The small Minnesota town giving Ben Wheatley’s action-comedy “Normal” its name is reminiscent of the English village Sandford in 2007’s action-comedy “Hot Fuzz” in so much as its idyllic nature belies a bevy of unhinged arms-toting citizens. The latter held that twist for a good chunk of its running time whereas “Normal” gives it away immediately in its Tokyo-set prologue where a Yakuza boss dispatches a pair of underlings who have failed him to the American Midwest. This is one of the more interesting decisions that screenwriter Derek Kolstad (he conceived of the story with star Bob Odenkirk) makes. It means that Normal’s interim Sheriff Ulysses (Odenkirk) is the only one unaware of the town’s nefarious underbelly, including the audience, stressing the feeling of his being an outsider. Gradually, as he gets to know the tiny police force and meets other members of the community, he begins to suspect something is amiss in the death of Normal’s previous Sheriff, setting out to uncover the truth.
It’s a solid-enough set-up, an American western on the frozen tundra, but Kolstad’s script never finesses its ideas. There is something potentially interesting in a small town circa Right Now choosing to go all-in with the Yakuza to survive but “Normal” isn’t sure what to make of it – right, wrong, or in-between – and lets it burn out while Sheriff Ulysses’s backstory is hopelessly wan and means the conclusion lacks additional emotional punch. Indeed, the ever-changing factions of Normal, good helping bad and vice versa, provides some spark that never quite goes anywhere because eventually it’s revealed as mere twisty structure for the sake of twisty structure. And fair enough. Normal, Minnesota might as well be a soundstage, a depressed cop movie giving way to a western giving way to Japanese gun-fu, and so on, as if Normal, Minnesota is really just a “Blazing Saddles”-style series of soundstages, one genre followed by another, an elaborate excuse to shoot some people’s limbs off, proving there is more than way to skin a cat.
The central event of “Violent Saturday” is a bank robbery, but Richard Fleischer’s crime thriller feels more like a disaster movie, really, with the heist serving as the catastrophe in place of an earthquake, hurricane, or volcano. We see the meticulous planning of the three thieves, Harper (Stephen McNally), Dill (Lee Marvin), and Chapman (J. Carrol Naish), but we spend just as much time with the residents of the small Arizona town where the bank is located, from colleagues at the local copper mine to a devout Amish family with the taciturn Stadt (Ernest Borgnine) for its patriarch. The manager of the bank under surveillance, Harry (Tommy Noonan), is a George McFly-ish peeping tom, Boyd (Richard Egan) suffers a philandering wife, likely from his own alcoholism, and Boyd’s associate at the local mine, Shelley (Victor Mature), discovers that his son is being bullied because his old man failed to serve and win honor in WWII. These are all issues of a decided masculine variety, and it is telling that the debt-riddled librarian, Elsie (Sylvia Sidney), has the most superfluous subplot of all.
Befitting “Violent Saturday’s” so-called sunshine noir genre, all these problems will be exposed to the harsh light, in a manner of speaking, when the robbery commences, a lengthy sequence of changing locations that Fleischer recounts in an almost documentary-like fashion. There is no accompanying music, nothing more, really, than some chirping birds on the soundtrack once the three thieves make haste from the bank to the Amish farm where they have tied up the family and Shelley, using the latter’s car in lieu of their own stowed getaway vehicle. This vérité sensation makes the gunshots that are fired sound all the more startling, and the deaths stemming from the bullets feel that much more shocking. If Shelley being able to free himself and the Amish clan from the barn loft where they are being held can feel like a bout of some all-too-convenient screenwriting stupidity courtesy of the character keeping watch, it still allows for him to ante up and be the hero he never got to be.
But that’s also the strange thing about “Violent Saturday.” The cold cruelty of the bank robbers would seem to refute the nature of violence just as the Amish patriarch being forced to kill one of the robbers would too. Whether he was coached, decided on his own, or some combination of the two, however, Borgnine plays the Amish patriarch not just with no inner-life but no life at all, reducing him to a cyborg in a straw hat, meaning the moment has no resonance. What’s more, the capping scene in which Shelley is greeted heroically not only by his son but by virtually every boy in his son’s school, like we are suddenly watching an afterschool special, suggests the exact opposite of his character’s half-hearted protestation that it would be better if such things didn’t happen in the first place. I mean, if not, how could you ever prove you were a real man?
Released in the fall of 2000, meaning into a contentious American Presidential election in addition to the roiling wake of the Lewinsky scandal and Starr Report, writer/director Rod Lurie’s political thriller “The Contender” was designed to make waves even as it wound up engendering some unintentional waves too. Its eponymous character is Ohio Senator Laine Hanson (Joan Allen), tapped by President Jackson Evans (Jeff Bridges) to be his next Vice President after the death of the current one, though the Republican chair of the nominating committee, Shelly Runyon (Gary Oldman), plans not merely to oppose this but to “obliterate (her) life.” A smear campaign, in other words, and so perhaps it’s appropriate that “The Contender” not only divided the critics but became victim of something akin to a smear campaign itself. That occurred when co-star Oldman’s words in one publication were misconstrued in another, making it seem as if he insinuated that Lurie caved to his production company Dreamworks and its patron saint, Steven Spielberg, to make the movie more big-D Democrat-friendly. Afterwards, Oldman contended his issue was only with Lurie in so much as the filmmaker compromised “The Contender’s” ethical and moral ambiguity to render it a more straightforward story of heroes and villains. Frankly, Oldman is not wrong in his assessment. A genuine melodramatic entertainment, “The Contender” also seems to come bearing sharp fangs in depicting statecraft until they are revealed as nothing more than a set of costume teeth.
