Quick Thoughts on Best Achievement in Popular Film Oscar (or: End of Days)

You probably heard. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, in its endlessly infinite (infinitely endless?) wisdom, decreed yesterday that it would be adding a new category to the 2019 Oscar ceremony to honor achievement in popular film. (It also announced that the 2019 Oscar ceremony telecast would, no ifs, ands, or buts about it, run three hours. Las Vegas promptly caught on fire from everyone calling in to place bets on the over.) The blowback, as any marketing sage not employed by the motion picture industry could have told you, was something fierce. This news was ridiculed as a desperate ratings ploy, an attempt to ward off the pop cultural embarrassment of the beloved “Black Panther” failing to land a Best Picture nod, an inadvertent in-advance slight to “Black Panther” as not being worthy of the Best Picture category’s presumed art, or a mixture of all three. The announcement was such a fiasco that, like someone writing an in-depth article that went through multiple editors still prompting the writer to pen a clarifying article about the first article, the Academy was compelled to release a follow-up statement clarifying that movies could be eligible for both Best Picture and Best Popular Picture

None of this, however, means anything, not really, because as of this point we do not even know the Academy’s criteria for what constitutes a “popular” film. And that, as it had absolutely had to, is what got Cinema Romantico to thinking.

Possible Criteria for Best Achievement in Popular Film Oscar 

1.) Box Office. Bo-ring.

2.) Rotten Tomatoes scores. Perhaps only movies that earn so-called fresh scores on Rotten Tomatoes can be considered eligible for Best Achievement in Popular Film. This might be an intriguing possibility, except that, as everyone knows, “nobody cares” about the critics.

3.) Rotten Rotten Tomatoes scores. If “nobody cares” about the critics then maybe bad Rotten Tomatoes scores should be the signifier of what is popular. Except “Black Panther” scores a 97% which would make it ineligible for Best Achievement in Popular Film and so we are back to square one.

4.) Budget. Maybe only movies with budgets north of $100 million should be eligible for Best Achievement in Popular Film since nothing screams Populist like blowing $258 million on “Spider-Man 3.”

5.) Presence of Fantastic Beasts. Maybe only movies that have Fantastic Beasts should be eligible for Best Achievement in Popular Film. The problem then, however, is defining “Fantastic Beasts.” Do they have to be mythical? Do cloned dinosaurs count? Should it even be Fantastic Beasts? Should the lone qualification just be CGI? Your movie must have CGI to be considered “popular”? Or should it be robots? Or explosions?

6.) Maybe movies with quote-unquote Kitchen Sinks are automatically ineligible for Best Achievement in Popular Film?

6B.) Maybe any conceptual connection to Mumblecore renders a movie as automatically ineligible for Best Achievement in Popular Film? (Does that mean A Greta Gerwig Film cannot be nominated for Best Achievement in Popular Film? If not, Best Achievement in Popular Film is stupid.)

7.) Maybe Best Achievement in Popular Film should not have anything to do with the movies themselves? Have we not reached a point where a movie’s rendering is essentially irrelevant in terms of its popularity? Isn’t the ultimate signifier of 2018 popularity GIFs? Should Best Achievement in Popular Film strictly correlate with Best Achievement in Social Media Cinematic GIF? Does this mean “Mamma Mia 2! Here We Go Again” is destined to win Best Popular Film?

8.) Maybe we should just open up the Best Achievement in Popular Film to a Twitter poll?

8A.) Maybe President Donald T*ump can be the Twitter arbiter of Best Achievement in Popular Film since nobody has the pulse of the full populace like His Spray Tan. “Nobody cares about the Oscars anymore. Movies aren’t for People. I liked GOTTI! Won’t Win!”

9.) The sport of college football employs a 13 person selection committee to determine its four-team playoff so perhaps Hollywood can employ its own selection committee to determine the nominees for Best Achievement in Popular Film. I know, I know, you’re thinking that such a committee, one no doubt composed of so many snobbish left coast cosmopolitan elites, will counteract the notion of what is truly popular. But that is why the Best Achievement in Popular Film Selection committee will be chaired by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. Problem solved.

10.) Maybe at next year’s ceremony during the newly traditional segment in which Jimmy Kimmel trots a bunch of unsuspecting regular, everyday rubes who think they are seeing a sneak peek in front of the camera, the regular, everyday rubes can, on the spot, in front of the camera, nominate and choose the winner for Best Achievement in Popular Film?

Potential Die Hard: Year One Narrative Prototypes

Whereas once I followed the news of new movie productions, release dates, casting announcements, etc., with great gusto, that gusto has since given way to indifference. This indifference is mostly a blessing, freeing me up to waste my time in other less productive ways, but also to have experiences like, say, watching “First Reformed” and all of a sudden in my head being like: “Wait, is that Cedric the Entertainer?” It’s fun! What’s less fun is, say, overhearing something about a “Die Hard” prequel whenever in the world it was first announced, forgetting about it, and then having your memory re-jiggered being confronted with the impending reality of a “Die Hard” prequel called “Die Hard: Year One” all over again. The prequel will, per the Slashfilm exclusive with director Len Wiseman, cross-cut between Old John McClane now and Young John McClane in the 1970s, and will also include a young Ms. Holly Gennero.

In being re-struck by this news, I thought back to Memorial Day weekend and the stink bomb prequel “Solo: A Star Wars Story.” More specifically, I thought about what my friend Rory texted me in the aftermath of his encounter with that same stink bomb. He (very, very) facetiously wrote: “Did you know that nearly every iconic moment in Star Wars was really just a proto moment from earlier in Han’s life?” Like, Han shooting Greedo first in “Star Wars.” That could not just be allowed to come from nowhere. No, it had to be written into Han’s past so the entire audience could at the same time figuratively think “A ha!” *Shakes head.*

As such, I imagine that even if “Die Hard: Year One” hires one of screenwriting’s brightest and best, she/he will nevertheless eventually be squired into some conference room and surrounded by a Hollywood Think Tank armed with a flow chart of “Die Hard” references connecting back to “Die Hard: Year One” because that sort genius, dammit, just doesn’t grow on trees! This, of course, prompts the natural question: what iconic moments in “Die Hard” could really just be proto moments from earlier in John McClane’s life?

1.) Maybe if the prequel is set in the 1970s then in the introductory sequence Young John McClane is booking a perp for protest graffiti against the crime-infested subway system. Young John McClane, demonstrating his weary brashness, tells the perp he is only booking him because those are the rules. Sensing a mutual respect, the young perp, a la Old John McClane riding in the front seat of Argyle’s limousine, climbs in the front seat of McClane’s cop car to get taken down to headquarters.

2.) Maybe if the prequel is based, as some have suggested, on the “Die Hard: Year One” comic book series in which Young John McClane is apparently on the case of Son of Sam (GRITTY REBOOT!!!!!), then perhaps in the midst of one of NYC’s 1977 summer blackouts, Young John McClane, who has just returned home from a hard day’s work and has removed his shoes because his dogs are barking is, when the lights go out and a shot is heard outside, forced to navigate the mean streets in his bare feet.

2A.) Maybe if there is a scene set in the midst of one of NYC’s 1977 summer blackouts then Young John McClane will find himself forced to climb up/down an elevator shaft. This, of course, will counteract the line in “Die Hard 2: Die Harder” in which Old John McClane, as he climbs into an elevator shaft, rhetorically laments “How can the same shit happen to the same guy twice?” since, in fact, this would mean it would be happening to him for the third time, not the second, but we can just have Willis re-record his dialogue for all future blu-ray releases.

3.) Maybe Young John McClane is introduced riding around the streets of NYC in his police cruiser with his irascible partner who is droning on and on and on and on and on about the great John Wayne flick he saw the previous night to which McClane, dry, imperious, replies: “I always preferred Roy Rogers myself.”

3A.) Maybe there’s a scene where Young John McClane gets obligatorily called on the carpet by his irate superior and the irate superior says something like “The guys tell me you think you’re a real Roy Rogers” and so the Young John McClane says “Yippe-ki-yay.”

4.) If this is set in the 1970s, and if Old John McClane once said to Sgt. Al Powell by telephone that “Holly keeps telling me to wake up and smell the nineties” while dealing with a pesky fax machine, then perhaps a scene can involve Young John McClane being comically flummoxed by a new-fangled pocket calculator. “I can count up to ten with both hands,” Young John McClane wearily sighs.

