Friday's Old Fashioned: The Baron of Arizona (1950)

“The Baron of Arizona” does not technically begin on a dark and stormy night but it essentially begins on a dark and stormy night, a comically sly detail underlined in a magnificent close-up of Vincent Price in the rain emitting the distinct sense of a tall tale. Then again, Sam Fuller’s 1950 movie is based on the true story of James Reavis (Price) who in the late 1800s really did deploy a massive and massively detailed scheme involving fraudulent land claims to try and claim the Arizona Territory as his own. And sort of in the spirit of its main character, and despite a meager budget, “The Baron of Arizona” convinces as it moves the action from the American Southwest to Spain and back again, though its limited sense of action and substantial talky nature can sometimes weigh it down. Price plays this cruel manipulator with great panache, though he is less successful at convincing us of the character’s burgeoning love for the faux-Baroness (Ellen Drew) as the scheme gradually unravels. No, the real affection here is Fuller’s for his unlikely subject. A director famous for intense realism, this independently financed film feels like a sincere melodrama rather than a subversive one. By the end, and by taking liberties with the story, it’s as if the unlikely appreciation evinced by forgery expert Griff (Reed Hadley) toward his target mirrors the iconoclastic Fuller’s. Foreshadowing, or maybe just epitomizing, our national gift for greed and grift, the would-be baron tried to steal a whole freaking territory and for that, in the parlance of our times, you’ve gotta hand it to him. 

Pitching 90s Movies as Broadway Musicals

Linguist and Columbia professor John McWhorter noting in the run-up to America’s 250th anniversary for The New York Times that one of this country’s greatest inventions was the musical felt unfortunately ironic given that Michael Paulson reported the same month for the paper record that the musical was in trouble, just as he had reported the same thing in September of last year. The high cost of production and theater rental are just a couple of the reasons cited by Paulson for Broadway’s struggles, and this iffy status in the grand scheme goes a long way toward suggesting why there are fewer original musicals and more musicals based on movies; pre-existing intellectual property can provide a built-in audience. As such, an adaptation of 1987’s “The Lost Boys” was nominated at the most recent Tonys for Best Musical just as an adaptation of 1992’s “Death Becomes Her” was nominated the year before that; the musical adaptation of 2001’s “Moulin Rouge!” won in 2020/21 and is set to close at the end of this summer which no doubt will not help box office statistics. Adaptations of “La La Land” (2016) and “The Princess Bride” (1987) are reportedly in the works as is Lin-Manuel Miranda’s of Walter Hill’s 1979 thriller “The Warriors.” Whether this is good or bad, I can’t say; it seems more like sheer necessity. And if it is, I thought, well, why not try to help? What am I here for in my (un)official capacity as pretend producer if not to proffer fake pitches? And since the 90s are back, I also thought, well there is our intellectual property – the decade itself! Here then are a smattering of possible 90s movies to transform into surefire Broadway musical hits! You’re welcome. (I apologize.)

Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael. I think this comedy-drama failed because it wasn’t a musical in the first place; that title just sounds like a musical.

Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead. Ditto. They remade this 1991 comedy in 2024 to no great effect and that’s because it was always supposed to be a musical: just imagine the title song.

There’s Something About Mary. I mean, this is set up for music and lyrics by Jonathan Richman, right?

Quick Change. And if Jonathan Richman would prefer something completely (relatively) new, then let’s pitch him a musical of “Quick Change” because Richman writing music and lyrics for a sort of stuck-in-place musical about three bank robbers who can’t get out of New York sounds up his alley too.

Bowfinger. This 1999 comedy should have been a bigger hit and maybe we can make it one on stage by reimagining a motley crew of Hollywood outsiders filming a movie around an unwitting movie star as a motley crew of Broadway outsiders staging a musical around a star of the stage. How would such a thing even be possible? Eh, we’ll work that out later. And while I am tempted to say the unwitting Broadway star could be Brian Stokes Mitchell as himself, let’s instead finally give David Alan Grier his role of a lifetime.

The Pelican Brief. It’s high time we bring John Grisham to The Great White Way. 

Pacific Heights. A thriller in which a psychotic tenant who won’t leave is transformed into an uproarious comedy, as it was always meant to be, about how nobody can afford to buy a home.

The Fugitive. A “Miss Saigon”-ish tragedy in which Dr. Richard Kimble and U.S. Marshal Sam Gerard realize they are soulmates. 

Enemy of the State. A “Jersey Boys”-like romp told from the perspective of so many youthful NSA agents as they begin to question the nature of the surveillance state.

Clear and Present Danger. A “Camelot”-inspired retelling of the Jack Ryan legend and his utopian Central Intelligence Agency. 

A Simple Plan. “As sure as the night is long / a simple plan goes wrong.”

Empire Records. Is it possible to make an anti-jukebox musical jukebox musical? Let’s find out!

The Big Lebowski. Boy, would I love to see Donny’s version of “Mister Cellophane.”

Clerks. A musical set entirely in the Quick Stop sung by amateurs with improvised choreography.

Disclosure Day

“Disclosure Day” begins in media res with a point-of-view shot of a professional wrestler in the ring getting a boot to the face. It’s quite the wakeup call, dropping us directly into 79-year-old director Steven Spielberg’s 37th feature film with nary a warning and foreshadowing a sci fi-thriller that never takes a moment to let us get our bearings, just as some of its key characters never really have time to get their bearings, and then never really stops going, virtually two hours and twenty-five minutes of rising action in which the concluding line functions as the climax. That line, though, taken in tandem with the opening shot also suggests a wakeup call as a sort of Spielbergian version of Wake Up, Sheeple! There’s an alien conspiracy theory at the heart of David Koepp’s screenplay, true, but Spielberg has never really been about rolling in the mud where most conspiracy theories reside and more about lifting us up. “Disclosure Day” does not suggest that the truth is out there so much as the truth in here, in you and me, in all of us, and has been for a long time, as if he has ineffably transmuted the long-buried alien tripods of H.G. Wells’s “War of the Worlds” into dormant machines, to quote the esteemed Roger Ebert, for generating empathy. 

The truth is inside Dr. Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), a cybersecurity expert for a nefarious corporation in cahoots with the department of defense called Wardex, who absconds with numerous computer files demonstrating not just the existence of extra-terrestrial life but a 79-year cover-up. He’s a whistleblower, in other words, aiming to get the files to several other Wardex defectors, including Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo), who is adamant about broadcasting the images rather than uploading them. Kellner, however, is doggedly pursued by Wardex’s CEO Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), a creepier version of Tommy Lee Jones’s Agent K in “Men in Black” in so much as he contends that mankind can only get on with their happy lives if they don’t know the whole truth. It’s as fascinating question as the one posed by Kellner’s semi-inadvertent co-conspirator and pious girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson) about whether the revelation will trigger a societal crisis of faith. “Disclosure Day,” however, is not interested in truly debating these points but rather paying them lip service by lining them up as a few philosophical bowling pins to just knock them right back down.