Runyon’s ammunition for character assassination is explicit photos that emerge of what is purported to be a college-age Hanson engaging in lewd acts at a frat house. The Senator from the great state of Ohio not only does not confirm nor deny their legitimacy, but she also publicly refuses to even acknowledge them, much to the chagrin of White House Chief of Staff Kermit Newman (Sam Elliott). Newman even yearns to hit back at Runyon with some character assassination ammo of their own. “Come on, Kermit,” Hanson derides, “if we do that, we’re no better than he is.” “We are,” Newman replies with Elliott emphasizing the second word, “no better than he is,” a line that has been ringing in my head during this whole divisive midterm election season. Like it or not, Laine is judged in the venerable court of public opinion, even if that venerable court is shown to be influenced if not outright shaped by the media and by political actors goosing the media. When Runyon rhetorically asks why the American people will believe him, he says, “Because I will have a big microphone in front of me,” evocative of “The Contender’s” oft juicy dialogue. Politics, however, do not take place only in front of the camera, but off them, and in an astonishingly deft performance, Bridges creates one of our all-time great movie presidents. Evans is a chameleon who is skilled at operating in either environment, virtually glowing with affability in the presence of others while simultaneously maintaining an unmistakable assertiveness (the running gag of Evans procuring food in meetings from the White House chef is as funny it is telling) while coming across cunning and even savage behind the scenes.
Evans is practicing politics, in other words, in the true sense of the word, all their wheeling, dealing, and not so much persuading as bulldozing, demonstrating how even what might be noble ideals are always swimming in raw sewage-infested waters. Even noble ideals are in question, however, as President Evans wanting to install Hanson as VP is summarized as being less about what she stands for than POTUS’s own “swan song” while Runyon never even explicates a good reason why he wants to do her in. “She’s no good,” he tells his wife Maggie (Irene Ziegler) in the middle of the night in his pajamas and slippers while sipping milk, a shot that truly makes him look like nothing beyond a bitter old man. Yet, even if “The Contender” does a bang-up job demonstrating “politics as power, nothing more,” as the philosopher X once said, where the notions of character are immaterial in more ways than one, Lurie pulls his punch at the conclusion with two revelations that repaint the political arena as angels and devils and a place where character counts after all. Maybe he could have swung it had he stuck to the complicated portraits of these people that he seems to be generating, but the two climactic twists negate that possibility. And whether from narrative cowardice, or bleeding-heart intentions, Lurie inadvertently yet revealingly transforms “The Contender” into a manifestation of the most dangerous kind of politician: one that believes in their own bullshit.
There is a double meaning to the title of the new war movie “Pressure,” one glimpsed in the opening image of the clouds, referring not only to the inherent mental strain of the 1944 D-Day invasion but how that invasion was predicated on nothing less than an accurate weather report. That’s quite a task for director Anthony Maras and his co-screenwriter David Haig (who wrote the book on which it is based) to manage – rendering not only a movie with a foregone conclusion but a foregone conclusion hinging on feuding weathermen thrilling. They succeed by crafting an old-fashioned feeling kind of drama from performances and writing, making the meteorological details both palatable and dramatic, boiling everything down to Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower’s (Brendan Fraser) one key question: Do we go? And yet, as old-fashioned as “Pressure” feels, it also comes across modern in a funny kind of way by suggesting a wartime “Moneyball,” of all things, advancing the argument that when it comes to active combat, the data overrides wishful thinking.
“Pressure” is seen through the eyes of RAF Group Captain James Stagg (Andrew Scott), leaving his pregnant wife Liz (Tamsin Topolski) at home, one of the many little details that gets neatly folded into the overarching drama, summoned by Eisenhower (Brendan Fraser) to provide an accurate forecast ahead of the proposed June 5th date for D-Day. After all, they can only launch with good weather. Stagg, though, clashes immediately with Eisenhower’s American meteorologist, Colonel Irving P. Krick, played by Chris Messina with great relish, making for an obvious if no less enjoyable antagonist, often evincing the air of a haughty student in a debate competition. Krick will be proven wrong, of course, and part of the fun is in seeing the antisocial, pragmatic Stagg figure out how to access his inner emotionalist to reach a roomful of uniformed men who fancy themselves pragmatists, too, without quite realizing just how much they are guided by feelings.