4A.) As Young John McClane is waiting to get called into his irate superior’s office, a new rookie with a nervous air sits down next to him. “What’s your name, cadet?” asks Young John McClane. “Al Powell, says Young Al Powell. “You meeting with the chief?” asks Young John McClane. “First time,” says Young Al Powell. “Any advice?” At that moment, the irate superior bellows at McClane to get the hell into his office. “Yeah,” says Young John McClane as he stands, “don’t piss in his pool.”

5.) Just as Young John McClane seems to have got a break on the Son of Sam case, a break he need to keep to himself to ensure Son of Sam does not know that Young John McClane is a step ahead, the break gets reported in the pages of The New York Post by a pompous young reporter desperate to make a name for himself, a reporter named Richard Thornburg.

5A.) Maybe if this prequel isn’t about a Son of Sam but a character that is like Son of Sam that maybe this character that is like Son of Sam can, after being branded, perhaps, the .357 Magnum Killer, pass an insidious note to the media that says “Now I have a machine gun too.”

6.) Maybe Young John McClane’s partner is reading the New York Times and says “Have you heard about this Volksfrei Movement?” to which Young John McClane says “I don’t follow the news.”

Thoroughbreds

The opening shot of “Thoroughbreds” is a stare down between woman and beast as Amanda (Olivia Cooke) stands across from a wounded racehorse in a medium frame that writer/director Cory Finley holds for a couple beats longer than you might expect. Eventually he cuts to a shot of Amanda wielding a knife, and while we never see what she does with it, we can infer, which is Finley’s overriding modus operandi. The plot turns on Amanda’s friend, or, perhaps more accurately, teenage contemporary, Lily (Anya Taylor-Joy), deciding to off her onerous stepdad (Paul Sparks), and Finley teases this out for an hour and a half by withholding. In one scene where Lily pulls up a gruesome image on her laptop we deliberately see the computer from behind. And when she leaves the room, the camera nudges forward toward the laptop, making you think, for a second, that it might circle around so that we can see what she was seeing. That doesn’t happen, but the camera’s forward nudge nevertheless piques our curiosity. In other words, Finley’s playing Hitchcock in playing us like a piano.

The auteurist piano playing is necessary because even as Finley ropes us in with his aesthetic, he is conspicuously indifferent to evincing any kind of traditional empathy. Amanda and Lily used to be friends, but had a falling out, and now the latter is supposed to tutor the former in preparation for the SAT, though they spend most of their time sort of verbally picking at and dancing around one another in dialogue that can, occasionally, be sidesplitting. Like Amanda’s observation that she might do better dropping out of college and Steve Jobsing her way through life, which is a kind of dry dig at Steve Jobs always being the beacon of dropout glory. This line, like every other one Cooke speaks, is is entirely dry, which describes her character’s entire disposition, summarized in the way she locks onto whoever she’s looking at with a blank expression so that you’re never completely sure if she’s spaced out or planning your demise. That air is furthered in the way she sets the principal plot in emotion, saying that if Lily dislikes her stepfather so much then she should just kill him. And that’s how Cooke has Amanda say it – by just saying it. You don’t thinks she’s serious, but that’s only because nothing she says sounds all that serious, and even when “Thoroughbreds” becomes serious, and it surely will, it is hard not to think that she’s just f***ing with you.

Upon hearing her faux friend’s suggestion, Lily rejects it, even if Taylor-Joy lets you see that she’s tantalized by it, and once Lily embraces it then Taylor-Joy lets you see that’s she’s not entirely sure about it. That’s more or less the whole dynamic as the movie plays out as Finley’s script is carefully designed to shift the balance from one character to the other so that you are never sure who’s in charge or what each of them truly wants. In this light, Finley’s formal exactness aids the idea that both these young woman are wearing figurative masks, which becomes even more apparent when they bring Tim (Anton Yelchin) into the mix as a potential criminal conspirator. He’s a small-time, really small-time, drug dealer with a despicable past who brays about how one day he’s going to be big time. If Cooke and Taylor-Joy are founts of placid reserve then Yelchin is an oblivious emotional volcano; he rips off his own mask the second he speaks.

Those masks are invaluable to the narrative as it proceeds toward a conclusion you will likely have no trouble guessing, particularly because of all the foreshadowing, though Finely is able to keep you off balance with the power dynamics. Indeed, as one twist appears, another is placed right on top of it, and which is made stunning because of its languid presentation. “Thoroughbreds”, frankly, might have done well to end there, except that it tags the movie with an epilogue and voiceover. This voiceover seems determined to re-calibrate the movie as some sort of commentary on the ills of our vain, vapid society, a commentary which the rest of the movie never takes any care to actually promote. Finley apparently originally envisioned his movie as a play and this voiceover evokes a monologue that a playwright trots out when he/she reaches the work’s end and realizes he/she has failed to actually elucidate whatever theme was percolating in his/her head. If “Thoroughbreds” is Hitchcock then this last scene is “Psycho.”

Mission: Impossible – Fallout

In the movie’s biggest twist, “Mission: Impossible – Fallout” forgoes opening with a slam bang. I would not dream of giving it away but suffice to say the lengthy prologue is revealed as something akin to a shaggy dog story, brought home in a delicious celebrity cameo where somber topicality is just a ruse. It’s not that writer/director Christopher McQuarrie is utilizing reality in the name of a joke, but that he’s reminding us – or presuming to – that what’s at stake is sheer entertainment. What’s weird, then, is that McQuarrie not only proceeds to resurrect a particular ghost of Missions Impossible past, but that he employs this ghost to try and inject a little levity amidst so much mind-blowing mindlessness. The pivotal speech in “Fallout’s” glorious antecedent, “Rogue Nation”, comically equated Tom Cruise’s IMF agent Ethan with the living manifestation of destiny; the pivotal speech in “Fallout” stops the movie dead in its track to explain that Ethan is, like, a really good guy. It doesn’t ruin the movie, because too much of it is too good, some of it great, but it mellows the buzz.

“Fallout’s” plot boils down to plutonium, a word repeated throughout the traditional self-destructing message Ethan receives, that repetition being all we need to understand the global stakes. Three plutonium cores must be prevented from winding up in the wrong hands, and though Ethan’s team is tasked to retrieve them, his choice early on to save fellow IMF agent Luther (Ving Rhames) when the cores are within reach arouses questions of loyalty from the CIA. As such, they assign August Walker (Henry Cavill), he of the flowing 1940s movie star mustache, as an accompanying observer, and who comes to suspect Ethan has gone rogue, such an obvious faint you wish it would have been written out. The actual villain, meanwhile, fronting a terrorist group billed as The Apostles, is ultimately disappointing not because his identity might be obvious but because absolutely none of his ostensible anarchist streak comes across in the buttoned-up performance. Lame.

The real villain is, or should be, the White Widow (Vanessa Kirby), a black market arms dealer working as the go-between for an undercover Ethan and The Apostles. In a scene where Ethan coolly maintains his covert persona by casually dismissing the sanctity of life, Kirby has the White Widow respond with an indelible turned-on trembly twinkle, the sort of theatrical relish the real villain decidedly lacks. Indeed, bowing to time-honored Hollywood tradition, Kirby’s character is moved aside much too soon, dousing the tantalizing possibility of a love triangle between she, Ethan, and Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), back from “Rogue Nation” and still skirting about the story’s periphery, intervening to aid or thwart Ethan, with her own conflicting, unknowable motives.

Kirby is moved aside to pave the way for Michelle Monaghan, returning as Ethan’s fiancé, Julia, from J.J. Abrams’s third “Mission: Impossible.” Why she is here, I don’t know, unless there was an edict from on high, because she never appeared in “Rogue Nation”, a smart move given that McQuarrie’s universe is wholly different from the one created by Abrams. Then again, the character is much gentler than the White Widow, and that gentility connects back to not only Ethan needing to presented as all-around valorous but, worse, to Cruise’s eternal leading man flaw – that is, sexlessness. Seriously, you see it when the White Widow suddenly grabs Ethan and plants one right on his lips, which Cruise has his character receive like he’s out of practice. C’mon, Tom! Go for the gusto! No, a Cruise a love scene has always been better filtered through a stunt, like his martial arts meet cute with Ilsa in “Rogue Nation”, or, in a sly bit of Maverick/Iceman-ish, uh, camaraderie in a Grand Palais lavatory in “Fallout.”

