, to Asia Argento, but we know Ms. Argento, rightfully, respectfully, would smash our admittedly pointless Brûlé Palme into a thousand pieces.

This blog has no problem with film festivals. We really don’t. We don’t even mind the critics covering them who author 140 character 280 character reviews by Tweet 90 seconds after the screening so long as those critics admit up front that they are writing their reviews entirely within the Cannes champagne bubble atmosphere where proclamation trumps rumination. And we will never not love the inherent frivolousness that film festivals of the ornate Cannes variety provide. They are silly, star-laden, red carpeted affairs, and because this blog is more than capable of allowing multiple thoughts to co-exist in our mind at any one time, we refuse to engage with the flimflammery claiming that you can't care about something like Cannes when X, Y, or Z is happening. Please.

Still. Cannes, as Asia Argento emphatically stated when she took the stage at the festival’s awards ceremony this past weekend, was where she was raped at the age of 21 by Harvey Weinstein. “This festival,” she said, “was his hunting ground.” She continued:  “I want to make a prediction: Harvey Weinstein will never be welcomed here ever again. He will live in disgrace, shunned by a film community that once embraced him and covered up for his crimes.” Then, the turn. “Even tonight,” she said, “sitting among you, there are those who still have to be held accountable for their conduct against women, for behavior that does not belong in this industry, does not belong in any industry. You know who you are. But most importantly, we know who you are. And we’re not going to allow you to get away with it any longer.”

Shunning Weinstein, in other words, alters nothing. It make the industry feel better about itself, and it might allow proprietors of the asinine A Few Bad Apples theory to wash their hands of the mess and move on, but it does not cleanse the movie industry of all its myriad sins. Argento, however, bravely stepped up to call all the sinners still in prominent places of power within the industry out. Not by name, perhaps, but nevertheless right to their face, and in the brightest spotlight imaginable. If you don’t think she’s right, if you don’t think she was taking a risk, keep tabs on her IMDb credits in the coming years and see how things go for her.

The red carpet should not, literally or figuratively, be rolled up and stowed away as festival season rolls on. Because to roll up the red carpet and stow it away is a means to try and ward off the conversation by acting as if cheap symbolism means something. So, for the rest of festival season and awards season after that, I hope the red carpet stays right where it is, and I hope more women and men in Hollywood follow Argento’s lead. Step into the spotlight, walk the red carpet, turn around, douse the red carpet in gasoline, and toss a match. Change, real change, will have taken place only when the industry has been fumigated not only of Weinstein but of every person like him.

Paddington 2

“Paddington” (2014) was not dark, not exactly, but it did feel a little more sinister, given Nicole Kidman’s comically menacing turn as well as allusions to Jews fleeing the Nazis. “Paddington 2”, however, while overtly nodding to the reactionary attitudes prevalent in many parts of the world these days, including, obviously, Britain, remains firmly on the sunny side of the street, not so much ignoring the narrative infiltrating sadness as heroically overcoming it. That victory for happiness is connected to Paddington himself, the storybook bear (voiced by Ben Whishaw with maximum earnestness) who, when last we saw him, had become spiritual caretaker to the Brown family, and they to him. Paddington might hail from the Darkest Peru, but his worldview feels born as much from Seattle – that is to say, from Lloyd Dobler, who once memorably asked “How hard is it to decide to be in a good mood and be in a good mood?” Not that hard if you’re Paddington.

Not even when things go awry, which they do often, like a madcap window-washing stint, an impeccable comic set piece evoking Buster Keaton. Such an evocation might well be a nod toward the adults watching, but also works as an important tutorial to kids that movie action can be wrung from precise choreography and editing as much as overwhelming special effects and loud noises. That Paddington finds himself window washing is connected to his yearning for a paycheck to purchase an expensive, precious pop-up book for his beloved Aunt about to turn 100. The pop-up book, however, does not merely lie on the table, brought to life in a sequence where Paddington imagines showing his aunt the sights of central London, one occupying the thin melancholy line between mere dream and a manifestation of making your dreams come true.