As Eisenhower, Fraser embodies both the Supreme Commander’s tact and temper and, even more than that, the figurative weight of the world on his shoulders, conveying in equal measure how the crucial decision gradually becomes inevitable while still feeling impossible. Kerry Condon, meanwhile, in playing the part of Eisenhower’s private secretary, First Lieutenant Kay Summersby, continues to prove she is one of our most exciting current actors by beathing life into what could have been a stock character, a cool, patient turn evoking the old phrase it takes an army. When Kay remarks “Men are too fond of that word” after Eisenhower says Stagg is known as a genius, Condon’s line reading brings the house down.
For as much as Maras prefers to emphasize plot and performance, however, he does make room for one true filmmaking flourish. It occurs on that fateful Sunday, June 4th, right after Eisenhower is convinced to postpone the invasion. The day begins in the bright sunshine with all the major characters attending Sunday mass, save for Stagg, pointedly outside the church when the wind picks up, the clouds roll in, and the rain pours. If the cinematography and soundtrack lay it on a little thick, I still liked it, the forceful way in which Maras mocks not only the notion of praying for good weather but that all the military might in the world doesn’t get first say over the weather gods. It’s so satisfying that yet one more brief recreation of D-Day in its aftermath cannot help but pale in comparison, drawing an otherwise solid movie to a somewhat anti-climactic conclusion, though, by that time, I was already satisfied.
Brad Pitt’s gloomy, self-serious performance as Achilles, waiting around for two-and-a-half hours to die, embodied Wolfgang Petersen’s foundering Iliad-adaptation “Troy” (2004), unless you want to argue it was Diane Krueger as Helen of Troy seemingly with no guidance about what she was supposed to be doing other than standing around and watching other people die. Then there was Brian Cox as Agamemnon. The character is cautioned at one point that he cannot have the whole world, which he takes as nothing less than a personal challenge, and which is also how Cox plays the part, as if he were biting into the whole planet earth like it was an apple. Cox, bless his heart, is willing to crash and burn by going over the top for the sake of our entertainment amid the otherwise somber goings-on. Indeed, while “Troy” mostly evaporated from my mind the minute it ended, Cox stayed, though I confess, I can’t calculate exactly how much of that was Cox himself and how much of that was Friend of the Blog Rory saying for months afterward in his finest Scottish brogue (Cox kept his accent), “Then every son of Troy shall die!” Even so, I would never would have expected that while watching Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey, every time Agamemnon was mentioned, and even when Agamemnon was literally on the screen in front of me, albeit obscured by his Darth Vader-ish helmet (“Star Wars” is “The Wizard of Oz” and “The Wizard of Oz” is The Odyssey), I kept picturing Brian Cox. If he could sometimes feel out of place in “Troy,” he really would feel out of place in “The Odyssey,” but I couldn’t help it, no matter what, Cox’s sneer just kept involuntarily flashing in my mind. And that, I suppose, is the test.
Kate Winslet is my Ophelia (duh), Angelina Jolie is my Cleopatra (even though she never made that movie), Anne Hathway is now my Penelope, and Brian Cox, it turns out, is my Agamemnon. We don’t choose these things; they choose us.
On Monday, I lamented that in his version of Homer’s Odyssey, Christopher Nolan saw fit to figuratively put wax in the audience’s ears by not letting us hear the song of the sirens. Maybe that was a wise creative decision, sometimes what you don’t hear is more powerful than what you do, and I’m willing to be swayed, though I mostly meant it as an emblem of the director’s overall lack of imagination. But it also invites the question, who would I cast to sing the song of the sirens? True, that’s a little too close to Diane Sawyer once upon a time in an interview criticizing the erstwhile Dixie Chicks for criticizing President George W. Bush’s foreign policy without formulating a foreign policy, as ordinary citizens so often do, of their own. Reviewers need not be in the business of rewriting the movie they are reviewing. That’s not how it works. Still, the question was tantalizing, so much so that I worked through it, even if I am mostly considering a siren in the singular form rather than the plural. Hey, that’s the beauty of using your own imagination.
My first thought was, Emmylou Harris. The ethereal nature of her voice fits the bill and even more, it would sound so eerily enticing drifting over water crashing against rocks, a lulling in spite of yourself. But then I remembered that The Coen Brothers had the same thought when they enlisted the singing voices of Harris, Alison Krauss, and Gillian Welch to be their sirens in their own version of Homer’s Odyssey, “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” Geniuses and idiots think alike, I guess?
If we had access to a time machine, the haunted nature of, say, Billie Holiday would no doubt work since that voice knows more than all our 8 billion people put together, or even Edith Piaf. What was that moment with the phonograph ahead of “Saving Private Ryan’s” big final act if not a sort of song of the siren?
En Vogue could recalibrate the song of the sirens as one so smooth you suddenly just find yourself in the water without knowing you had jumped in.
Zola Jesus (i.e. Nika Roza Danilova) feels less like a siren, more like a witch, which I mean as a compliment, not unlike the ultra-iconic Stevie Nicks, though that goes without saying.
I was going to say Natalie Merchant, and I suppose I still am, yet, as soon as I thought it, I thought, hers is the voice of a mermaid, not a siren.