That last one kicks off with the HALO jump, subject of so much breathless pre-release discourse, which Cruise performed himself, jumping from a plane at 25,000 feet, though his stunt work is ultimately less the point than the scene’s overall conception and execution, beginning with the way Lorne Balfe’s score connotes the paradoxical dread and exhilaration that must come moments before a breakneck freefall through storm clouds to earth. The mid-air rescue, meanwhile, in which Ethan must aid an unconscious August, while inherently dramatic, foreshadows in its movements the gala at the Grand Palais down below which the two IMF agents are infiltrating where they move about so many partygoers busting a swank move.

In other words, Ethan and August are – and I simply must take this moment to stress how wonderful what I am about to say is – HALO jumping into the club. One minute they are wearing pressure suits in the sky, the next they are sporting suits and ties. For a second, you yearn for Agent 007 who would have paused for a martini post-HALO. Still, what follows, Ethan and August’s confrontation with John Lark (Liang Yang), supposed Apostles mastermind, in a stark white bathroom with thumping bass deliberately left present on the soundtrack gloriously, improbably merges Studio 54 with the Octagon in a sequence so brutal the characters have to pause to huff and puff yet with choreography so precise that they seem to be floating on air.

If their rollicking showdown is the movie’s high point, the ensuing action scenes are nevertheless lit, like a Paris motorcycle chase where every time Ethan makes a move to put down his foot for balance I felt myself clutching my seat or the concluding spectacle of a roaring chopper chase through Kashmir. There Ethan figures how to pilot a chopper on the fly, which is absurd but also right on brand. And yet, even as he threads the needle of majestic valleys and snowy mountaintops, so too does “Fallout” itself try to thread the needle of absurdity and gravity. McQuarrie can’t pull it off, which is not a fatal flaw, just an “eh, whatever”, but still. It’s not critical overthinking; if anything, it’s gut-level acceptance. I enjoyed “Fallout” even if I wish the whole movie could have been made in the image of that bathroom melee, three dancing queens shutting out the noise of the world, having the time of their lives.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Drop Zone (1994)

Kathryn Bigelow’s hallowed “Point Break” (1991) had skydiving but only in bits and pieces. John Badham’s “Drop Zone” (1994), on the other hand, while not strictly all skydiving still comes close to it. The movie opens with a prison break from 38,000 feet and concludes with something akin to a skydive off the DEA building where the chute opening doubles as the villain’s comeuppance. And in-between skydiving repeatedly takes center stage, so much so that at one point all the main characters gather for a daytime skydive over Washington D.C., endure the obligatory concluding second act crisis, brush it off, and then go right back up in the air for a nighttime skydive over Washington D.C. That is action movie efficiency.

The 747 jailbreak is schemed by Ty Moncrief, played by Gary Busey, who finds his seat aboard the plane while wearing thick glasses, which Busey accentuates by theatrically squinting, as if trying to throw us off the scent of his true daredevil nature. Indeed, not long after, he and his crack team of skydivers abscond with an uber-skilled hacker (Michael Jeter) who is being transported from Miami to Atlanta by a pair of federal marshals, Pete Nessip (Wesley Snipes) and Terry Nessip (Malcolm-Jamal Warner). As the surnames indicate, they are brothers, and if it seems odd that two brothers would wind up on such an assignment together, well, who I am to question the federal marshal service? Perhaps this is standard operating procedure, a means to ensure that if one brother gets killed mid-flight, as Terry does when Moncrief’s plan goes off, then the other brother, Pete, can seek federally mandated vengeance. Oddly, however, after initially getting bent out of shape, any sense of blood honor mostly falls by the wayside as the movie progresses.

This is just one of many narrative oversights, not that I’m really complaining. In his original review for “Drop Zone” the late great Roger Ebert applauded all the skydiving stunts but bemoaned the plot. And it’s not that the plot isn’t absurd, because it is, or that it doesn’t necessarily hang together, because I’m sure it doesn’t, but that I nevertheless appreciated the story on its own cornball, connect-the-stunts terms. Moncrief’s ultimate plan is to hack into the DEA to uncover the identity of every single undercover agent in the world and then sell their identities for the requisite millions. That involves a climactic plot to skydive into the DEA Building in Washington D.C. during the 4th of July fireworks show in the nation’s capital. As is explained, “Washington DC as a drop zone. Any other day it’s restricted airspace.” (As Peter Venkman once observed, I love this plan! I’m excited to be a part of it!) I mean, perhaps this is implausible, but narrative implausibility is only egregious if it is not amusing. And this is absolutely amusing. When that line was spoken, I laughed out loud. And if you’re not laughing out loud during a movie like “Drop Zone”, then the movie ain’t doing it right.

Wesley Snipes, however, is not laughing. That’s good and bad. I watched “Drop Zone” specifically because I yearned for the days when Mr. Snipes was a top-billed action star. And in that role, he is solid. He goes about his business with a kind of effective ass-kicking pragmatism, like a scene where he disposes of three baddies inside a men’s room. It’s not joyless, even if you wish he might espouse more quasi-witty one-liners, because the fun stems from his inexorable productiveness. But when the movie wants his character to leave that all-business persona behind and fall in love with the thrill of jumping out of planes when he falls in with some skydivers to try and ferret out Moncrief, Snipes fails to make the turn.

That he fails winds up, sadly, being right in line with “Drop Zone” itself. The narrative absurdity never trickles down to the movie’s presentation of skydiving subculture, which Pete ends up a part of after consulting Jessie Crossman (Yancy Butler), who might just know someone who might just know Moncrief, and her band of skydivers. Though Butler’s character suggests Patrick Swayze’s Bodhi in “Point Break”, she is never allowed to graduate to a similar sort of Zenmaster status, while promising characters like Swoop (Kyle Secor), suggesting a beach bum in the clouds, are not given enough to do. No, they are just along for the movie’s ride, which maybe isn’t such a bad thing. Maybe the adrenaline rush of skydiving can only be properly expressed through stunts, which is why “Drop Zone”, bless its heart, stops at nothing, no matter how far it has to stretch, to get us back in the air.

Parsing Miami Vice: Screen Shots on the Figurative Wall, part 2

Parsing Miami Vice: Screen Shots on the Figurative Wall is Cinema Romantico’s sporadic pseudo art exhibition in which we peruse frames from Michael Mann’s Miami Vice (2006) like the paintings they pretty much are.

“The film,”  the esteemed Manohla Dargis wrote of “Miami Vice” not long after its release for The New York Times, “shows us a world that seems to stretch on forever, without the standard sense of graphical perspective. When Crockett and Tubbs stand on a Miami roof, it’s as if the world were visible in its entirety, as if all our familiar time-and-space coordinates had dropped away, because they have.”

It’s true. If you see the above screen shot, the one that was most typically utilized as visual accompaniment for reviews, in the context of the movie then you know Crockett (Colin Farrell) and Tubbs (Jamie Foxx) are standing on the roof of a Miami club conversing with an informant by phone. If you see the shot sans that context then you realize how Mann has excised the roof from the frame, and has excised any other buildings too, leaving merely the men, the lights, the clouds, the sky.

It’s not unlike the end of “Contact”, where suddenly Jodie Foster realizes she can reach up and touch the stars because you think that maybe Crockett and Tubbs could reach up and touch the clouds.You stare at this screen shot long enough and Crockett and Tubbs come to resemble something like a more chic Godzilla and King Kong, as if they could turn and start stomping all over all those lights, as if they are somehow standing on the same plain as the cityscape.

There’s this James McMurtry stanza from his 2004 ballad “Lights of Cheyenne” that is, like so many McMurtry stanzas, astonishing. It’s a stanza that crept into the back of my head the longer I looked at this screen shot, not so much to help put the screen shot into context but because the screen shot brings the stanza to life. I would have thought the stanza beyond the grasp of any actual visual, best left to the heightened imagery of McMurtry’s carefully chosen words, but that’s Michael Mann for you, conveyer of the impossible, artist of the silver screen.

“You stand in the sky/
with your feet on the ground/
never suspecting a thing/
But if the sky were to move/
you might never be found/
never be heard from again.”