Like Kellner, Spielberg has already made up his mind, and the filmmaker has always believed in some larger force, not God, necessarily, but a higher belief that something in the cosmos is meant to unify us in the face of our earthly strife. That strife is evoked in “Disclosure Day” through an impending nuclear strike involving North Korea, an idea that Spielberg is content to let linger on the periphery rather than truly foregrounding it. The larger cosmic mystery, meanwhile, takes root both in Daniel’s emergent backstory and how it ties to the emergent backstory of the other main character, Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), a Kansas City meteorologist who suddenly finds herself endowed with psychic abilities and unwittingly speaking what proves to be alien dialect on live television, drawing the attention of both Wardex and its defectors as Hugo sees her as nothing less than a sign he has been waiting for to tell the world that we are not alone.

Blunt’s performance is a marvel. As written, her character skews broad, a perky weather girl who wants to be taken seriously becoming a spokesperson for the whole universe. In a sense, all the moving parts of Koepp’s screenplay bloom in Margaret and Blunt binds them all together without going over the top, evincing in equal measure fear and a sense of innate responsibility as someone swept along by forces they don’t understand. In that way, she’s an impeccable surrogate for the audience. Her character is trusting that all this will lock into place just as we are trusting that all this will lock into place, and that is how “Disclosure Day” engenders suspense as much as its expertly staged chase sequences. Every time we see Hugo he appears to be on a soundstage with some sort of set being put into place behind him, quietly implanting the idea in the back of our mind that once this set is ready, the final piece of the narrative puzzle will click. 

Hugo’s soundstage and what it ultimately engenders comes with a deeper meaning. “Disclosure Day” does not render its own artifice as explicitly as, say, Wes Anderson’s “Asteroid City” but in gathering all his characters at a soundstage where Hugo functions as nothing less than a director nods at his artifice, nevertheless, while also illustrating his six-decade career as an artist who has always believed in the power of the moving image to unite us. Spielberg might be pulling bits from so many previous movies, from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” to “Minority Report,” from “E.T.” to “War of the Worlds,” but the movie that his 37th one most echoes turns out to be the 36th: “The Fabelmans.” “Disclosure Day” is not just Spielberg replaying the hits but drawing together all the themes that have fascinated him his whole career. If the aliens feel almost beside the point by the time the movie ends, it is because they are the vehicle not only for Spielberg’s plea for empathy but a full-fledged act of self-expression. 

Friday's Old Fashioned for 4th of July: From Here to Eternity (1953)

“Robert E. Lee Prewitt,” says Lorene (Donna Reed) as “From Here to Eternity” draws to a close. “Isn’t that a silly old name?” She is referring to the chief character of the 1953 winner for Best Picture, and though the name is, indeed, sort of silly, it is also revealing. Derived from Middle English and Old French, the surname Prewitt means brave, which is how America’s national anthem summarizes its general population, while the character’s given name Robert E. Lee encapsulates this country’s contradictions and complications, truth and lies, the story it tells about itself and how that story is constantly being revised. The making of the movie adaptation of James Jones’s celebrated 1951 novel of military life on Oahu leading up to Pearl Harbor encapsulated those contradictions too as director Fred Zinneman, writer Daniel Taradash, and producer Buddy Adler softened the book’s coarse language and less politically correct details even while painting itself in enough shades of grey to anger the U.S. Military for not being complimentary enough. The immortal essayist Joan Didion loved Jones’s novel and wrote about how in visiting America’s geographical end to Manifest Destiny, the Hawaiian Islands, in 1977 that she was less taken by seeing its beaches than Schofield Barracks, the army base where “From Here to Eternity” is set. In speaking with then-current service members, Didion came away thinking that much had changed and not much had changed at all, and that “the Army was nothing more or less than life itself.”

Robert E. Lee Prewitt (Montgomery Clift) is the proof. Zinneman’s approach might have been overly polished, and occasionally too literal (the turning of a calendar to December 7, 1941) but in truth, his camera did not really need anything other than Montgomery Clift’s visage to evince “From Here to Eternity’s” myriad dimensions; virtually smoldering in close-ups, Clift wears defiance and vulnerability at once. A hard-headed individualist, Prewitt arrives at Schofield Barracks as the movie opens having taken a buck to private when he is replaced as company bugler in his previous outfit by what he views as an inferior musician. His new company commander, Dana “Dynamite” Holmes (Philip Ober), only wants him for the boxing team, which he refuses to join on account of having previously blinded a man in the ring, given the so-called treatment by his fellow soldiers as brutal, callous incentivization to get in the ring but refusing to waver. “A man loves a thing,” this individualist explains of his devotion to the collectivist Army, “that don’t mean it’s gotta love him back,” which may as well encapsulate a great many Americans and their relationship to this nation. In a sense, Prewitt reflects both his First Seargent Milton Warden (Burt Lancaster), a career soldier who both is and is not content at putting out everyone else’s fires, and his best pal, fellow private Maggio (Frank Sinatra), a hothead who walks off duty when his weekend pass is revoked.

It is through Maggio that Prewitt meets Lorene. In the book, she’s a prostitute, in the movie, she’s a hostess, though that delineation is thinly veiled, and I suspect it is why both then and now that despite winning an Oscar for her performance, Reed is often cited as being miscast. Donna Reed became a certain American housewife archetype while the real Donna Muellenberger, as she was born, was something else altogether, and those dueling notions and the more complex sense of self that Reed nee Muellenberger possessed are why she was, in fact, perfectly cast. Why, Lorene is not even Lorene, she’s Alma Burke, and she works at the New Congress Club to save up enough money to go back to the mainland and lead she what deems a proper life: a proper marriage to the proper man with the proper children with a membership at the country club. The monologue in which she explains this is Reed’s best moment – you can virtually see her putting on a mask in real time, a mask of the person that American society expects her to be. 