The soprano of Swedish chanteuse Lykke Li is in the key of the siren, yet, paradoxically, her voice is so sad it would just make you fall down and cry rather than swim over to your doom.
I have a strong desire to cast Neneh Cherry in the role, not so much because her Swedish-West African heritage would tick off the right people but because her beguiling spoken-word style would break the song of the siren mold.
Hope Sandoval’s voice would lead you into temptation and inevitable doom, there is no doubt about it, and if you don’t think so, buddy, I triple dog dare you to eschew wax in your ears without tying yourself to the mast. Could Sandoval’s voice, though, infuse you with the knowledge of the whole world as do the sirens? Could anyone’s voice? Is it such a tall task that it’s insurmountable? Was Nolan right, after all, to leave it alone?
He wasn’t. Reader, have you heard the mighty alto of Neko Case, and have you heard it intertwined with her longtime harmony vocal compatriot Kelly Hogan? They will lead you into temptation while simultaneously impressing upon you the beauty and horror of the whole world, reconstituting the biggest branch on the tree of knowledge into a shiv so delicately you won’t even realize that it has already impaled you.
“A time of apparent magic” explains the title card that opens Christopher Nolan’s two-hour-and-fifty-three-minute version of Homer’s Odyssey. You can practically hear the scoff just off camera. For all that’s been made about Nolan’s commitment to putting us there, the Bronze Age, that is, from practical effects, to lighting, to a score utilizing era-appropriate instruments, “The Odyssey” proves more modern, and not just because everybody is speaking in contemporary American accents. Nolan’s version of Odysseus (Matt Damon) is one conspicuously in the throes of PTSD brought on by a Trojan War unpacked as a traumatic event while the gods are minimized, underscored in a crack of thunder that may or may not represent Zeus, like a special effect in a middle school play, which I might take to be Nolan’s tongue in his cheek if I thought he ever laughed. Humorless, revisionist, just as every translation of Homer’s Odyssey adopts its own point of view, so does every adaptation, like this one, in which the fabled ancient Greek epic poem is transformed into, uh, well, what else: a Christopher Nolan movie.
Odysseus, King of Ithaca, has been away for 20 years, 10 spent fighting and winning the Trojan War, 10 wandering in his struggle to return home. This has left his kingdom in peril with suitors occupying his home, seeking to marry his wife, Penelope (Anne Hathaway), while his son Telemachus (Tom Holland) looks on, wanting to help, but not sure how. Honoring both Homer and his own nonlinear propensities, Nolan has chosen to use the chunk of time Odysseus spends on an island with Calypso (Charlize Theron) as his unconvincing framework. It’s not so much that in his version Nolan plays coy with why Odysseus is trapped there, and as if afraid to render his protagonist contemptible for stepping out on his wife eschews Calypso repeatedly taking him to bed, as it is an overriding air so morose as to beggar belief when she remarks on their having such a good time together. No, these scenes are just a flagrant vehicle for him to process his trauma, never dramatic in and of themselves, and with a staid air that weighs the whole enterprise down.
The Odyssey emerged from songs and spoken tales that preceded it and has in effect been influencing stories of all varieties in the centuries since, and so anyone that it takes it on is naturally going to see it in their own way. Still, there are times when it feels less like Nolan is interpreting The Odyssey so much as he is repurposing it for parts to construct a sort of spiritual summation of his whole oeuvre. You see it straight away in one of the movie’s first shots of the trojan horse half-buried in the sand, evoking the concluding image of “Planet of the Apes” and immediately impressing upon you the sense of destruction rather than victory, foreshadowing the war between the Greeks and Troy as nothing less than an ancient world atom bomb a la “Oppenheimer.” In wandering those 10 years afterwards, Odysseus has lived long enough to become a villain, cough, cough, at least in his own mind, not so much the complicated man of Emily Wilson’s famous 2017 translation, never mind the wily trickster of the original epic, as a one-note brooding stoic. If The Odyssey is in so many ways about homecomings, this might be where Nolan’s own identity, or at least, his predilections, most tellingly merge with Homer’s ultimate intent: of course, his King of Ithaca would become Batman.
Robert Pattinson, at least, is not brooding as Antinous, the foremost suitor of Penelope (along with Corey Hawkins as Polybus), giving some real president of Alpha Beta fraternity energy. In a weird way, Pattinson might be having too much fun, in so much as his malevolent sniveling invites a bloodlust in the denouement that inadvertently runs counter to the lessons that we are supposed to have learned along the way. Antinous meets his match, however, not in Telemachus, whose arc can feel perfunctory with all that’s going on, but Penelope. Along with Samantha Morton giving life to Circe’s righteous anger, Hathaway’s performance is “The Odyssey’s” best, both honoring Nolan’s modern vision while still effusing grand melodramatic flourish. And though Nolan generally prefers medium shots to close-ups that would befit these larger-than-life characters, in a reverse shot over Holland’s shoulder, Hathway suddenly lunges forward in the frame, fashioning a close-up all on her own.