That manifestation becomes more difficult when it turns out the pop-up book doubles, as these things do, as a treasure map, a treasure lusted after by chief villain Phoenix Buchanan (Hugh Grant). No role, I dare say, in Grant’s canon has so exactly matched his aptitude for mixing charm, comedy, and imperiousness quite like Buchanan, a washed-up theatre actor who nevertheless oozes vainglory. Grant evinces this throughout, most hilariously in a television commercial where he dresses in a man-sized canine costume to pitch dog food, imfusing the sequence with hilarious misplaced confidence as opposed to tail between legs shame. A later moment in which the character rues forgetting his cravat might be a narrative trigger for a subsequent scene, but Grant emits a droll, believable air of self-absorption, as if he meanders down the street entirely within the confines of his own head. This narcissism is deliberately contrasted against Paddington’s selflessness, stressed in the egotistical actor framing Paddington for the book’s theft and then leaving the bear to rot in jail.

If this twist sounds harsh, it both is and isn’t. If there is a genuine melancholy that comes with Paddington being separated from the ones he loves, his intrinsic personality gradually infuses his fellow prisoners. That infusion is literally and figuratively tied to the sweetness of his preferred marmalade, which becomes something like an inadvertent statement of purpose, helping to win over even the hard-nosed prison chef Knuckles, played by Brendan Gleeson with a humored gruffness that is not so much a grizzly bear with teddy bear tendencies as a grizzly bear who gives respect where it’s due. And when Paddington messes up the prison laundry by way of a single red sock, causing the standard black and white uniforms to emerge pink, this color change evokes the clink’s eventual attitude change, one given voice by the movie’s Calypso band Greek Chorus espousing for everyone to love their neighbor, a contemporary, Caribbean update of Sesame Street’s immortal “Co-operation Makes It Happen”.

Paddington’s sentencing, meanwhile, also allows the Brown family to bond over attempting to prove their beloved bear’s innocence. If Sally Hawkins was not afforded the opportunity to do much in the original other than offer encouragement, here she gets to step it up, as Mrs. Brown becomes a sort of Sherlock, declaring her intent to “sniff out anything suspicious”, a line reading that Hawkins invests with so much in the moment glee that the sheer vocal elan will make you laugh out loud. Mr. Brown (Hugh Bonneville, rigid comedy gold), on the other hand, initially comes across like a more hesitant Watson.

Indeed, if the first “Paddington” centered on Mr. Brown’s transformation from risk-averse to gallant risk-taker, here his being passed over for a work promotion triggers mid-life crisis. His corrective is community, embodied in his and Mrs. Brown’s quest to unmask Phoenix Buchanan as the real thief. And if you couldn’t really have a Paddington movie without Paddington (and why would you want to?), the rock solid chemistry between Hawkins and Bonneville nevertheless suggests the Browns are their cuddly co-star’s equal. A scene where they break into Buchanan’s home to prowl for clues might be based in timeworn tropes, but the byplay, timing and all-around enthusiasm of the two actors (and Grant) gives it a farcical kick that involuntarily will curl your lips into a joyous grin.

Still, prison is where “Paddington 2” truly shines. Our bear might be betrayed a few times throughout, but, in a Ferris Bueller-ish sort of way, he is a character not so much about change as he is about just sort of innately imbuing everyone around him with his own spirit. And if community is essential to “Paddington 2’s” makeup, so ultimately is rehabilitation, not just when it comes to Knuckles and company but Phoenix too. Closing credits sequences, particularly those passing on relevant information, have never been my bag, since if you have something to say you should simply be able to say it before the movie officially ends. Yet the post-conclusion sequences of “Paddington 2”, not to be revealed, is truly (and sonically) righteous, its after-the-fact narrative position emblemizing how everyone has the chance to write a second act so long as they seize the opportunity.

Avengers: Infinity War

“Avengers: Infinity War” builds to perhaps the most lyrical denouement in comic book movie annals. We will proceed in delicately in our description, so don’t run away, but suffice to say that the inherent invincibility of the film’s countless superheroes is suddenly compromised. You don’t know precisely what is happening as it does, only that it is momentous, underscored by how the blustery Alan Silvestri score mostly falls away, intrinsically zeroing you in on the characters and their fate. The pragmatic particulars of that fate matter less than the images, enigmatically imagining the keepers of Marvel’s bank account as nothing more than, in the words of Steve Walsh, dust in the wind.