Lorene’s hope that Prewitt will be the one to help her fulfill the American Dream is undone, however, when Maggio is killed in the brig by the sadistic stockade Sergeant Fatso Judson (Ernest Borgnine) and Prewitt avenges his friend by killing Fatso, leaving him wounded and on the lam, friendship and honor bleeding into standard-issue American masculine idiocy. Lorene hides him at home, and Warden protects him during roll call, holding out hope he might return, demonstrating his own unexpected complications just as his affair with his commanding officer’s wife (Deborah Kerr) does too. Ah, but the problems of one, two, three, four, five people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world and that proves true when the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor and “From Here to Eternity” both unironically and ironically brings to life Mr. X’s observation from JFK that the “organizing principle of any society, Mr. Garrison, is for war.” Even Prewitt is galvanized, in a manner of speaking, inverting the notion of dying for your country by dying for his country in the dumbest way possible by trying to sneak back to the barracks against all logic and getting shot and killed by his own men. That, however, is not how “From Here to Eternity” ends. No, it ends with Lorene telling a make-believe story reframing Prewitt’s idiotic death as an act of genuine valor and reminding us that if you tell a story about who or what something is enough times, you might just start to believe it. 

250 Years Burning Down the Road

I remember the exact moment when it dawned on me for the first time that I would probably not live to see the United States of America’s Tricentennial. It was my sixth-grade class with Miss Carlson, and not my fourth-grade class with the same Miss Carlson, because it was fifth grade in-between when I formed my lifelong fascination with the American War of Independence and related Founding Fathers history. And when we touched on our country’s 200th anniversary of signing the Declaration of Independence, Miss Carlson humorously noted that because everyone in the classroom was born a year or two after July 4, 1976, we would need to live to be roughly 99 years old to see the tricentennial. Everyone laughed, but I was heartbroken. I could not even conceive of 2076 in my mind at that point, but I knew it was far away and my odds of getting there were long. No, the semiquincentennial was going to have to be it for me. Little did I know that 2026 would be the year the great-great-great-great-great-grandson of King George III would appear in the district named for George Washington to subtly remind the light-of-brain 47th American President of his being a chief executive of a constitutional democracy, not a king. The British army probably did not play The World Turned Upside Down at Yorktown, the 1781 battle sealing the whole American Revolution deal, just as nobody played it after King Charles III spoke to Congress, but you could hear its figurative echo.

Of course, the older I got and the more history I read, the more I realized that missing the American Bicentennial was no tragedy. Despite something approximating its best efforts, the celebration could never expunge the pungent fumes of Watergate and Vietnam; if anything, Gerald Ford pardoning his Presidential predecessor to move on, as they say, probably only made the stench worse. What’s more, in a real what’s old is new sort of situation, the Bicentennial being used to sell so much commemorative schlock echoes our current President hawking his own Freedom 250™ crap. Perhaps our country has always been about crass commercialism as much as constitutionalism. The big exposition of 1876 meant to celebrate the American Centennial, meanwhile, was as much a for-profit trade show as much as anything, and while the Civil War was technically in the rearview mirror, Jim Crow was just ramping up. (It might be ramping up again.) The sesquicentennial in 1926 was deemed America’s Greatest Flop. All this got me to thinking about my favorite July Fourths. I liked the one where my parents threw a party and my dad’s best friend brought his ice cream maker; I liked the one where a couple of my friends and I went and saw “Terminator 3” in lieu of fireworks; I liked the one where My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife and I went to a small carnitas place where the air conditioning barely worked and then we watched A Capitol Fourth on PBS and went to bed early. Maybe the less momentous the 4th of July, the more memorable.

Just as the founders erected figurative guardrails to hold the country together, I find myself wondering if the Divine Providence namechecked in our declaration incorporates bad feelings if not outright existential threats to ensure our biggest national celebratory milestones are mindful rather than mindless. Yet, even if we accept this premise, it seems like Divine Providence laid it on a little thick for 250. After all, our nation’s capital was specifically designed by Pierre L’Enfant to evoke constitutional democracy and yet our know-nothing President has spent the run-up to the semiquincentennial running roughshod over Washington D.C. He trashed the White House ellipse for a bloody spectacle as glorification of his massive ego and reduced its east wing to rubble to construct a ballroom less about security than blighting the people’s house for eternity. (At least all the tacky gold accents the President is supergluing himself to walls inside 1600 Pennsylvania Ave will probably just fall off themselves.) He has put his name and face on every building he can, trying to make the nation state synonymous with himself, commandeered the National Mall for a pitiful semiquincentennial fair that is glorious only in the pudding where his brain should be, and sought to plant 47 trees in Lafayette Park to remake the nationally protected public space named for America’s greatest friend in liberty in his own image. He has brayed about constructing a 250-foot arch which he undoubtedly believes will be his own gold-accented pyramid to earn his way to the afterlife while his attempts to transform the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool into the MGM Grand Pool Complex in Las Vegas by draining it and painting the bottom so-called American Flag Blue instead turned the whole thing Hi-C Ecto Cooler green and became the ultimate reflection of his T*ump-brand tyranny, self-perceived infallibility, blatant grift, and awe-inspiring incompetence colliding to manifest uproarious, infuriating, depressing unintentional comedy and conspiracy theories. The Iran War and the reflecting pool are hardly the same, but also, you can see how the former would have been something conducted by the person responsible for the latter. He repeatedly claims to be a builder, but his greatest gift is for destruction. 

As the President went about laying waste, Bruce Springsteen exercised his constitutional right to protest about it by taking to the road in April and May for the Land of Hope and Dreams American Tour (slogan: No Kings), including the United Center in Chicago in late April where I saw him. Wearing a black vest over a white button-town and black tie and indulging in several between-song monologues expressing his belief in core American values, he cut the image of a revivalist preacher whose text was the Constitution rather than the Bible. His air was less spirited than solemn, however, and frankly, the music and the way he structured his setlist said what needed to be said all on its own. He made his anti-ICE protest anthem “Streets of Minneapolis” a centerpiece, but objectively, it paled when put side-by-side with his earlier work, putting into perspective how his own songbook was already built for this moment. That howl of desperation for “The Promised Land” never hit so hard, the contradictions of “No Surrender” were never so poignant, and a full band “Ghost of Tom Joad” in which Bruce let co-star Tom Morello cook on guitar was electrifying, not so much summoning the specter of the eponymous “Grapes of Wrath” character as reminding us he was still there, in Minneapolis and in Memphis and in Chicago. He was probably at the reflecting pool, too, maybe played by Will Ferrell instead of Henry Fonda, incredulous, but there. “Wherever there’s a national guardsman, ma, yawning with nothing to do, I’ll be there.”