She fares better than Zendaya, anyway, who is ostensibly playing Athena, though like Theron, seems to intentionally downplay, thinking the performance will be made in the camera, only to be stranded in diminishing, dull frames unworthy of a Greek goddess. (She has resembled a Greek goddess on the red carpet for the movie’s promotion more than in the movie itself.) Then again, Nolan sees Athena less in terms of mythology than psychology, turning her into nothing less than an Imaginary Friend, providing a form of recurring consultation for Odysseus so that when she ultimately disappears, we know he is now emotionally and mentally healed, the hoariest trope in the screenwriting manual. It is emblematic of how Nolan sees the gods in more abstract terms, evoked in Odysseus’s struggle to believe in them at all, which on some level makes it both his most audacious and most cautious revision in so much as it feels like he is taking this 3,000-year-old story of polytheism and revising it for vacation Bible school.
The presentation of Athena, however, ties back to the presentation of Calypso, both of which relate to “The Odyssey’s” biggest problem, Nolan’s filmmaking style, or a lack of one, more accurately, meaning that no matter how spectacular the scenery and sets, there is a pervasive stodginess. He filmed on 70mm IMAX cameras, the first feature film ever to do so, and yet, it feels like a crutch for his own lack of visual imagination. He essentially transcribes what is on the page to screen rather than bringing it to life, like Penelope’s burial shroud, or Odysseus’s faithful dog Argis, but two plot points that Nolan injects with no real feeling. Would it have been impossible to render the song of the sirens as bewitching as the poem says? Perhaps, but isn’t that why you go into filmmaking, to envision and make perceptible that which seems impossible on the page? Isn’t that the dream of filming The Odyssey, not just to rework the text for our own times but to animate one of our world’s foundational stories? You’d think, but in the end, Nolan’s Odyssey lives its title card a little too much: a movie of apparent magic.
Listen—stop talking. I don’t need to hear the rest. The first half of the sentence was genius! “Owen Wilson befriends a dolphin and…” And? What “and”? No “and” necessary! Are you kidding me? I’m sold. Sold!
As it happened, that article also came back to me this week not so much when I read about Anna Kendrick’s new streaming series for MGM+, “Embassy,” but when I saw the accompanying photo announcing the streaming series. It was a photo of Anna Kendrick and her co-star Sam Heughan in an air duct. And I immediately thought, I don’t need to know the rest. That photo is genius! Anna Kendrick in an air duct and... And? What “and”? No “and” necessary! Are you kidding me? I’m sold. Sold!
Well, on second thought, maybe one “and.” Anna Kendrick in an air duct and it’s a movie, not a streaming series, a hundred minutes, tops.
John Carney’s 2007 little musical indie that could “Once” opens with an unbroken shot of a nameless street busker (see bottom of the post) played by Irish singer-songwriter Glen Hansard standing on the street at night strumming guitar and singing. Utilizing a handheld camera, Carney starts the scene in long shot, conveying how the street is deserted and that Hansard’s character is not so much busking in this moment as singing just for himself. In the song, one that is both Hansard’s composition and his character’s composition within the movie, evoking its blurred lines, “Say It to Me Now,” he at first seems to plead with an unnamed lover to tell him what she needs to tell him, if there is, in fact, something to tell. As the song moves to its conclusion, however, the subject whom he is addressing seems to shift, from an unnamed lover to the Lord Almighty, pleading with Him that if he has something to say to our unnamed busker, to say it now. He is no longer performing, even, he is shouting into the void, even as Carney gradually moves his camera into close-up, intimacy, intensity, and emptiness in equal measure. Then, Carney takes a couple steps back with the camera to reveal that the nameless busker has acquired one listener, a nameless girl played by real-life Czechian singer-songwriter Markéta Irglová. His moment effectively becomes her moment too, the camera letting her into it just as he will let her into his life as they go on to make literal music together, filling up that aching void we have just felt. I remember seeing this sequence for the first time almost 20 years ago at the Landmark Century in the mall that time forgot like it was yesterday, how music and just a few shifts of the camera could say everything.
“Once” was a runaway success, first at Sundance and then out in the world, commercially and critically and Hansard and Irglová proceeded to win the Oscar for Best Original Song for “Falling Slowly.” That there was a mite of controversy as to whether having been composed a couple years earlier it had technically been written for the movie, as Academy criteria dictates, only underlined how dumb the rules of that category are in the first place and how even the sullen sticklers of such dumb rules were swept away by the movie’s ineffable spirit. Though Hansard had cultivated a successful career in the music industry up to that point as frontman of the Irish rock band The Frames, the fame and success with “Once” was on a different level, and even given their 18-year age difference that we might say, charitably, was, ah, a bit discomforting, it was also maybe inevitable that Hansard and Irglová would wind up together, a relationship based on an intense experience, to quote Sandra Bullock in “Speed.” Of course, Bullock’s character said such relationships did not last, and neither did Hansard and Irglová’s, recorded for hard-to-watch posterity in the 2011 documentary “The Swell Season,” though even as they both went on to marry other people, and have kids, their musical partnership endured; they released an album together just last year. No one else knew what Hansard had been through except Irglová, and vice versa.