Ah, but this is the last scene of a two hour and forty minute movie, meaning it takes a long time to reach, and “Avengers: Infinity War” both does and does not need all that time. It does not because the weight of so many moving parts often makes the movie as laborious as the conclusion is lyrical. But it does because so many moving parts necessitate so much running time to simply gather and disperse these various comic book clans. The first, I dunno, twenty, thirty, forty minutes involve getting the gang back together; it’s the longest getting-the-gang-back together cinematic sequence I can recall. And if you have not seen every Marvel movie, which I have not, half the time you are thinking, “Wait, who are these people now?”

In my original “Avengers” review, I compared the smattering of superheroes to a band, though back then these Avengers were like The Allman Brothers, big enough to require a pair of lead guitarists but not excessive. Now they’re like Bruce Springsteen’s pre-E Street Band, the ill-fated Dr. Zoom and the Sonic Boom, which surrounded its ample musicians onstage with copious people just doing random stuff, like a dude playing Monopoly. “Avengers: Infinity War” has so many characters that Black Panther, King of freaking Wakanda, is basically reduced to the dude playing Monopoly. Characters often exist less as characters than callbacks to other movies, delivery devices for audience applause. That’s why we get a Stan Lee cameo, a la “Black Panther”, a self-referential tear in the hermetic seal that works against the sober culmination.

All these characters are required to oppose Thanos (voiced by Josh Brolin), oversized, ogre-ish, who once ruled Titan, but in opting for murder to prevent overpopulation found himself on the wrong side of intergalactic ethics. All this, I think, happened in some other Marvel-sanctioned movie, as it is not organically part of the narrative here but glimpsed in clipped flashbacks. No, the integral part is his attempts to acquire all five infinity stones, rocks precious for explicated reasons that Thanos attaches to some sort of sci-fi contraption on his fist that will essentially render him invincible. As such, he must be stopped.

In charting these arduous efforts to stop him, “Infinity War” mines fine individual moments, as most of these superhero movies, whether good or bad, do. Joe and Anthony Russo’s script (they also directed) is funny, if not as often as the Joss Whedon-penned versions, with a few too many one liners that are less delightfully satirical than disappointingly conventional, like a late moment where Scarlett Johannson’s Black Widow, seeing something unpleasant, mutters “gross.” Still, an intertitle that simply says “Space” is classic, and the chemistry between Robert Downey Jr. (as Tony Stark, from a Marvel movie I have seen) and Chris Pratt (as Star-Lord, from a Marvel movie I have not seen), emitting notes of a hipster Newman & Redford, demands follow-up. We don’t get much of it, though, because we don’t get much of anything, whether it is that, or Tony Stark’s atypical mentorship to Peter Parker (Tom Holland) or Thanos’s relationship to Gamora (Zoe Saldana), originally from Titan, for whom he deeply cares even if she does not for him.

Josh Brolin is best in show, playing Thanos as a fanatic wholly committed to his cause but also contemplative, two dueling notions that come through in his deep voice. And Brolin’s own expressions, transposed onto the CGI creation he gives life to, match that air perfectly. It’s quite a performance, and the one around which the entire movie orbits. The character is nigh unstoppable, never more than a late film showdown in which the otherwise larger than life good guys are made to seem so small as they one-by-one come up empty-handed in trying to slay Thanos, rendered in slow motion illustrating how easy everything comes to an infinity stone-juiced villain. But it is a sequence carrying, frankly, more weight than the usual gargantuan ones, where so much CGI is hurled on the screen amidst whirling cameras that do not allow us to see much of anything, sound and fury signifying, etc.

The latter is all the more disappointing because they are mere retreads of an eternal truth – that is, the immortality of our superheroes. It is this truth that “Infinity War” seeks to muddy by forcing its innumerable characters to confront the idea that Thanos cannot be defeated, and that they, icons, might have to sacrifice themselves to save the universe, an idea pushing back against the emotional aloofness that inadvertently cropped up in the preceding “Age of Ultron.” It is an interesting notion the end is meant to embody. But then, the end is not really the end; it can’t be the end. After all, “Avengers 4” is slated for 2019. And that this is already known counteracts the character frailty “Infinity War” yearns to make its whole point, not so much sacrificing any of its characters so much as sacrificing a true artistic statement, merely teasing impermanence in the name of continuing the brand.