Nothing hit harder than “Wrecking Ball.” Springsteen has composed quite a few politically motivated songs in the new century, though none have proven more durable as a 21st century American national anthem than “Wrecking Ball.” Written in the fall of 2009 when he and The E Street Band played a five-night stand to close Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey ahead of its demolition the ensuing year, the eventual title track of his 2012 album anthropomorphizes an 80,000-seat concrete edifice as it defiantly stares down its own imminent destruction. It sounds impossible, such a song working at all, and even with a powerhouse performance by The E Street Band, the subject matter can make for some clunky lines. But Springsteen is a keen songwriter and he knows that the reverence Americans tend to feel for certain sports stadiums allows the song to work as a broader allegory of recalcitrant institutions and the implacable forces that would seek to destroy them, and that even if they succeed, a deeper and stronger spirit prevails. Indeed, “Wrecking Ball” is not elegiac but jubilant, evinced in its f major chord and in the climactic solo call and response of “hard times come and hard times go” five times fast giving life to that endless American ebb and flow, punctuated by taunting the wrecking ball to bring it on, suggesting that whatever you can destroy, we can rebuild, achieving something I am positive only Bruce Springsteen could: effecting Alexis de Tocqueville’s famed observation that American democracy’s special sauce is “being able to repair the faults (it) may commit” as a rock and roll anthem told from the perspective of a football stadium. 

“Wrecking Ball’s” message of “hold(ing) tight to your anger and (not falling) to your fear” can admittedly sound of its time, the wake of the 2008 Financial Crisis and the early days of the Obama administration, when fanciful words like hope and change were in the air. Those eventually ran up against the hard but necessary realities of political compromise but more than that, the 44th President never seemed to see, or maybe just never could bring himself to believe the dark forces that were conspiring against his rosy vision. And yet, at the recent opening of his presidential library, he struck the same optimistic tone that first made him famous, in a way evoking why so many young people are obsessed these days with the twenty-tens. It felt better. Of course, such nostalgia can feel naive, and so did President Obama’s optimism, frankly, in advance of Freedom 250™. That sort of tension, though, between belief and a lack of it, animated our founding, and has been animating us ever since, and has animated Bruce Springsteen’s music too, whether or not people have allowed themselves to hear it. He has written constantly about the dark side of America, and at the same time, he has never stopped believing in it, the famed arc of justice always at a standstill, as it was on April 29th at the United Center. He said his piece about current affairs, but he structured his setlist to let a little light back in when things got dark. He held tight to his anger; he refused to fall to his fear. 

Famously, the 555-foot Washington Monument was designed by Robert Mills not to instill a sense of triumph but uplift, the emphasis of its verticality carrying your eyes up toward the sky as if appealing to our better angels. In recent times, however, with the apathy, obsequiousness, and whole-hearted shamelessness that has settled over not just our politics but civic life, it has been hard not to feel as if our better angels have taken their harps and gone home. If I have not always believed in the country itself, I have always believed in the idea of this country, though after so much of the citizenry’s collective shrugging off of January 6th as no big deal, I confess, I have never struggled to maintain belief so much. Does an idea cease to be enough when the ensuing course of action drifts so far from it? A funny thing happened, though, when My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife and I recently returned her hometown of Washington D.C. We were coming back from dinner in Alexandria in a car and I realized that from certain vantage points, all the construction, cranes, and fencing that currently blot the capital’s landscape disappeared and left only a view of the Washington Monument, an impervious, immovable testament to its namesake’s intrinsic example that no one man is greater than the country. And for those few moments I did not hear the echoes of The World Turned Upside Down but of Bruce Springsteen, daring our wannabe fascist of a President to bring on his wrecking ball.

 

Friday's Old Fashioned: Getting Even (1986)

The 1986 action-thriller “Getting Even” is a moving picture testament to that moment in time when Dallas, Texas captured the imagination of and evoked a swaggering attitude endemic of Me Decade America. It was co-produced by Mike Liddle and Al Hill Jr., the latter the grandson of H.L. Hunt and heir to the Hunt Oil Company, meaning “Getting Even” was infused with oil money and something like an opportunity to transform Big D into a movie town. Indeed, it was filmed not only on location in Dallas but by utilizing Dallas equipment and locations to which the producers had access, as director Dwight H. Little explained in an interview with The Flashback Files. What’s more, Little has said he was hired as director specifically because he was non-union. That’s hilarious, evoking a certain kind of wildcatting spirit and goes a long way toward describing what “Getting Even” is: effectively a B-movie made with an A-movie attitude. And though I can’t speak to how it looked or played in a theater on February 28, 1986, alongside “Pretty in Pink,” of course, just how it came across 40 years later on VHS rip uploaded to YouTube, I gotta say, I was smitten, and which is why I give it my full-throated endorsement. Get even with modern Hollywood by skipping the theater this summer to stay home and watch “Getting Even” on YouTube! 

In keeping with its era-specificity, “Getting Even” opens in Afghanistan where a one-time soldier turned soldier of fortune, Tag Taggar (Edward Albert), is pilfering lethal Russian nerve gas to transport back to Big D for analysis. It does not take long, however, for a wealthy rancher with a grudge against Yankees, King Kenderson (Joe Don Baker), to pilfer the nerve gas for himself, threatening to unleash it unless Tag coughs up an exorbitant ransom. Though the poster makes Tag look like Remo Williams, the characterization and Albert’s performance are anything but, more like a suave Robert Goulet filtered through Timothy Dalton’s James Bond. This is ironic given that Baker played the villain Timothy Dalton’s 1987 Bond movie “The Living Daylights,” though in “Getting Even” he lays his Lone Star heritage on thick, even as that heritage simultaneously makes for another of the movie’s weird ironies. Kenderson’s mission statement might literally be explicated as not messing with Texas, yet by threatening Dallas with the stolen gas, is he not, himself, in fact, messing with Texas?

Meh, who cares. The plot is but a thread on which to hang “Getting Even’s” myriad action scenes and running but a brisk 90 minutes, Little keeps those scenes coming at a good pace while utilizing so many action-thriller sound effects of grunts, screams, and machine gun fire to make for a hog-killin’ time. A car chase concludes on the Texas State Fairgrounds and involves a bad guy climbing the old Comet rollercoaster with the Dallas skyline as a backdrop, a delightful manifestation of Roger Ebert’s Climbing Killer theory, just as Tag deactivating a bomb at the top of Reunion Tower while King blasts away at him from a nearby hovering helicopter makes for a merry embodiment of Roger Ebert’s digital readout on the ticking time bomb cliché while also encapsulating the daredevil nature of 80s action moviemaking. “They were flying that (helicopter) thirty feet away from the tower,” Little told Flashback Files. “You could never shoot something like that today, not in a million years.” Yet, even as it frequently goes big, “Getting Even” is equally good at thinking small, like a sequence in which Tag is roped by some evil rodeo henchmen; I laughed out loud during that scene and I mean that as a compliment. Even better is the moment when Tag’s team runs a simulation of estimated casualties should the nerve gas be released. A helicopter hovering next to Reunion Tower is a whimsical reminder of the era, but so, too, are the dread-inducing graphics on a 1986 desktop computer. 