Prior to 2007, Hansard had only acted once, in 1991’s Irish rock band comedy-drama “The Commitments,” and even then, he “was basically just doing what I was told,” he would explain to the Montreal Gazette. Unwittingly, the singer/songwriter was describing what a lot of movie acting is, a performance shaped by the director and the camera as much as the performer. Yet, even if Carney did that to some degree in “Once,” he also honored his formal training-less leading man’s request to frequently keep the camera far away, even hidden, to encourage naturalism, demonstrating that there are many ways to string one’s guitar. Originally, County Cork native Cillian Murphy was going to play the role, getting cold feet and bowing out due in part to the octave-changing nature of the songs that he felt he could not handle. Those octave changes of Hansard’s, as the “Say It to Me Now” opening suggests, from tender to full-throated, melded with his performance, not hesitant in moments when he was not singing, but more reserved, even a bit sheepish, only to unleash behind the microphone. He might not have possessed the technique to evince a truly complicated individual, but in his way, did something more than that, manifesting the way in which recording artists tend to express themselves through their music and embodying an earnest belief in that music that, I suspect, only a non-actor could.
I thought of “Once” last year while watching the disappointing Bruce Springsteen movie “Deliver Me from Nowhere” about his recording the “Nebraska” album. Those sessions also famously included he and The E Street Band recording what would become the title track to “Born in the U.S.A.,” a performance so exhilarating that producer Jon Landau deemed it “the most exciting thing that ever happened in a recording studio.” You see the moment in “Deliver Me from Nowhere,” and it’s effective in a classic Hollywood sort of way, if not quite the most exciting thing that ever happened in a recording studio. In “Once,” on the other hand, when Hansard and Irglová’s characters scrounge up enough money to lay down a studio demo, Carney imbues a D.A. Pennebaker fly-on-the-wall feel, a la his documentary recounting the recording of the Original Cast album for the Broadway musical “Company.” That included an unforgettable sequence of Eileen Stritch doing take after take, deep into the night, trying to nail the solo for “Ladies Who Lunch,” going to show how what might sound spontaneous on record is often anything but. Sometimes it is, though, as it was with “Born in the U.S.A.” and as it is when Hansard and Irglová and their makeshift band lay down one take of “When Your Mind’s Made Up.” It’s thrilling, the way Carney frames and editor Paul Mullen cuts it, so that you implicitly feel how the electricity coursing between the nameless guy and girl and the electricity coursing through the performance itself is one and the same. (During the beach montage scene not long after, Carney, in fact, runs the song back again, as if this moment is so overwhelming we need to hear it a second time to process it.) It might not, itself, be the most exciting thing that ever happened in a recording studio, but it probably comes closer than anything we have to capturing what it must have been like for Jon Landau to hear Bruce throw down “Born in the U.S.A.” for the first time.
Glen Hansard died on Wednesday July 29th in a single-vehicle motorcycle crash west of Dublin. He was 56.
Postscript (8/3/2026): The American singer songwriter Neko Case remembers a much different Glen Hansard. A reminder that people like you and me tend not to really know these people at all. You can read it at her Substack. Click here.
A couple weeks ago the staff at Defector was asked to name the worst movie they had ever watched in a theater and provide a brief explanation why. The post has since received over a thousand comments, as you might expect, and it naturally made me reflect on the question, though I wondered if it was a good idea to contribute with a post of my own. I wasn’t sure if I felt like going negative at a moment when everything already feels so negative in the first place. It sometimes feels easier to reflexively lambaste a movie you dislike than elucidate a movie you love. But the thing is, even seeing a bad movie in the movie theater can be illuminative. “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker” was dreadful and made worse from my perspective because it was the last movie I saw in a theater before the pandemic, but it also provided an essential moment of clarity: what “Star Wars” meant to me when I was a kid did not matter anymore, had stopped mattering to me a long, long time ago, and I could just put the whole thing up on a figurative shelf. When I saw “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” in the theater in the spring of 1990 at the age of 12, I had the profound realization that, hey, you know what, not all movies are good.
I stayed ‘til the end of “The Rise of Skywalker,” and even more unbelievably I stayed ‘til the end of “Reindeer Games” (and saw it at all even though the person working the box office literally laughed when I said what show I wanted to see) in the winter of 2000, but I did not stay ‘til the end of “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End” in 2007. The first one, honestly, is overrated, inflated by the immense quality of Johnny Depp’s performance, the second one sagged, but the third was at once so gluttonous and so moribund that I simply reached a point where I literally thought to myself, “I cannot take another second of this,” stood up, and walked right out of the theater. It is the only movie I can recall paying for and leaving early. I did not walk out of “The Scorpion King” in 2002 but only because I was seeing it with my friend Nicolle and her family and because we were seeing it at the late, beloved second-run West Des Moines movie house Billy Joe’s Pitcher Show, meaning I could just order another cheap light beer to power through.