Friday's Pimm's Cup: Dater's Handbook (2016)

Even if the Hallmark non-seasonal romance “Dater’s Handbook” is principally about one women, Cass (Meghan Markle), it is nevertheless a story that comes in twos, as Cass is made to date two guys at once, trying to decide between both, while two family members, her mother and her sister, give counsel and keep score. And director James Head underscores this idea, so to speak, with emphatic, if emphatically artless, cuts between dates and situations. Like, if Cass is getting ready for one date in a white dress, then suddenly we see her getting ready for another date in a green dress.. Do not presume, however, that all these twos are “Sliding Doors”-esque. This is not a movie about parallel dimensions, or even about What Could Be? as much as What Is. Then again, even as it all takes place in the here and now, “Dater’s Handbook” finds duality in both accepting the conventions of these sorts of movies and moving a few inches past them. If these movies typically refuse to let women have it all, “Dater’s Handbook”, while nevertheless still sometimes dated (peddling cringe-worthy Jewish jokes), never exactly forces Cass to give up who she is for what she wants. She does, in a sense, get to have it all, even if she has to navigate a minefield of bad advice that nearly undermines so much goodwill.

As “Dater’s Handbook” opens, Cass’s life doesn’t look half-bad, taking her dog Duke (great dog performance) for a hike in the scenic Denver mountains, which is lingered over with a little too much rear projection. Quickly, however, we ascertain that she is Married to Her Job because we see her purposely striding through a work hallway with a to-go cup of coffee, the universal emblem of Hard-Charging Career Gal. Thing is, though, while a lot of Hallmark leading ladies play these moments with an air of I-Want-Something-More-I-Just-Don’t-Know-It, Markle does not; she lets her character like this life. It reminded me a little of Jennifer Aniston in “Wanderlust” explaining she dug her Blackberry, sleeping pill and latte to Malin Akerman’s nouveau hippie. And so even if Cass’s beau is obviously a lunkhead who does not deserve her, taking her to the batting cages for a date, there is an air of credibility to the idea that she would be in a relationship that does not require her true emotional presence.

The plot instigator here, frankly, is less Cass than her sister, Nadia (Christine Chatelain), as obnoxious a movie character as I have encountered though I am unconvinced the movie creators were mindful of this obnoxiousness. It is Nadia who urges her sister utilize the coaching of Dr. Susie (Teryl Rothery), author of self-help romance books that gives the film its title, in the hopes that this self-proclaimed guru’s belief that it is generally you, not him, at fault for relationships going bust will help flip a switch in Cass. And so, after Cass splits with her lunkhead and then meets cute at a wedding with Robert (Kristoffer Polaha), rather than letting fate chart her course, Cass lets Nadia, with the aid of Dr. Susie, guide her instead.

This is the only reason why Cass even starts seeing George (Jonathan Scarfe), a client, at the same time she is seeing Robert, meaning that each time she has a date with one, she reports back to Nadia and her mom Gloria (Lynda Boyd), with the latter taking Robert’s side and the former taking George’s. Nadia likes George because he seems to check key un-amorous boxes on Dr. Susie’s checklist regardless of Cass’s clear hesitation, and despite Cass’s clear-cut chemistry with Robert. Markle lends great credibility to that chemistry, flirtatiously giving shit with great aplomb, effusing a detectable glow in his presence. (Markle could have played the Cody Horn part in “Magic Mike.”) And in scenes with George, quietly, she mutes that glow by aiming to please rather than being herself, as if she is tip-toeing around that one room in the house your parents forbade you from entering.

Granted, George is not as blatant a dolt as you usually get in these situations. If nothing else, he is entirely respectful of Cass even if he does not seem to be all that interested in what she’s like as a person. And even if Markle evinces the idea that cosmically she is just blundering into the wrong relationship all over again, the obvious strings that Nadia, anti-matchmaker, pulls are enough to make you (that is to say, me), utterly partial viewer, Meghan Markle fan, want to scream at the television. Seriously, Nadia seems to operate from a place of knowing next to nothing about Cass’s actual wants and emotional failings which is ridiculous because, obviously, this should not be about what Nadia wants.