Some Drivel On...Trapped

It was sheer coincidence that I happened to watch “Trapped” (2002) not long after watching “Apex” (reviewed Monday), two one-word titled Charlize Theron thrillers 24 years apart, providing an inadvertent if revealing window into the ebb and flow of the Hollywood middling thriller. In the former, Theron and Stuart Townsend star as Karen and Will Jennings, mother and father to young Abigail (Dakota Fanning) who is abducted by a trio of kidnappers (Kevin Bacon, Courtney Love, and Pruitt Taylor Vince) that holds her for ransom. It suggests Joel Schumacher’s “Trespass” (2011) not just in its overtones of a home invasion thriller but more crucially, in its totally bonkers energy, epitomized in director Luis Mandoki’s overheated aesthetic and screenwriter Greg Iles’s commitment to kooky sensationalism much more than convincing characters. The kidnappers are set up as shrewd and thorough, only to come across as anything but, not that gaps in logic mean much. “You are here for the smoked meat,” the server said to My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife when we went to Schwarz’s Deli in Montreal and if you watch “Trapped,” you are here for Courtney Love’s screw-is-loose performance, the You-Cannot-Be-Serious twist, and Will being introduced flying a seaplane all so he can land a seaplane on a highway during the car chase climax. I did not believe this climax, of course, but I did not believe it in the way one cannot believe, say, a Knicks 29-point comeback in Game 4 of the NBA Finals. And so, while “Apex” was made in the indifference-inducing house style of Netflix, “Trapped” at least piques a perverse sense of curiosity that makes you want to watch if for no other reason than to wonder, “What’s this movie on about then?”  

Apex

“Apex” begins with an adrenaline junkie couple, Sasha (Charlize Theron) and Tommy (Eric Bana), at a risk-taking crossroads inside a tent suspended in mid-air alongside a sheer vertical rock face. She wants to keep climbing despite the bad weather while he is starting to wonder if maybe she needs to stop seeking quite so many thrills and frankly, it’s remarkable just how much these two wily acting vets sell this scene. Yet, even if its purpose is partly to induce terrifying vertigo with a shot looking out the tent, these introductory narrative moves of Baltasar Kormákur’s straight-to-Netflix-streaming action-thriller are so cozy and reassuring that it’s like slipping into a warm bath. Do I need to tell you that Sasha is riddled with guilt when Tommy perishes on the rock face? Flash ahead five months and Sasha is traversing a remote Australian National Park where, a ranger warns, numerous people have gone missing. Sure enough, the genial local Ben (Taron Egerton) who helps her fend off a few loutish red herrings turns out to be a cannibalistic psycho. Game on! What ensues suggests an outback horror-thriller, like “Wake in Fright,” crossed with “Surviving the Game,” as Ben gives Sasha a head start in the wilderness and then gives chase. For his part, Egerton plays Ben like a simmering kettle, really letting his insanity escalate before unleashing. Theron, on the other hand, while evincing as much resolve as desperation, is done a disservice by a script that does not explore nor even so much as just momentarily wonder whether this diabolical version of the most dangerous game reactivates in her a macabre rush of adrenaline. It speaks to a lack of deeper emotional layer or even a true sense of surprise, no matter how intense the stunts might be, meaning “Apex” ultimately is a thriller that just regresses to the middling mean.

Friday's Old Fashioned: When Time Ran Out... (1980)

Paul Newman and Jacqueline Bisset react to special effects.

“When Time Ran Out…” is an appropriate title given that it effectively marked the end of producer Irwin Allen’s brief run in the 1970s as Hollywood’s master of disaster with “The Poseidon Adventure” and “The Towering Inferno.” Neither were any great shakes, but they were virtual barnburners next to this low-energy abomination that Leonard Matlin cheekily termed When Ideas Run Out. Maybe, but director James Goldstone’s bomb started as a re-telling of the 1902 Mount Pelée disaster, only for Allen somewhere along the line to call off a dramatization of real events, perhaps deeming them too real. He opted instead for a fictional narrative about a pair of luxury hotel owners, Shelby Gilmore (William Holden) and Bob Spangler (James Franciscus), on a Pacific island who ignore the impending threat of a long-dormant volcano that erupts and threatens to wipe out everything with slow-moving lava that sort of melds the future 1997 volcano movie double shot of “Dante’s Peak” and “Volcano” together. 

Shelby also wants to marry his secretary, Kay (Jacqueline Bisset), but Kay is still in love with Hank (Paul Newman), an oil rigger on the same island who in the course of drilling uncovers the volcano’s resuscitation. This is one of many soap opera threads inserted by screenwriters Carl Foreman and Sterling Silliphant that are not only half-baked but barely there, just coming and going, likely owing to the different cuts of the movie, no doubt the studio desperately trying to hack this turkey down. You can occasionally see glimmers of how “When Time Ran Out…” might have worked as a big piece of stinky cheese. The moment when Hank and Kay rekindle their love doubles as the moment when the volcano erupts. What should be waggish melodrama, however, is undermined by the shoddy special effects, stranding Newman and Bisset in laughable effects-less reaction shots. Such bad effects apparently stemmed from the movie’s budget being slashed in the middle of production when costs ran too high, leaving them with matte paintings and models that must have looked ludicrous on the big screen. What’s worse, despite slashing the run time, “When Time Ran Out…” feels endless, owing to a peculiar lack of urgency in the scenes that do remain.

That Newman ended up in “When Time Ran Out…” owed to his deciding to fulfill his contract to Warner Bros. despite earned skepticism over the script. As Matt Zoller Seitz once noted, Jeff Goldblum’s performance in “The Lost World: Jurassic Park” was something like a running commentary on the dumbness of the movie itself. Newman, however, did not have that kind of meta gear, and so he’s left to helplessly look out the side of helicopters and jeeps at the lava to be added later. As such, he innately merges with his character, two men at the mercy of corporate bigwigs, just trying to survive.

Watched on a Plane: Titanic

This is another in Cinema Romantico’s sporadic series of reviews of movies watched on planes.