See, I worked at a movie theater in the late 90s and worked for much of it as a projectionist and/or manager, meaning I was tasked with screening virtually every movie we got after hours to ensure the film reels had been properly put together. That meant seeing a lot of dreck and so, occasionally, if there was another manager willing to endure the whole thing, there were movies I walked out of, I just didn’t pay for them. That makes leaving early a little different, a little easier to give up, like I did on “The Postman,” or on “Varsity Blues.” Once, a fellow manager and I started “My Favorite Martian,” just the two of us, and found it so affectless that we fast-forwarded the reels on the projection platter to the end so we could just go home.
My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife reports that she has never walked out of a movie, though she has seen some bad ones in the theater, nevertheless, so many bad ones that she could not narrow it down to single title when I put this question to her. “Legal Eagles,” “Harry and the Hendersons,” much to the chagrin of Jack Donaghy, “Light of Day,” which breaks her heart because she was a Michael J. Fox stan long before the term stan even entered the cultural lexicon, and “Gung Ho,” were all movies she provided as being among the worst of the worst she has seen in a theater. They were not, as she explained, schlock, a critical designation meaning they were not low budget cheesy fun but the tedious horse latitudes of Hollywood. Those four titles she supplied all sound like part of the bad DVD shelf from The Onion.
“Pushing Tin” was on The Onion’s figurative bad DVD shelf and was also mentioned by someone in the Defector comments as the worst movie they had ever seen in a theater. And that’s what a lot of the movies I watched in the theater during those days were like – “Pushing Tin.” They were watched but not necessarily remembered; transitory in the bad way. And it does invite a question: is the worst movie watched in movie theater one that spurs nothing more than total lack of interest, or is it one that provokes intense dislike? My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife also mentioned “Under the Skin” as one of the worst movies she has seen in a movie theater, not because it washed over her unremembered because she was disgusted by it just as I was disgusted by “The Trip to Italy” as tantamount to a three-hour Widespread Panic concert with celebrity impressions in place of guitar noodling. She and I can agree to disagree on those movies (I loved “Under the Skin”; she loved “The Trip to Italy”), but I think we would both agree those movies are doing something, they are just doing something that each of us personally rejects. I mean, I have not yet mentioned “Armageddon”, which I generally cite as the worst movie I have ever seen, and I did see it in a movie theater. But even I will admit that Michael Bay is an auteur in his way, and even if his aesthetic made me want to gouge out my own eyeballs, he did not cause my eyelids to droop, and then to ultimately close.
In 2004, on the other hand, I fell asleep watching “Van Helsing” in a theater. Why did I see that movie? Probably because of Kate Beckinsale, if I’m being honest, or maybe because back then I saw almost everything on opening weekend and there was nothing else opening that week in central Iowa. And the thing is, that’s really all I remember of the experience: falling asleep. I could not recite a line, a scene, a moment, nothing; I do not remember a single thing that happened aside from suddenly waking up from a nap I did not realize I drifted into and thinking, “Hey, when did Frankenstein’s monster get here?” I might have walked out right then except I was mired in that post-afternoon nap state of grogginess, could not really bring myself to move, surrendered, fell back in my chair, and apropos of the worst movie I have ever watched in a theater, dozed off again.
“In the Grey” is the figurative place where Rachel Wild (Eiza González) works as a debt collector for shady investment firms lending massive sums of money to unscrupulous borrowers. Borrowers like criminal tycoon Manny Salazar (Carlos Bardem), from whom Rachel is hired to extract the one billion he never paid back, the narrative engine of writer/director Guy Ritchie’s action-thriller. You cannot, alas, just sit down and ask a criminal tycoon’s lawyer, Mr. Horowitz (Fisher Stevens, having the most fun of anyone in the cast, I swear), for the money, though she does just that as something of a feint before pressuring Salazar by dispatching her team of furtive operatives led by Bronco (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Sid (Henry Cavill) to sabotage his various businesses and bring him to the table. If this set-up raises some comical notions of criminal code, like the pseudo-ethical line between going after someone’s business investments and someone’s personal investments, Ritchie mostly just treats all this financial gobbledygook as pretext for ravishing scenery and an ultimate showdown with Salazar’s private army on his private island. Rachel might technically be in charge, but Ritchie’s heart is with Bronco and Sid.
That’s a little ironic because between and this and Ritchie’s previous action opus, “Fountain of Youth,” it would seem he wants to help make González a star. His idea of doing so here, however, seems to be nothing more than putting her in fabulous costumes. Indeed, those costumes, courtesy of Loulou Bontemps, are the real stars, including a flowing white get-up in a brief desert scene that looks plucked from luxury Tatooine fashion magazine, and a half-black, half-white dress that suggests a wearable black and white cookie commissioned for the Met Gala. As far as her vaguely defined character goes, Rachel’s team codenames her mom, seeming to paint all these buff, proficient, weapon-toting operatives as her sons, except that in Gyllenhaal and Cavill’s understated, frequently deadpan chemistry there is no mistaking the unmentioned but obvious homoerotic undertones between Bronco and Sid. Are they sons or lovers, Ritchie does not seem to know, nor care, never committing, mere allusions ultimately signifying nothing even if glimpses of the fun Gyllenhaal and Cavill are having still emerge now and again.