Rip(ping) Up the Hollywood Walk of Fame and Start(ing) Again

Last week President Donald Trump’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame was destroyed by virtue of a pick axe as a means of protest. There is a debate to be had about defacement of public property, whether that is good or bad or of any value in terms of, shall we say, critical commentary. I’m open to that debate, but let’s just take a moment to remind everyone that the original Sons of Liberty would gleefully, viciously have taken a pick axe to the Thomas Hutchinson star along the Boston Wharf Walk of Fame if the Boston Wharf Walk of Fame existed. That, however, is a subject for another sermon on a differently themed blog. No, what concerns Cinema Romantico is Donald Trump having a star on the Walk of Fame in the first place.

There is irony in such a notable all-caps opponent of inclusivity having a star on the inclusive, in a manner of speaking, Hollywood Walk of Fame. After all, Hollywood Boulevard’s most infamous stretch contains stars for Lionel Barrymore and Chris Berman, for Leslie Caron and Sean Diddy Combs, for Judy Garland and Leeza Gibbons, for Lana Turner and, yes, Donald Trump. Then again, that inclusivity comes at a steep price because $40,000 is required from each recipient to – cough, cough – “earn” a star. (That $40,000 goes to the Hollywood Heritage Trust non-profit to help maintain the Walk, or so they tell us.) Indeed, Ana Martinez, the chamber of commerce’s VP of media relations who oversees the Walk of Fame, as her 2012 New York Times profile makes clear, is not as interested in who gets a star as where whoever has paid to get a star gets to have their star placed. This makes the Walk of Fame sound like a political campaign donor event where contributors are angling to get the best seats at the ballroom table. In the end, it is less about inclusivity than insider access, but what else is new?

Hollywood, as we have to come see, has long been stricken by misogynistic sexual predators. So perhaps Trump – who, if the $40,000 mandatory payment amount is accurate, would have paid, what, $110,000 more to keep Karen McDougal quiet – and all the others like him should keep their stars as scarlet letters, and everyone else can have theirs moved somewhere else. Or, maybe we could just bulldoze the Hollywood Walk of Fame and start from scratch? I mean, an average of two stars, the actual Hollywood Walk of Fame website tells us, are added on a monthly basis, which is about as concise an explanation as I’ve heard as to why the term Movie Star has been devalued to such a point that, as we noted in our dissertation of the state of the Movie Star last summer, idiots claim that one is nothing more than “an actor or actress who is famous for playing leading roles in movies” which is so useless and vapid just GTFOH. In the same melancholy manner, 2,400 stars, or thereabouts, on the Hollywood Walk of Fame devalues all stars too.

They will never rip up the Walk and start again, of course, but let’s say that I was put in charge of Hollywood. Because if I was put in charge of Hollywood I would absolutely rip up the Walk and start again. And if I did, I would jettison the Walk’s absurd allowances for Radio/TV/Recording/Live Performance personalities because please, son, this is Hollywood, La La Land, ground zero for the Motion Picture industry which supersedes all those other tiddlywink industries, savvy? And I would cap the New Hollywood Walk of Fame at 16 stars for a minimum of 550 years to really let these cultural ingrates get ahold of what a Movie Star is supposed to mean. Drumroll, please.

The New Hollywood Walk of Fame

Lauren Bacall gets a star because she’s Cinema Romantico’s Hollywood’s lodestar.

Humphrey Bogart gets a star because he’s the flagship of the fleet.

Jean Harlow gets a star because, for God’s sake, she’s Jean Harlow, Harlean Harlow Carpenter, the Anglo-Norman god of the flickering image, or motion picture.

Cary Grant gets a star, but that’s a no-brainer.

Ingrid Bergman gets a star because, hey, the New Walk isn’t amateur hour, okay?

Marilyn Monroe gets a star not least because I assume that upon demolishing the old Hollywood Walk of Fame to make way for the New Hollywood Walk of Fame her star will survive the blast.

Olivia de Havilland gets a star because having a Hollywood Walk of Fame without her is like having an Earth without a Jurassic Period.

Donna Reed gets a star because cinematic cronyism, yo, and my Iowa homegirl is in.

Montgomery Clift gets a star because night on the New Hollywood Walk of Fame would be noticeably less bright without him.

Denzel Washington gets a star because he’s never phoning it in even if he’s just shouting from the other side of the office next to the coffee machine.

Nicole Kidman gets a star because the kids deserve a legitimate superhero on the New Walk of Fame.

Tom Cruise does not get a star even though he probably should because he’s responsible for “Top Gun.” But, Nicole comes first, always, and we don’t want to make her uncomfortable, and anyway Tom is probably cool just having the Scientology Freedom Medal of Valor.

Elizabeth Taylor does not get a star, but that is only because we still have to deal with pesky zoning laws to get her a planet.

Harrison Ford does not get a star, but we take solace in knowing that he doesn’t give a shit.

Keira Knightley does not get a star because we do not want to appear too biased, though we should stipulate a deal is already in place for the only advertising within a 100 foot radius of the New Hollywood Walk of Fame to be a Keira Chanel Billboard.

Prototype of the New Hollywood Walk of Fame’s lone advertisement.

Kevin Costner does not get a star, but his above-it-all, I-Don’t-Even-Want-This, your-little-TV-programs-are-so-cute acceptance speech at the 2012 Emmy’s will be the New Hollywood Walk of Fame’s official mission statement.

Marisa Tomei does not get a star, but all New Hollywood Walk of Fame Tour Guides will double as Mona Lisa Vito impersonators.

Chaplin and Keaton do not get stars, and we have no pithy reasons why other than the room fills up fast. All we can do is beg forgiveness.

Gene Hackman gets a star even though he would probably tell me in no uncertain terms to keep it.

Julia Roberts get a star because even if the star machine was the product of the studios the studios were, and continue to be, driftless without their stars.

Danny Trejo gets a star to show that the data often fed into the star machine is wholly flawed and stupid.

Mary Steenburgen gets a star because when I’m put in charge of Hollywood then Hollywood will become a cinematic constitutional monarchy and its ruling Queen, hear ye hear ye, will be Queen Steen.

And finally, Parker Posey gets a star because I damn well said so.

So, there you have it, the New Hollywood Walk of Fame. Don’t like it? Fine, fund your own with some Monopoly money, just so long as you send the old one where it needs to go.

Eighth Grade

“Eighth Grade” is bookended by both YouTube confessionals and time capsules. There is something of a then and now aspect in these dueling details, the former representing the social media prevalence of our present and the latter, buried in the ground with details meant to be found and interpreted in the future, evoking the past. And that is appropriate because even if writer/director Bo Burnham’s coming-of-age, of sorts, story feels indicative of the time in which it is set, with students forced through active shooter drills, it also feels wholly universal, which is why Kayla (Elsie Fisher) spends an active shooter drill chatting up a cute boy, which I can only imagine probably transpired during Cuban Missile Crisis drills too. Indeed, when Kayla hangs out with a few high schoolers one of them references their generational gap, which probably sounds ridiculous until you remember that everyone – EVERYONE – always feels, no matter their age, old.

The movie encompasses Kayla’s last week of eighth grade, though it is often less a triumphant processional than awkward ordeal. High school is a fertile ground for horror movies, from “Carrie” to “Prom Night”, and “Eighth Grade” is no less apt at demonstrating how the choppy navigation of adolescence is a machine for generating dread. Kayla describes her life experience as akin to the moment before you climb onto a rollercoaster with none of the joy that is supposed to come after you have ridden the ride and disembarked. And that is often how “Eighth Grade” feels, like you are climbing into a rollercoaster car already fearful for the moment when your stomach will drop. This is  most effectively conveyed in a sequence where Kayla musters up something approximating courage to attend a pool party she was grudgingly invited to, walking up the driveway as the camera follows, menacingly, over her shoulder and the piano keys tremble. In the next scene, the camera films from within an actual pool, but this unwilling march, while aqua-free, is straight outta “Jaws.”

That horror is frequently furthered in nothing more than Kayla’s posture, her shoulders slumped, her head down, and Fisher accentuates that awkwardness with deft line readings of variations of youthful slang that are cringingly hysterical in their soft-voiced half-heartedness. Eventually Kayla becomes more comfortable in her own skin and willing to stand up for herself, though even when she does, like confronting the cool girl in school, she cannot bring herself to make eye contact as she does and sort of cuts out before she truly putting a period on speech. If it is funny, it is also evocative of how Burnham resists writing Kayla’s change with obvious flourishes; it is much more halting and incremental, which is to say it is true to life.