In our current era, the big screen has ceded the stage to the small screen, a point brought home with great clarity on a recent flight when I noticed a woman one row ahead me was watching “Titanic” on her seatback screen. More than that, though, occasionally, she would take a picture with her phone of “Titanic” on her seatback screen. It was awe-inspiring. It would be like taking a picture of Mount Everest through the spotting scope. Then again, there is something to be said for watching “Titanic” on a 10-inch screen rather than a 52x20 one, at least, if you are watching it over someone’s shoulder. After all, what has been the preeminent the critique of “Titanic” lo these 29 years? The dialogue, of course, the clunky, sappy, wretched dialogue. And fair enough. Even I, staunch “Titanic” defender and lover, will cede that point. Yet, watching it sans dialogue only put into perspective the visual nature of James Cameron’s storytelling, the expert composition of Cameron and his co-editors Conrad Buff IV and Richard A. Harris, eliciting emotion and conveying information in equal measure. When I broke down my favorite scene some years ago shot-by-shot, I came away thinking that with some tailoring and tweaking, Cameron might have made “Titanic” as a silent movie, and after watching it over someone’s shoulder on a plane, I believe it even more. I mean, Billy Zane was acting like he was in a silent movie anyway. 

Still. The dialogue. There is no scene as poorly written as the one in which Rose and Jack first meet at the back of the ship where she is threatening to jump. The verbiage there is so woebegone and wooden that you can virtually see Winslet and DiCaprio stiffening in real time, trying to find ways to say it, not quite being able to. As fate would have it, however, while watching over the other passenger’s shoulder, I was simultaneously listening on my headphones to Bruce Springsteen’s 1993 MTV Plugged album and almost the instant that scene started, so did The Boss’s “If I Should Fall Behind.” It wasn’t Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” while watching “The Wizard of Oz,” or anything, an eerie synchronization of the events onscreen, but the words did echo the visual cues that Cameron is setting up for later. Indeed, just as the visual cues foreshadow later events, so does Springsteen’s key observation – “If as we’re walking a hand should slip free / I’ll wait for you / And should I fall behind / wait for me” – eerily foreshadow “Titanic’s” heartrending conclusion. I realized this because due to a lot of taxiing, a lot of sitting on the tarmac, and a lot of the pilot trying to line up the door with the jet bridge, our flight literally took the 3 hours and 15 minutes of James Cameron’s movie. As I finally deplaned, I was already wondering what “Avatar” might look like scored to “Human Touch.”

Send Help

Send help is a phrase colloquially associated with castaways, or movie castaways, at least, but in Sam Raimi’s horror-comedy “Send Help,” the phrase may as well be stamped on the forehead of his hilarious, hapless, resourceful, unexpectedly complicated anti-hero Linda Liddell (Rachel McAdams). Perpetually unkempt and smelling of tuna, Linda is the office pariah even if she doubles as its dynamo, working overtime to compose a report for the frat brother (Xavier Samuel) of her new CEO, Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien), who subsequently gets the promotion that she had been promised. The opening 20 minutes is fast-paced and flashy, but it is also oddly predictable. When we see Linda at home talking to someone, it doesn’t take a clairvoyant to know that when the camera finishes pulling back, it will reveal that she’s been talking to her pet. That this extended opening works so well anyway is a testament to McAdams creating a character out of what could have become a caricature by brilliantly jibing with Raimi’s frenetic aesthetic to evince the air of someone so awkward and oblivious that she can’t help but step on social rakes over and over with a well-meaning smile on her face. Even if I always knew the cringe that was coming, McAdams made it so that I could hardly stand to look. Truly, it’s easier to watch her repeatedly projectile vomit on someone’s face than unwittingly talk to someone with tuna on her chin.

Linda does not so much find the wherewithal to confront Brantley about being passed over as she does suffer something like a temporary bout of insanity, marching into his office in lieu of breaking down. He does not recant his decision but instead invites her on his private plane to a meeting in Thailand to prove herself. Little does he know! Aboard the plane, however, the other executives make fun of her behind her back by watching her Survivor audition tape, apparently angering the gods so much that the plane’s engine fails and sends them hurtling into the sea, a sort of diabolical version of a corporate retreat challenge in which seeing what everyone is made of mixes with showing their true colors, and turns out, Linda is made of the stiffest stuff. It also foreshadows how nimbly Raimi turns blood and gore into unexpected personal growth. Only Linda and Bradley survive, washing up on a seemingly deserted island, though at first the latter is infirm due to a nasty gash on his leg, foreshadowing a shift in the balance of power.

I am reluctant to delve too deep into spoilers. It’s not that “Send Help” becomes less predictable, per see, but that it deviously remixes deserted island cliches and wields them in an order you are not necessarily always anticipating. It also ditches any sense of practical realism, speeding through all bits and bobs that it took Tom Hanks’s character forever to sort out in “Cast Away,” for an effective emotional realism that essentially recasts their setting as a beachside boardroom. Honestly, at times “Send Help” evokes an R-rated “Gilligan’s Island,” like the makeshift desk that Linda fashions out of sticks to manifest the undergoing power shift between she and her boss. If it’s clear that Raimi sides with Linda in the emergent struggle for control, it’s just as true that writers Damian Shannon and Mark Swift infuse her with contradictory traits that pleasingly muddy our attachment to her, adding dimension that gives “Send Help” some real juice. It carries that juice all the way through a conclusion that is literally ambiguous but figuratively clear as day, stretching the corporate retreat as horror movie allegory as far as it will go. She has visualized success.  

Leisure Still Rules: Ferris Bueller’s Day Off at 40

When Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert reviewed “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” for their TV show in 1986, the two inestimable Chicago film critics gave John Hughes’s pièce de résistance one thumb up (Ebert) and one thumb down (Siskel). For a movie that became both a cultural touchstone and lightning rod, their disagreements skewed basic; Roger thought it was fun and funny and Gene did not. There is, however, a revealing moment when they show a clip of the scene in which the eponymous high school senior (Matthew Broderick) laments having to take a test on European Socialism: “I’m not European, I don’t plan on being European, so who gives a crap if they’re socialists? They could be fascist anarchists, it still doesn’t change the fact that I don’t own a car.” Off camera and under his breath, Siskel mutters, “So much for the history of man.” He was 40 when the movie was released, just entering middle age, and though I chuckled at his line, it also struck me as blinkered. “Movies do not change,” his counterpart once noted, “their viewers do.” “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” might have been fantastical, but his European Socialism line rang remarkably true from the point-of-view of so many teens and pre-teens like me who hated school. (I support public education and public schools. I contain multitudes.) Indeed, once Ferris has convinced his parents (Lyman Ward and Cindy Pickett) that he’s sick, he sits up in bed and confesses his lie by breaking the fourth wall. In 1986 this blew my eight-going-on-nine-year-old mind. He was making me his accomplice, taking me under his wing, and inviting me into his subsequent adventure as he moves heaven and earth to round up his girlfriend Sloane (Mia Sara) and best friend Cameron (Alan Ruck) to take a day off from school by leaving suburbia via Cameron’s dad’s 1961 red Ferrari GT for sunny downtown Chicago with Edward R. Rooney (Jeffrey Jones), Dean of Students, in hot if comically hapless pursuit.