It made me think a little about Harry – you know, Harry, Prince of Wales. Monarchies, of course, are insider-exclusive, but Harry, bless his heart, chose an outsider to wed, one Meghan Markle. Why you can practically imagine the Queen consulting her own Dr. Susie and being inspired to point the young Prince toward a more suitable George-ish Duchess. Ah, but like Markle’s Cass eventually allowed herself to see the light, so did Prince Harry, adhering not to some Royals-Only Search Committee but to the desires of his own heart. Perhaps it’s not an exact match, but still. Hallmark Channel movies are, rightfully, respectfully, televised clotted cream; they are also, occasionally, rarely, really rarely, emotionally true.

Solo: A Star Wars Story, Best Case Scenario

Han Solo was not really always my favorite “Star Wars” character. When I was first falling in love with George Lucas’s space opera, Luke Skywalker was my favorite character. It was easier as a precocious adolescent to identify with a kid who hadn’t been further than Anchorhead than a grouchmaster gruff who had seen it all. Over time, however, Han Solo’s charms worked on me, which is to say that Harrison Ford’s I-Wish-I-Was-A-Carpenter anti-charm worked on me. If as a little kid I understood on some non-cognitive level that there was something innately cool about the spice smuggler propping his feet up on the table shooting Greedo first, it didn’t really begin to hit home until reality begin intruding as I tried, desperately, to come of age, striking MTV-influenced disaffected poses while on vacation with my parents to make it seem like I wasn’t with my parents. I was trying to leave Luke Skywalker behind, in other words, to become Han Solo, which is impossible but the compulsory De-Leon-ish teenage quest nonetheless. All that is to say, if you had told me in the early 90s that there was going to be a Han Solo standalone movie, oh my God, I would have flipped my lid. Back then we only had three “Star Wars” movies, after all, and at that time maybe Harrison Ford still would have been spinoff Solo, even if he would have sabotaged all his lines like the “Blade Runner” voiceover, which would have been just right. A Han Solo spinoff anchored by a disinterested Ford would have been the tops.

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Once upon a time a Steven Seagal thriller was as commonplace during the movie season as a superhero movie is in the present. Seagal’s movies were interchangeable entertainment, reflected not merely in their gunplay and kung-fu but in titles like “Out for Justice” and “Marked for Death” that seemed to come straight from some Hollywood brainstorming session overseen by risk management experts who prefer Bud Light at the bar and their fish served very plain. The quasi-snappy three words, in fact, are a hallmark of Seagal movie titles, where even the ones that are not three words sound like they are, whether it’s “Under Siege” blowing two words out to three syllables or “Fire Down Below” sounding less like four syllables than roughly 3.5. The essential sameness of these names correlates directly to their analogous adventures. I have seen some of these movies, but I could not necessarily tell you which ones I have seen and which ones I have not. I have seen “Hard to Kill”, I think, and not “Above the Law”, but it could be, I suspect, that I have seen “Above the Law” and not “Hard to Kill.” This is entirely appropriate. Steven Seagal Three Word Title Movies are not intended for rumination, which is why I always found it funny that he tried to jam environmental issues into “On Deadly Ground” (which I have seen…maybe). This blog supports protecting the environment, sure, but A Steven Seagal Three Word Title Movie is designed to go in one ear and out the other and left with your empty Junior Mints box on the theater floor, experienced in the moment, enjoyed in a mindless sort of way, and never thought of again.