Her change is also not tied to a boy. That’s not to say there are no boys, because there’s Aiden (Luke Prael), the piercingly eyed dreamboat. But the music that pulses on the soundtrack whenever he appears betrays that he is merely a fleeting fantasy, and he factors little into her arc. The worthy, winningly weird male opposite, Gabe (Jake Ryan), appears early and then vanishes again until much later, after Kayla actualizes. No handsome boy carries her across the threshold; she does it herself. No, the most pivotal scene involving a boy doubles as the movie’s most harrowing when an older guy gives her a ride home and tries goading her into something she does not want. If it does not plunge as deep into the darkness as you might fear, that’s only because it never becomes physical, instead transforming into an acute, terrifying evocation of mental abuse. “Sorry,” she keeps saying, shockingly earnestly, as if it’s her fault. In this moment, Fisher bodily seems to shrink, evincing how emotionally she is made to feel so small.

Though adults are present in “Eighth Grade”, they are seen exclusively through an adolescent prism, seen in an early shot of Kayla’s principal at the front of a classroom where he is viewed from a camera peering around the backs of the heads of students at their desks. The closest we get to an adult is Kayla’s father, Mark (Josh Hamilton), though we deliberately never spend any time with him on his own. There is a subplot dangled, momentarily, about another mother who seems to possibly be attracted to him, though that is immediately set aside, and, as such, might have been jettisoned altogether. No, Mark is better as an unwilling outsider in his own daughter’s life, brought home in Hamilton playing the part with the air of a soldier tip-toeing around land mines, never quite sure he has a hold on her needs. In fact, when Kayla asks if she can burn something in the backyard, Hamilton has his character comically, hesitantly reply like he knows he’s wading into a minefield.

The backyard sequence finds Mark momentarily opening up and essentially expressing that he loves his daughter for exactly who she is, which might not be a new sentiment but is given such remarkable life not so much in this speech as in the movie’s entire rendering. There’s a little “Lady Bird” here in so much as Kayla is presented as a normal kid. That’s why her YouTube confessionals attract no views; she does not have to become a star to matter. You see that at the birthday party she doesn’t want to attend when she forces herself to perform karaoke. Burnham does not shoot this from the point-of-view of the party guests but with the camera tightly at Kayla’s side, blurring out every background character, a moving visual encapsulation of how change from the inside-out feels.

Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again

The prevailing theory when it comes to sequels is, simply, go bigger. But “Mamma Mia!” (2008), the ABBA jukebox musical, was plenty big, in aesthetic, box office, and star power (see: Dame Meryl Streep). So, for the just-released follow-up, “Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again”, writer/director Ol Miller makes a lateral move, forgoing bigger for lighter and frothier. The original was not particularly plot heavy, but it nevertheless posed a central question – namely, whether Bill (Stellan Skarsgård), Harry (Colin Firth), or Sam (Pierce Brosnan) was father to Sophie (Amanda Seyfried), daughter of Donna (Meryl Streep). A soap opera, perhaps, but a story point just the same. And though “Here We Go Again” is nominally tied to whether Sophie will get her mom’s Grecian hotel the Bella Donna ready in time for its grand re-launch, the bigger questions are more along the lines of, say, when and where will Cher appear? (It’s like waiting for Lady Gaga instead of Harry Lime.) And how blue is the Aegean Sea? Answer: so blue. That sparkling blue water is “Here We Go Again’s” aura color.

The one way in which “Here We Go Again” does amplify is its dueling storylines. In the present, with Donna having passed away, and who is represented by a sort of Dia de los Muertos portrait as Glamour Shot, Sophie works in concert with her hotel manager (Andy Garcia) to get the Bella Donna ready to go while simultaneously worrying that two of her three dads – Bill and Harry – might not make the ceremonial christening. In the past, events mentioned in the original are brought to life as the college graduate version of Donna, played by Lily James, treks from Oxford to Greece and encounters the younger versions of Bill, Harry, and Sam. And though the movie’s conclusion sort of literalizes the spiritual connection between mother and daughter despite now being eternally apart, the narrative toggling between then and now evinces the same sensation, as if mother and daughter are speaking to one another across space and time.

Music has always possessed that same sort of immutability, and so the sense of cosmic communication is organically furthered by the movie’s soundtrack. Granted, because the series’ foremost tenet requires all that music to be ABBA’s, Miller is mostly compelled to mine the Swedish band’s back catalogue since many of their most popular tunes were already deployed in the original. If that might well be an issue for viewers who are disappointed when they don’t find a band’s Greatest Hits on the jukebox, it is a blessing for any (raises hand) who thrive on deep cuts. And if I, faithful reviewer, might be a tad disappointed that “Here We Go Again” failed to work in that astonishing insistent synth bass in “What About Livingstone?”, well, hey, the movie’s first number, “When I Kissed the Teacher”, is no less gleefully kitschy. Sung at young Donna’s graduation it becomes both her post-graduate declaration of adventure and the movie’s edict to sail away on its sonic summer breeze.

Not that “Here We Go Again” completely foregoes hits. “Fernando”, which was left out of the original movie, appears, and while its showbiz choreography might be limited the sequence’s inherent theatricality still pushes right through the camp ceiling to access starry sentiment. The immortal “Dancing Queen”, meanwhile, does earn a reprise, and the at-sea sequence it adorns – suggesting the Kylie Minogue line “We’re in a place where heaven breathes” which is culled from a song called “Love Boat”, which, suffice to say, is not an accidental reference here – stops the movie in its tracks to just kick back and celebrate. That celebratory air evokes the entire movie, even when the tone is ostensibly melancholy. Sullen characters sail straight into the heart of heart-stopping sunsets; fishermen lamenting their economic downturn have a drink and cut loose; even the storm that briefly halts the Bella Donna’s progress barely registers as anything more than a passing shower.

All the actors, bless their heart, are tuned into this festive frequency, whether it’s Garcia fashioning gravelly-ness as pure uncut charisma or Jessica Keenan Wynn playing the part of Young Tanya and therefore reveling in the opportunity to live out playing a young Christine Baranski. Wynn is not doing an impression, mind you, just having the time of her life by locking into Baranski’s full-bodied mien. James isn’t really doing a Streep impression either, because how could she, and why would she want to anyway in the face of Streep’s oft-chronicled singularity, even as she embodies Streep’s original spirit, not just in the singing and semi-dancing but, crucially, in her non-singing reacting. Seriously, just watching James watch her fellow performers wrests as much joy as the joy emitted by her fellow performers, whether it’s Keenan Wynn or Panos Mouzourakis as the frontman of a highly questionable local island band.

That band’s spirit, which is self evident despite its lack of skill, speaks to the movie’s overriding Put on A Show vibe. That vibe was just as prevalent in the original where, fans might recall, Pierce Brosnan managed some wincing approximation of singing. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that he is generally forbidden from singing here, though I found that to be the film’s most significant flaw. After all, if you’re putting on a show then everyone deserves a part.

Friday's Old Fashioned Flashes Back to the 90s

It happens all the time these days. Me, 40 year old man, born in the late 70s, who spent half the 90s in middle and high school, will be on the train just minding my own business when, suddenly, apropos only of the so-called 20 year fashion cycle, will look right and see some young kid who was born post-Y2K wearing a Nirvana t-shirt and then will look right and see a young woman, probably just out of college, wearing a dress and shoes that are straight from the Jenny Calendar catalogue. It’s an old song, sure, I get it, but still, it never ceases to amaze each generation that suffers through it. The other night I watched an Ellen HBO stand-up special from 1990 with My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife, one that I remember watching with my best friend nearly 30 years ago. Rest assured, when I would have watched with my best friend, I did not howl at Ellen’s hammer pants like I did with My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife because, well, in 1990, man, those pants, believe it or not, kids, would have just looked, like, normal. Life, it’s wild.