The following year, “Adventures in Babysitting” would portray downtown Chicago as nothing less than an urban warzone, a far cry from the gleaming metropolis of “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” The truth of mid-to-late 80s Chicago likely lay somewhere in the middle, but then, “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” was not an in-the-middle kind of movie. Its downtown Chicago was one where the most nefarious character encountered was a snooty maître-d (Jonathan Schmock) and where Ferris could join a parade midstream, sing karaoke, and the whole city would be none the wiser. The trio repeatedly comes close to being caught, though the movie never effuses a true sense of fear or risk, illustrating not only a lack of traditional stakes but how as a character, Ferris is virtually unchanged by the end. Like Ferris, “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” is not playing by narrative rules, and while there is something to be said for a movie genuinely wrestling with the high school experience, there as much to be said for one that transcends it. High school is grueling, not just on account of homework and tests but from social anxieties and pressures, something to survive as much as enjoy. Ferris Bueller dared to imagine a world where none of that had to be true, for one day, at least. No wonder everyone considered him a righteous dude.

George Will certainly did. The same year The Wall Street Journal deemed the one-time Pulitzer Prize winner as the most powerful journalist in America, he called “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” “the greatest movie of all time” in The Washington Post. “By ‘greatest movie,’” he explained, “I mean the moviest movie, the one most true to the general spirit of movies, the spirit of effortless escapism.” He makes this argument as only Will could, not merely lauding Hughes’s work but dissing French, Italian, and Scandinavian arthouse movies along the way, complaining that movies have grown too serious by literally writing that “in the 1950s movies became ‘films,’” and firing figurative shots at film critics like the name-checked Pauline Kael for deigning to treat movies seriously in the first place. I wonder what Will makes of his fellow conservative pundit Mark Hemingway’s take that “Ferris Bueller is a celebration of pure individualistic liberty.” Is that too serious or is that just common sense, an eternal verity rather than an ephemeral one, a la Joseph Epstein whom Will cites in opposition to what he predicts a mere two weeks after the movie’s release will be clichéd critiques “(o)f the self-absorption of youth corrupted by the complacency of the Reagan years.” He is not only essentially quoting David Denby’s negative assessment for New York Magazine but a thousand pithy leftist Letterboxd-style putdowns word-for-word, which is not necessarily to say those putdowns are wrong but that they are not in any way new as they no doubt assume themselves to be. Verily, all that was there in the beginning, kidz.

How can you argue with ‘“Life moves pretty fast; if you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you might miss it’” wondered Bonnie Stiernberg for Paste in 2016. Oh, you can argue, and plenty did and have, as Alan Siegel did in 2011 for The Atlantic, dismissing perhaps the movie’s most famous line as fortune cookie wisdom, the viewpoint of a character for whom the world is a cushy place, ensconced in wealthy suburbia, quite literally evoked in the movie’s first shot, an establishing exterior one of the Bueller home. Stiernberg, in fact, cops to Ferris’s cocoon of privilege even as she deems the story universal. Siegel, on the other hand, suggests it cannot be universal because of the privilege, the inherent classism, and the pointed whiteness of the main story. He links to a piece in The Paris Review by Caleb Crain which is some real Moby-Dick-is-the-Republic-of-Ireland stuff. Crain sees Ferris as “a child of wealth,” which is demonstrably true, everything else flowing from that, building to a concluding paragraph in which the Ferrari convertible becomes the ultimate emblem of capital, spending it rather than investing it, as he writes, destroying it for self-expressive pleasure. I laughed so hard reading this I practically had tears in my eyes.

The best “Ferris Bueller” revisionist argument is no essay; it’s Minhal Baig’s Chicago-set 2023 independent film “We Grown Now.” Told from the perspective of two pre-teen Black boys, Malik (Blake Cameron James) and Eric (Gian Knight Ramirez), living in the Cabrini-Green project of Chicago circa 1991, their lives are diametrically opposed to Ferris, besot with the threat of violence even if their mother works hard to make their home a serene, inviting place. Mid-movie, they skip school and light out for downtown Chicago via the CTA rather a 1961 Ferrari, visiting the Art Institute where in addition to seeing Georges Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte like Cameron they also see Walter Ellison’s Train Station. In the former, Cameron might have desperately sought to see himself only to see nothing at all, but in the latter, described by the Art Institute as foreground(ing) the harsh realities of racial injustice under Jim Crow in the 1930s,” Malik and Eric are allowed to see themselves. And it suggests that a day off in downtown Chicago belongs just as much to two Black kids from Cabrini-Green as it does to three White kids from Shermer High. Why it even belongs to a pair of garage attendants (Richard Edson and Larry Flash Jenkins), as “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” itself makes clear, when they take the Ferrari for a joyride in lieu of parking it. All these characters’ backgrounds and perspectives may be different, but the experience of the day off itself is universal.

At one point during the parking attendants’ Windy City hot-rodding, Hughes cues up the “Star Wars” theme, a humorous underscoring of this day off’s inherent sense of light-hearted rebellion. That rebellion takes a sober turn in the climax, however, when Cameron rejects his and his family’s wealth and his father’s own rejection of him by sending that pristine Ferrari plunging into the abyss, “like an outtake from ‘Rebel Without a Cause’ dropped into the middle of a Bugs Bunny cartoon,” Matt Zoller Seitz would write for Slant Magazine. “(B)y showing it, Hughes subtly acknowledged that the rest of what he’d shown us was pure escapism—and that by seeking out such entertainment, we were trying to avoid thinking about our own miseries, which might not be identical to Cameron’s in all the details, but were every bit as intense and alienating.” If Cameron momentarily punctures the bubble, it seems as if Ferris’s sister Jeanie (Jennifer Grey) and her parallel subplot is ready to puncture the bubble entirely, on the verge of giving up her brother right at the last minute…until she doesn’t. It’s not only that’s she spurred to self-reflection by a Boy in the Police Station (Charlie Sheen in a career-best performance), but in that final do-or-die moment, she chooses to believe in the fantasy, opting to follow her brother down the path of merrymaking righteousness. 

Escapism in movies is not a bad thing. Even Hollywood Special Emissary Emeritus Orson Welles knew the value of escapist cinema. “I think it’s very nice,” he said, “to make movies for the child which is in every grown person.” The truth is, as I get older, the harder it is to remember the movie-watching child within. I stopped caring about “Star Wars” a long time ago. I did not see the new “Masters of the Universe” movie because the first time I watched a He-Man cartoon in adulthood my immediate inclination was to call my dad and profusely apologize for ever having forced him to sit through such dreck. “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” has not changed in the last 40 years, I have, and yet, for me, its spirit endures. Ferris often gets yoked to capitalism and individualism, but as I have aged and changed and formed and modified a set of beliefs and values, I see him through the lens of flânerie (he even dresses like a flâneur). The poster memorably decreed that Leisure Rules and in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” he effectively transforms leisure into his own ism, demonstrating how it can enrich, fulfill, inspire, and nourish, that the very meaning of life is to stop and look around once in a while. If you think that message is banal or does not remain worthwhile then I’m willing to bet you’re still too scared to eat pancreas. 