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“Solo: A Star Wars Story” doesn’t sound like a Steven Seagal Three Word Movie Title. It sounds more like “The Path Beyond Thought”, a documentary about Steven Seagal’s time as a sensei in Japan, which I have not seen and which might be really, really good, but is nevertheless a title a few leagues apart from, say, the expository glory of “Half Past Dead.” “The Hutt Gambit”, which was the second book in a series concering Han Solo written by A.C. Crisp, is more indicative of the eponymous ring I wish Ron Howard’s movie was going for, less a Memorial Day weekend event than a late April or late September release. “Solo: A Star Wars Story” makes it sound determined to fit squarely into the franchise, meaning it will become fodder for endless conversations about its place in the canon. And whereas long ago, in a lifetime far, far away, I would have been ripe for those conversations, these days I find myself exhausted with them, a little burned out on this franchise that once meant so much to me. I have, I realize, become, finally, all these years later, in a way, Han Solo, just as I always dreamed, meeting his own movie on his level, less excited than indifferent, wishing that “Solo: A Star Wars Story” was nothing more than a Steven Seagal Three Word Movie, watched and forgotten, destined to be followed a little while later by an eminently forgettable movie too.

5 More Musicals Based on Movies Absolutely No One Needs

I saw a lot of theatre on my recent jaunt to London, but what I did not see was any musical based on a movie. And, near as I could tell, there were numerous musicals based on movies from which to choose. Every tube stop was adorned with multitudinous posters for “School of Rock” the musical and “Strictly Ballroom” the musical and “Young Frankenstein” the musical and “Aladdin” the musical, and soon England’s capital will have “Bring it On” and “Heathers” musicals on the docket too.

This, frankly, is just as true of my city, Chicago, where a quick scan of upcoming musicals finds such names as “Pretty Woman”, “Dirty Dancing”, “Waitress”, “The Color Purple”, and “Tootsie.” If interest in going to the movies is on the wane then perhaps this spate of movies cum musicals suggests that the movies’ future is, paradoxically, on the stage. That, however, is a theory that probably is not true and that I am not inclined to follow up on anyway. No, what interests this blog, as you no doubt expect, is what other musicals based on movies should (not) exist? Do we have ideas? You better believe we have ideas.

5 More Musicals Based on Movies Absolutely No One Needs

The Avengers. Triple dog duh. Sure, “Spider-Man” flopped on Broadway, but our “Avengers” musical will not. This is because we will forgo complicated staging derring-do for ironic posturing. Robert Downey Jr. has sung and danced before, of course, in “The Singing Detective” as well as an episode of “Ally McBeal.” Except we do not want Downey Jr. to sing and dance. As comically disagreeable Tony Stark, he will spend all of “The Avengers Follies” trying not to sing and dance as his various Avenging cohorts melodically exhort him to join in the fun.

Runaway Jury. My friend Daryl long ago dreamt up the seemingly ludicrous idea of a musical based on “Runaway Jury.” Daryl can pitch ideas like the rain falls and yet, for reasons I struggle to explain, this one always stuck with me more than many of the others. Maybe this is just because picturing John Grisham Comes To Broadway! subway advertisements sounds hilarious. Whatever the case, the idea was just tossed off, not really fleshed out, and so what I propose is this: a “Mamma Mia!” inspired adventure in which our dueling lawyers try to select a jury all while singing, in a nod to the movie’s News Orleans setting, the hits of Fats Domino.

Jurassic World. The resurgent “Jurassic” franchise is ripe for cashing in via the stage. So, for the musical let’s turn Jurassic World into a sort of Sleepaway Camp where paleontologists double as chaperones and feud with their charges against the backdrop of dino mayhem. A T-Rex named Doug plays the King George III of “Hamilton” role as intermittent comic relief.

Cocktail. I’m actually a little insulted that Roger Donaldson’s 1988 box office bonanza, non-masterpiece has yet to receive the musical treatment. Its soundtrack, after all, was a Billboard powerhouse, fueled by The Beach Boys’ (Mike Love version) “Kokomo.” And whether the musical version embodies the trivial all-inclusive Caribbean resort atmosphere of the song’s surface or evokes the tune’s melancholy undercurrent that Molly Lambert latched onto several years ago in a piece at Grantland (rip) to render it euphonic revisionism, I don’t particularly care. Let’s just do this thing and start brainstorming how to get a waterfall on the stage.

Streets of Fire. Like “Cocktail”, Walter Hill’s cult(ish) classic, billed as A Rock ’n Roll Fable, is readymade for the stage. Why two of its songs were written by Jim Steinman whose “Bat Out of Hell” musical is running in London too! So let’s cast Carly Rae Jepsen as Ellen Aim and put on a show.