It's funny though, because even as I lament these fashion trends that I would have been fine never seeing again coming back around, I have found myself this summer, more than ever, pining for 90s movies. Well, not 90s movies, exactly, so much as 90s thrillers. You know, thrillers, exercises in suspense. And I’m not even talking about “The Fugitive” here. No, I’m talking about mid-level thrillers, airport rack versions of cinema, with above average pedigrees, preferably, in the form of solid actors who might well be there for paychecks but are nevertheless maintaining professional standards rather than Xeroxing their performances from past triumphs. I don’t want a movie like “The Net”, because in 2018 that would be ridiculous, I just want a movie with the air of “The Net.” Sandra Bullock had more fun in “The Net” than she did in “Ocean’s 8.” That ain’t right!

That’s what brings us to the Old Fashioned we plan to serve every Friday in August. Normally the eighth month of the year, the worst month of the year, is when we lessen the unrelenting wretchedness of summer’s dog days by returning to the cinema of our youth – that is, the 80s. Except, well, the 90s are part of our youth too. And between the sudden emergence of aspiring Chanel models sporting mom jeans on purpose and a summer movie season dearth of passable thrillers, it is time to re-set our August DeLorean date one decade later than usual. So dust off your Starter jacket, crank the Spin Doctors, and thank your lucky stars that Lisa Lopes (RIP) did not star in a mid-level, wrongfully accused thriller called “Kick Your Game” that finished 154th at the box office in 1995 because, rest assured, we would be reviewing the hell out of it. Beginning next Friday, August 3rd, and carrying through literally the last day of the worst month of the year, we will return to the 90s in search of suspense, turning our attention to a couple cult classics, or thereabouts, and a few other movies you probably thought you’d never hear from again only to wind up on the wrong blog at the wrong time.

Shout-Out to the Extra: M:I - Rouge Nation Version

Shout-Out to the Extra is a sporadic series in which Cinema Romantico shouts out the extras, the background actors, the bit part players, the almost out of your sight line performers who expertly round out our movies with epic blink & you’ll miss it care.

As the curtain on “Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation” (2015) raises, IMF agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) is trying to board a cargo plane in Belarus about to take off to prevent a gaggle of nerve gas from winding up in the wrong hands. But to get onboard he needs Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg), who is on site, to hack into the plane’s operating system to get the door open. But to hack into the operating system Benji needs Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames), who is patched in remotely from Malaysia, to hack a Russian satellite, a governmental no-no. In the midst of all this, instructions, in a manner of speaking, are relayed from William Brandt (Jeremy Renner), Operations Director, at IMF headquarters on the other side of the globe. And despite this hopping back and forth between different time zones, the moment still feels intimate, the camera cutting between the four mentioned characters as if no one else is even involved. But other people are involved. As all this transpires, the plane begins to taxi, which Brandt realizes. “The package,” Brandt says with the air of a Domino’s manager who just realized his deliveryman left one of his deliveries in the store, “is still on that plane.” As he says it, we suddenly see an extra in the bottom left hand corner of the frame.

As first she is looking forward, in the same direction as Brandt, presumably at the IMF’s version of The Big Board. But when Brandt advises the package is still on the plane, she glances at him out of the corner of her eye.

This extra could have merely turned her neck, nothing more, but expressively she goes for it, and good for her. Her face betrays worry, but it is not the kind of worry that is necessarily worried about how they are going to get the package off the plane. If it was that kind of worry her brow, no doubt, would be more furrowed, connoting insta-brainstorming. No, this worry resembles a passenger in a car when the driver decides to floor it in the middle of rush hour traffic. The whole scene, frankly, is played as much at a comic pitch as an action-adventure one, and this extra’s A+ expression is evidence.

Stakes in movies like this are always high. If it’s not America, then it’s the world; if it’s not the world, then it’s the universe. The stakes are definitely high in “Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation.” Still, even as the story trots the globe and encompasses geopolitics, this extra functions as a droll ode to the flunkey’s plight. As Brandt makes clear in the moment, his agency is under investigation, and hacking into a Russian satellite un-approved will no doubt cause additional consternation. Maybe hacking into it and preventing that nerve gas from getting where it should not go can be attributed to national security, sure, but in that extra’s expression you see how sometimes national security, and all that it entails, goes hand in hand with job security. “Am I,” she seems to be thinking, “about to get fired?”

Pour one out for the extra.

Set It Up

I confess, I was rooting for “Set It Up.” As Claire Scanlon’s Netflix distributed romantic comedy entered its second act downturn, where so many promising rom coms before it have crashed against the rocks and capsized, I was so taken with “Set It Up’s” sprightly telling and energetic performances that I was actively rooting for it not to spring a leak. And though a couple coincidences do emerge to help spur the narrative along to its conclusion, the film, refreshingly, never betrays the intelligence of its characters. That’s not to suggest “Set It Up” resists coloring within fairly rigid rom com lines. Nothing here is really new, a fact which the movie essentially acknowledges by way of various references to rom coms of yore. And if that might suggest what “Weird Al” Yankovich recently rightly criticized as unimaginative Reference Comedy, “Set It Up”, bless its heart, is never so shallow. It acknowledges its debts to its ancestors and then employs those familiar tropes to yield its own entertaining rewards.

“Set It Up” sort of blends the puppet-master romantic routine of “The Parent Trap”, which is cited, with the boss from hell comedy of “The Devil Wears Prada”, which is not cited. Harper (Zoey Deutch) and Charlie (Glen Powell) are overtaxed personal assistants to, respectively, a powerful sports reporter, Kirsten (Lucy Liu), and a venture capitalist, Rick (Taye Diggs). The assistants’ stress levels are effectively demonstrated, particularly in the early-going, by a camera refusing to stay still, rendering moments like Harper’s attempts to anticipate her boss’s needs by coming out from around her desk and into her boss’s office, and then making haste backwards as her boss angrily strides forward as something like a tango, where her boss leads by forcing her assistant to guess which way she is going to go.

After Harper and Charlie cross paths, they scheme to dial down their hectic lifestyles by manipulating their boss’s daily schedules in a wily effort to hook them up. If you suspect this will lead to Harper and Charlie falling in love instead, you would be right, though it is commendable just how un-obvious "Set It Up" is despite such a pre-ordained arc. If you might wish Harper and Charlie’s other love interests, whose names I forget because their characters are so uninspiring, were ditched altogether, it is nevertheless welcome that we spend so little time with these two nobodies anyway. And while moments like conspiring to get Kirsten and Rick on the Kiss Cam at Yankee Stadium seem readymade for Harper and Charlie to then be found by the camera too, it thankfully does not.

Charlie is written as something approaching a bro, but Powell’s natural twinkly demeanor, so ably displayed in both “Everybody Wants Some!!” and “Hidden Figures”, still emerges so that you can see precisely what it is that draws Harper to him in the first place. And together Detuch and Powell emit wattage in the convincing, flirtatious way they give each other shit, the cornerstone of any beginning relationship, before gradually allowing it to transform into something more. The latter is best seen in a late-night sequence that is an acute evocation, as any one who has ever been in their twenties can attest, to the majesty of drunk pizza. It, like so many others, is a scene that refuses to end the way you think it will.

The film’s flaw, as it were, lies in its attempts to intertwine career aspirations with the love story. Though Charlie's yearning to become sort of vaguely defined business analyst are insignificant, it is nevertheless at least tied back to his ultimate, if obvious, realization that he isn't even certainly what he actually wants to be or do. Harper, on the other hand, really does yearn to break into the sports journalism industry, an idea worthy of exploration that the screenplay reduces to nothing more than her repeatedly trying and failing to write a single story.....until she succeeds, and all is well, as frustrating a trope as the mildewy closing shot of the Central Park skyline. C’mon.

More incisiveness into the journalism world would have been beneficial, particularly because the screenplay does give the characters space to settle their professional and personal conundrums before officially bringing them together. Whatever its other deficiencies, that space is nothing less than a triumph, an acknowledgment that Love does not Cure All, but that Love goes hand in hand with Everything Else.

The Catcher Was a Spy

Moe Berg, professional baseball player, spy in the OSS, was an odd duck, the strangest man ever to play baseball, as longtime New York Yankees manager Casey Stengel once observed, all of which can be found in Nicholas Dawdioff’s book “The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg”, or at least by combing through Berg’s Wikipedia page. Ben Lewin’s film version, however, leaves you wondering how much of Dawdioff’s book both the director and screenwriter, Robert Rodat, ingested. The movie Berg (Paul Rudd) is flattened out of nearly all eccentricity, leaving only the hollow shell of a bland would-be Hero. It’s as if “The Catcher Was a Spy” didn’t want us to get to know Moe Berg at all.