Dissecting a Scene from The Insider: redux

Ten years ago, I broke down this scene from Michael Mann's masterpiece "The Insider" (1999) shot by shot. It's a scene in which 60 Minutes producers Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino) and Don Hewitt (Philip Baker Hall) and consummate correspondent Mike Wallace (Christopher Plummer) are called into a meeting with the President of their CBS News division, Eric Kluster (Stephen Tobolowsky), and CBS general counsel Helen Caperelli (Gina Gershon) to answer questions about their exposé with the ultimate insider, Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe), ex-employee of Brown & Williamson Tobacco who accuses his former bosses of consciously ignoring health considerations. I posted this at a moment in time, July 2016, when the notion of truth was becoming ever more specious and I was truly beginning to sense what was coming for the United States. In the decade since, both the scene and the movie have proven frighteningly prescient. Given what is currently transpiring with 60 Minutes and CBS News and its kowtower in chief, it is proving prescient again. So, I dusted it off and reposted it with just a few minor tweaks. 

This is how the scene is established, with Bergman and Wallace in cozy, laugh-filled consultation while their executive producer, Hewitt, sits one chair over. This is a Bergman & Wallace world, see, until.....

Caperelli enters with a cheerful countenance by asking "Should I send for coffee?", the obligatory faux-peace offering in corporate conference room settings before figurative shots are fired. 

She sits, along with Kluster to her right, while Bergman and Wallace disengage, still smiling, still in their own little world.

Notice how Gershon has Caperelli lean toward Wallace, Bergman and Hewitt, a subtle shift into attack mode. "I thought we'd get together because there's a legal concept that has been getting some new attention recently, 'tortious interference.'"

In saying "tortious interference", Hall has Hewitt snap to attention, like, 'Oh, this doesn't sound good.'

But in the ensuing wider shot, compare Hewitt's reaction with what Pacino has Bergman do in the face of "tortious interference" - utter disinterest, like, 'Oh, some more corporate b.s..' 

Caperelli explains that corporate b.s. "If two people have an agreement, like a confidentiality agreement, and one of them breaks it because they are induced to do so by a third party..." and on third party Gershon has Caperelli point right at Wallace as a thinly veiled accusation, telling them if stuff happens, this is their fault. 

Upon concluding her spiel, Bergman and Wallace take turns explaining that they air something only if it's in the public interest, and only after they verify and corroborate it, which is why, as Wallace notes, they "have never lost a lawsuit and run a classy show." And Plummer caps his little lecture with an "Anything else?" that is laugh-out-loud haughty.

Ah, but there is so much else, because even if Caperelli agrees that 60 Minutes has exacting verification standards, she thinks it wouldn't hurt to "make sure you're right on this one." 

Hewitt asks Kluster, his boss, what the CBS News position is on this issue. 

And as the CBS News President goes to answer, he looks first to Caperelli for approval, signaling the hierarchy. 

And Caperelli takes the baton, explaining that they must check on this claim of tortious interference before they air the piece.

And as she explains this, Plummer has Wallace look at her like her reasons aren't worth the gum on his shoe.

But now Caperelli turns the threats from an outside party to her own, terming the segment "already rife with problems", and opening a binder as she says to visually underscore the supposed rifeness.

Now she has Bergman's attention. "What does that mean?"

"'Rife with?'" Bergman repeats as he leans forward, readying for conference room battle.

Off camera, she explains to Bergman that "unusual promises" were made to their client, which Bergman immediately disputes by saying they merely agreed to hold his story until it was ready to air.

She questions Wigand's veracity.

Bergman explains Wigand's veracity was good enough for the whole state of Mississippi.

Caperelli explains that their "standards have to be higher than anyone else's because we are the standard for everyone else." 

"As a standard, I'll hang with, 'Is this guy telling the truth?'"

Gershon's smirk is the wicked rebuttal to the quaint notion of "telling the truth", which her character then explicates further. "Well, with tortious interference, the greater the truth, the greater the damage. They own the information he's disclosing. The truer it is, the greater the damage to them. If he lied, he didn't disclose their information. And the damages are smaller."

Here, in fact, is where Pacino should have won the Oscar. Confronted with the idea that telling the truth gets you into more trouble than telling lies, Pacino has Bergman pause and look around the room, a moment that cannot be fully captured in a screenshot, as if he can't believe here is here and now is now. He asks: "Is this Alice in Wonderland?"

Plummer has Wallace lean forward, quickly, like he's just seized on what he only just realized is the key to the whole case, his interviewing instincts having kicked in. "You said," he says, referring to the earlier statement made by Caperelli (see ninth screenshot), "'on this one.' What about this one?"

She explains that if they air the segment then Brown & Williamson could sue CBS. "At the end of the day, because of your segment, Brown & Williamson could own CBS." And she tops it off not with an expression conveying threat, but this expression, one that communicates a kind of "Aw shucks, if your segment was the reason for all this, gee, wouldn't that suck for your reputations?"

And Pacino has Bergman look not at Caperelli but at Wallace, as if he knows matters of "reputation" are what gnaw at Wallace like nothing else.

Caperelli's wristwatch bloops, her scheduled out. "I'm due upstairs," she says.

You can't see it in the still because it's almost imperceptible, but at what is obviously Caperelli's pre-arranged out, Pacino, brilliantly, has Bergman nod, like he's saying 'Of course.' 

Caperelli tells them not to rush to any conclusions because, hey, "We're all CBS."

And as she says, "We're all CBS", Mann's handheld camera drifts ever so slightly to the left, to allow space for the CBS "Eye" to enter the frame, as if the "Eye" is watching Caperelli who is watching everyone else.

Then, Caperelli dissolves, as if into a cloud of smoke, like she was never there.

Wallace tells Bergman not to worry, and Plummer gives Pacino a pat on the hand, momentarily reverting to their jocular behavior at the scene's start. "We call the shots around here," Wallace says. 

But Bergman knows that's not true. At least, not anymore, not after today, not from this moment forward. He wins, eventually, of course, he has to, he's the movie's hero, but not really, and he knows it. He gets the truth out, but the notion of truth has been compromised. "What got broken here," he says at the end, "doesn't go back together." This is the moment when it's broken.