That might have been a compelling angle since narrative impenetrability is often an effective means to underscore the vagaries of the spy game. Except that even as “The Catcher Was a Spy” renders Moe Berg as a blank picture frame, it tells its story with oddly misplaced directness. You see this straight away. The movie opens with a title card explaining that Moe Berg was tasked by the OSS to track down Werner Heisenberg, German physicist, at the height of WWII and assassinate him. The ensuing scene is Moe Berg in the midst of this task. And while the dialogue is fairly cryptic, such ambiguity is entirely counteracted by the preceding title card which has already placed us one step ahead rather than one step behind, holding our hand, parceling out information where a little narrative cloak and dagger might have aided atmosphere.

From there, “The Catcher Was a Spy” flashes back eight years to Moe Berg on the field at Fenway Park, rendered in fine period detail, as most of the movie is. Commendable production design, however, cannot make up for beginner’s exposition, a criticism as old as the hills yet no less apt, where a few Red Sox just sort of stand to the side and helpfully explain for our benefit who Berg is rather than the movie shrewdly showing us. What’s worse, if the diamond is where Berg is happiest, as we are also told, Lewin hardly revels in this fact, just as he hardly revels in the fact that Berg – as we are also expressly told – loves libraries almost as much as the diamond. These traits are relayed to us through dialogue but never visually or behaviorally reveled in, a frequent aesthetic symptom.

The only real tension, as it were, relates to Berg’s sexual orientation, introduced when a Red Sox rookie, wondering whether or not his teammate is gay, follows Berg home. The rookie, however, gets beaten to a pulp when Berg realizes he is being followed, a sequence segueing directly into a pointedly lascivious scene involving Berg and his girlfriend, Estrella (Sienna Miller). Taken in tandem, these explicit moments seem to exist for no other reason than to reassure any wary audience members that the movie they are will not refrain entirely from manly pursuits. Indeed, later, when Berg goes to Japan on a barnstorming tour, he seems to have a fling with a Japanese delegate, Kawabata (Hiroyuki Sanada), another man, though, sure enough, Levin cuts directly to Berg in an empty bed the morning after, a cautious cop-out.

Berg’s relationship with Estrella, while apparently pivotal since the movie keeps going back to it, is emotionally sanitized too. She, in the manner of so many Supportive Spouses, real, faux, or otherwise, is mostly just on hand to be blue as she continually realizes he will not commit. Miller has cornered the market on these sorts of roles as of late, and though she engenders less screen time here than last year’s “Lost City of Z”, she still manages to stand out. In the face of her character being told she cannot go along to Japan with Berg because they are not married, Miller, in the mere way she stands up and walks away, evinces moving, disbelieving self-actualization.

Japan, where war is foreshadowed, sets up the movie’s WWII spy adventure, occupying most of the film’s second half. Alas, just as the film fails to convey any of the singularity of its otherwise singular character, so does it fail in infusing these action-adventure passages with anything that is not off the shelf, right down to the obvious recurring shots of the lurking Gestapo agent, telegraphing a theoretical twist so hard that you actively root to be proven wrong. Rudd, meanwhile, no doubt yearned to capture his character’s enigmatic nature through emotional restraint, but this actorly choice inadvertently has the opposite effect by transforming Berg into something more akin to many stone-faced All-American heroes of so many other war movies. He could be anyone in any movie.

In his little screen time, Strong, as Heisenberg, leaves a more indelible mark, his glares of irritated perplexity directed at Berg conferring more inscrutability onto the baseball player turned spy than Rudd manages to convey himself. And Heisenberg’s motivations, which as a closing title card reminds us remain unknowable to this day, emerge as a more preeminent enigma, really, than Berg, which is such an incredible flaw that you wish this whole production had ripped itself up midway through and started again.

Tending My Garden

Late last July, when the attempt at ACA’s repeal and replace was in its hellraising eleventh hour, my Beautiful, Perspicacious Girlfriend (now Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife) and I fled north from Chicago to Milwaukee. This had already been planned, but given the state of things this trip felt less like mere r&r than sanity saving. One of our stops was the Milwaukee Art Museum. Alas, the special exhibition we had specifically come to see was shut down to prop up a Foxconn soiree hosted by Scott Walker; it was a twist worthy of Lynch. Nevertheless, we were able to peruse the regular collection, including Pierre Bonnard’s View from the Artist’s Studio, wherein, the accompanying placard explained, as WWII’s European Theatre ground its grisly conclusion, Bonnard, from the vantage point of his studio in southeastern France, simply looked out the window and painted what he saw, not isolating himself from the globe’s turmoil but briefly finding solace in what was right in front of him.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that painting in relation to Voltaire and his garden, and I have been thinking a lot about Voltaire and his garden in relation to blogging. After all, the eponymous Candide of Voltaire’s legendary 1759 satire was moved, after deliberately experiencing society’s infinite ills, to see the routine cultivation of his garden as the only sane response to a world gone mad. In present-day America, however, you needn’t go out to find all the ills of the world. No, each atrocity is delivered straight to you, every week, every day, every hour, with every refresh of the page. Those atrocities extend to this blog’s nominal theme – that is, Hollywood, where the bill for an industry steeped in sexual and racial malpractice dating back to its infancy is finally, rightfully coming due. And even if I still love movies and find them to be of significant value, I wonder if carrying even a flimsy 4 oz. paper cone cup of water for Hollywood is wrong. Sometimes I think putting this blog on ice until Ashley Judd is put in charge of a major movie studio even if me doing so would not necessarily amount to much more than this blog blowing its own horn.

It is not, however, merely Hollywood itself that has made me evaluate my relationship to blogging; it is blogs too. I sometimes think about my Swedish blogging friend Jessica, proprietor of the Velvet Café, a site that has not posted in over three years. Granted, even when she was online, Jessica found time for many unplugged adventures, and I figure she has only been MIA as a means to be permanently adventuring offline which is hardly something I can fault. Still, her absence is evocative of a once thriving movie blogging community that has, like so much of the blogging platform itself, wilted. This unfortunate happening is tied to many reasons, and I am not blameless, sort of ceasing to regularly check in with my community members’ gardens as my life has become busier, merely taking the time I do have to focus on cultivating my own.

Reviews are this blogging garden’s principal crop, because I enjoy them as a means to really work through what I’ve seen, even if I also enjoy utilizing this platform, as most loyal frustrated followers can attest, to indulge my notably peculiar fancy with other postings about God-knows-what. But in the Rotten Tomatoes age, reviews function less as opportunities to truly consider a movie than as fodder for numerical worth, suggesting an emerging post-criticism age, or something, where Good/Bad trumps What/How. My former editor at a different site once confessed that movie reviews were not getting anywhere near the amount of pageviews they once did. This turn toward empty calorie clickbait often makes me wonder why I bother to keep up this blog.

I have sometimes wondered if I keep it up only as compulsion. Yet in taking more time away from Cinema Romantico in the last year, I have discovered that my eventual return never stems from grudging obligation, only honest desire. This might be an itty-bitty ad-free .org, but I take pride and find joy in it. This is my garden to tend, and I am free to tend it any way I damn please, which, considering the state of increasingly corporatized online writing, is worth something. As time only moves faster, as my life gets shorter even as it accrues more responsibility, and as the world, by the second, only grows crazier, I can still open up my blog interface and, like Bonnard at his easel (uh, kind of), write.

Summer Break

(Optional Musical Accompaniment To This Post.)

Hello, loyal frustrated followers. Cinema Romantico has a fairly momentous occasion on the horizon, one you might be able to deduce from recent blog content. Let’s just say that this blog’s favorite recurring character — My Beautiful, Perspicacious Girlfriend — is set for an upgrade to, shall we say, a more permanent blogging sobriquet. As such, we had planned to take a few days off before and a day or two after to just sort of luxuriate in our life event. But hey, it’s a life event transpiring in the middle of summer, and summer is typically when people take some time off, and so we felt like a bout of slightly extended summer blogging vacation might be in order.

Not to worry, of course, because we will be back soon enough, probably in a week and a half. We would never dream of ceasing to inflict our asinine opinions on you! Ha! Besides, this will give us time to catch up on some of the 2018 movies we have missed, which is a lot of them, and indulge in our preferred methodology of rumination before review. And as a teaser, let me also say that August is right around the corner, and our Friday’s Old Fashioned, while traditionally 80s-oriented for the eighth month of the year, is slated for a slightly different flavored bourbon this time around. But I can’t give the whole recipe away just yet. So hang tight, and soon, after some celebration, we will be back on blogging time.

At the Movies: A Walk Through Cinematic Weddings

Years ago, during a casual discussion about “The Deer Hunter”, a friend of mine said that his first go with Michael Cimino’s magnum opus left him wondering why the wedding scene was so long until it gradually dawned on him that the wedding scene’s duration essentially encapsulated every wedding he had ever attended. I agreed. But then, the “movies is magic”, as Gregory Hines memorably observed in “History of the World Part 1”, and so even if I do not object to the wedding scene in “The Deer Hunter” on its own terms, I wonder if authenticity is exactly what we want from our movie weddings. Wouldn’t we want something bigger and bolder? Wouldn’t we want something to channel the preposterousness that wedding planners and relatives cum wedding planners would never allow? Wouldn’t we want something like the ending of “Blue Hawaii”, with the King floating down Wailua River aboard a tropical flower adorned canoe and serenading Joan Blackman with the Hawaiian Wedding Song? (And which you, prospective movie-obsessed bride and groom, can sort of re-create for the low, low price of $2,495 to $3,795!)

Maybe you wouldn’t want something like the end of “Blue Hawaii”, and that’s okay, but this is my blog, not yours. And I might want something like the end of “Blue Hawaii”, or at least like the end of “Honeymoon in Vegas”, because if you can’t get real Elvis then several Elvis impersonators keeping watch like a heavenly host is the next best thing. But then again, that is probably not what I would want. No, I would probably want something more like the wedding in “Rachel Getting Married”, apart from all the pre-familial drama, of course, though that, it goes without saying, is part and parcel, in varying amounts, to any rite of nuptials. That wedding was a multicultural celebration with big hunks of meat on plates passed around the backyard, Anita Sarko (RIP) as the D.J., and the groomsmen opting out of matching attire to instead don clothes as a reflection of their own individual souls; take your tux fittings out to the wedding planning trash.

I would be remiss, however, if I failed to mention my favorite Will Smith wedding. No, not the impromptu ceremony at Area 51 – just like every little girl’s dream – in “Independence Day” between his Air Force Captain and Vivica A. Fox’s, uh, adult dancer (but very nice person), which sort of doubles as a two-for-one wedding since ace cable repairman David Levinson (Jeff Goldblum) and Press Secretary Constance Spano (Margaret Colin), acting as witnesses, sort of rekindle their own defunct marriage in the background at the same time. That is a wonderful movie wedding, undoubtedly, and yet I, avowed cinema fan, constantly, annoyingly blathering about how I only watch a couple TV shows and absolutely no more, dammit, have long considered Peak Dream Wedding to have taken place on episode 117 of “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Aire.”

You know, when Will (Smith) and Lisa (Nia Long) elope to Las Vegas against the wishes of their parents and find themselves on the precipice of getting hitched in a “Shaft”-themed wedding featuring, per sweeps month criteria, a stellar guest turn in the form of Isaac Hayes as the officiant. At that point in my life, I had not even seen “Shaft” nor attended a wedding, but I clearly remember thinking to myself in this scene’s aftermath, “That. That’s what I want my wedding to be.” Google wasn’t around in 1995 but if it had been I probably would have Googled: Las Vegas Last of the Mohicans Themed Weddings.



Of course, the “Shaft” wedding goes awry on account of Isaac Hayes’s relentless interruptions and backup singers that keep trampling the groom’s attempts to recite his vows with their vocal flourishes, prompting Will and Lisa to flee with the would-be groom giving the officiant a piece of his mind on the way out (“Your Isaac Hayes impression STINKS!”). It’s funny stuff, sure, but it also inherently exposes a fundamental truth — that is, the ceremonial pomp and circumstance is weightless if you don’t speak the words, and if the words spoken are not filled with love and meaning.

That was addressed in a very Wes Andersonian way in the finicky auteur’s “Moonrise Kingdom” by Cousin Ben (Jason Schwartzman), the Falcon Scout Legionnaire running Supply & Resources, who is enlisted to oversee the wedding of the teenage protagonists, Suzy (Kara Hayward) and Sam (Jared Gilman). Says Ben to the aspiring newlyweds: “I can’t offer you a legally binding union. It won’t hold up in the state, the county, or, frankly, any courtroom in the world due to your age, lack of a license, and failure to get parental consent – but the ritual does carry a very important moral weight within yourselves.” He then tells them to go off to the side and consider what it is they are about to do.

Anderson sets this shot beside a trampoline, which is nominally quirky but deceptively deep, childhood ceding to something akin to young adulthood. Suzy and Sam do have a ceremony not long after, but it feels deliberately perfunctory to what comes before, the direct result of consideration rather than an ill-considered flight of faux-marital fancy.

You sort of see this harsh truth in the light of “Jerry Maguire.” The film cuts straight from the eponymous sports agent’s (Tom Cruise) spur of the moment proposal to Dorothy Boyd (Renee Zellweger) to their wedding, but director Cameron Crowe films the actual ceremony by keeping the camera entirely affixed to Dorothy’s six year old son, Ray (Jonathan Lipnicki), the ring-bearer, standing down below Jerry and Dorothy, betraying that the little dude is the whole reason they are getting hitched in the first place. And so even if their small-time backyard wedding earns its keep, a little less Isaac Hayes, a little more Marvin Gaye, seen in a comically exemplary shot sliding from left to right and past a mariachi band to find Jerry’s best man (and only client) Rod Tidwell (Cuba Gooding Jr.) belting out “What’s Going On”, the union is doomed because of the bride and groom’s refusal to consider the ritual’s moral weight.

In another Cameron Crowe joint, the legendary “Elizabethtown”, the moral weight of the wedding is not conveyed but implied. In a movie filled with obvious juxtapositions, the most obvious might be that Drew Baylor (Orlando Bloom), in Louisville for his father’s funeral, is staying at the Brown Hotel right next door to Chuck Hasboro (Jed Rees), who is there for his wedding to Cindy. Though this might suggest a parallel romantic crisis to Drew’s own romantic and personal and romantic crises, Chuck and Cindy are copacetic. Indeed, Chuck is really just Buddha in a bathrobe, offering Drew encouragement and enlightenment, free of any dramatic mountain to scale because he has already achieved contentment.

That notion comes home in Crowe’s deliberate refusal to show us Chuck and Cindy’s wedding even though it looms so large. In that way, their wedding evokes the apartment of Cosmo Kramer in so much as it was never shown because its awesomenimity was unmeasurable and therefore impossible to properly visually express. At the same time, however, keeping the ceremony off screen works as an intrinsic reminder that a wedding, ornate or uncomplicated or points in-between, is only as festive and indelible as the love and meaning of the union itself. We don’t need to see the wedding to know it will rock its guests like a hurricane.

We don’t see the wedding in “True Romance” either. Maybe that’s because Alabama (Patricia Arquette) and Clarence (Christian Slater) tie the knot in a Detroit marriage court, or maybe because their delightful, calypso-assisted post-wedding walk down the aisle, in a manner of speaking, is more than enough. Whatever wish fulfillment flaws that romance might have as written by Quentin Tarantino, as played and presented by director Tony Scott in this moment, it pops, literally, with the pink of Clarence’s sport coat and Alabama’s dress and purse contrasting against the gray of the courthouse and the ickiness of the leftover snow, like phosphorescence in the depths of the ocean.

I always think of this wedding because Clarence’s hero is Elvis, and whereas Elvis’s wedding in “Blue Hawaii” is as lavish as they come, here it is as small as can be, and yet the amorous infusion is no less or different. So many movie weddings are so basic in their opulence, production designers copying and pasting from paint by the numbers wedding mags rather than thinking outside the box. But then, maybe so many weddings at the movies are merely flavorless rituals because the movies themselves too often proffer mere ersatz love, failing to make us believe in forever after.

Clarence’s hero might be Elvis but I suddenly find myself thinking of Paul McCartney: in the end, the love you take, is equal to the wedding you make.