Often Ritchie the screenwriter is just teeing it up for Ritchie the co-producer and location manager Nicolás Kico Aráez to shine, marshaling I-don’t-know-how-many locales and places, and teeing it up, too, for editor Martin Walsh to stitch so many scenes and accompanying exposition together. It’s nothing if not a professional production and that professionalism echoes Bronco and Sid’s habitually unfazed approach, so unfazed as to be damn near aloof. They are so good at what they do, that even as the plot picks up speed and the stakes theoretically increase, everything fits together with minimal fuss, so much so that the one hitch consciously feels like screenplay engineering, underlined in how Ritchie never even really lets the nominal emotion of it resonate. It’s ultimately evocative of “In the Grey” itself, a slam-bang thriller that passes like an inconsequential breeze.
Robert Altman’s revisionist western “McCabe & Mrs. Miller” has one of the greatest movie character introductions: a solitary figure virtually hidden beneath an enormous fur coast astride a horse in the Pacific Northwest circa 1902. When the figure finally reaches its destination of a rugged mining town, it dismounts and removes the coat. You expect, say, Tom Hardy as a neanderthal-like mountain man and instead, Warren Beatty emerges. He is John McCabe, wearing a suit, albeit a bit rumpled given the circumstances, and dons a derby hat, tipping it to a passerby, cutting the image of a displaced dapper gentleman. The town is named Presbyterian Church, but its central gathering place is the saloon, not the chapel, where McCabe promptly heads, throws a cloth over the table, as if seeking to class up the joint a little, and fires up a card game to start making some money. The saloon owner, Patrick Sheehand (René Auberjonois), approaches, asking if they go into business together by working out a cut of the proceeds, but McCabe begs off. The scene is infused with Altman’s patented style of overlapping dialogue, myriad conversations happening at once, and has the effect of establishing the town itself existing independently of McCabe while simultaneously imbuing the sense that McCabe exists always at center of his own universe.
His universe is thrown for a loop when he purchases three women and opens a brothel, one that only starts turning a profit, however, when the recently arrived Cockney madam Constance Miller (Julie Christie) convinces him to make her a partner and let her run the place since it’s clear his business acumen lags behind his braggadocio. Indeed, Beatty gives an exemplary performance of a man putting on airs who almost, but not quite, knows he is putting on airs and which pairs perfectly with Christie’s raw candor; there’s this thing she does with her face, occasionally twisting it into a kind of confounded grimace, not able to fathom this blustery half-imbecile before her. When they sit down for breakfast to hash out the details of their partnership, Mrs. Miller orders almost as much as Daniel Day-Lewis in “Phantom Thread,” though it’s not a come-on as it was in that 2017 movie but a throwing down, leaving McCabe to look on like a lost little boy. He might become attracted to her, and she to him, but when they eventually wind up in bed together, Altman’s camera drifts away from them and to Mrs. Miller’s dresser where he has put the cash to pay for her time, as funny and sardonic a shot as you’ll see.
“McCabe & Mrs. Miller” is all business. Even the rumor that he McCabe a gunfighter of some renown known as Pudgy McCabe, which is eventually called into question, comes to feel mostly like a matter of branding. McCabe might claim to have poetry in him, but we don’t hear any of it. The world that Altman cultivates in the dim interiors and frequently harsh exteriors, a town with mud for streets and lumber stacked high is still in the process of building itself, is one that does not make room for poetry. Merely surviving day to day is the highest priority. That becomes an open question for McCabe when the powerful mining company with a hold on the town dispatches a couple representatives to try and buy out McCabe & Mrs. Miller’s successful operation. And though “The Art of the Deal” might not have been published until seven decades later, McCabe proves its ideas are timeless, spurning the initial entreaties as a negotiating tactic to get a bigger payout, only to peeve the negotiators and wind up with three men sent to kill him in lieu of any further bargaining. Art of the deal, indeed.
In another movie, this might be the moment when McCabe finds something within himself that he did not know he had to become a hero. That very notion is mocked by having McCabe meet with a politically ambitious lawyer (William Devane) who suggests taking the mining company to court, sticking it to large corporations and making McCabe a hero of small business owners everywhere, an idea that McCabe quite likes, even repeating it to Mrs. Miller. She looks at him like his days are numbered. He can’t stop what’s coming, though there will be no quick draw or ten paces, foreshadowed in one of the hired guns, a sadistic kid (Manfred Schulz), killing a goofy innocent (Keith Carradine) just to kill him. There is no gallantry here, just gutless desperation, and the ensuing shootout between McCabe and the three men is as funny as it is tragic with our nominal hero mislaying his shotgun and having it confiscated by a minister, of all people, stopping off for a beer and a bump midway through, scurrying around in the falling snow, and shooting people in the back. As it plays out, the Presbyterian church catches on fire, causing the town folk to rally together to save it, a sly juxtaposition to the gunfight that only emphasizes its meaningless. As the town is saved, McCabe winds up dead in the snow and Mrs. Miller winds up in a drug-induced stupor, just one more failed business venture, the American Dream brutally reconstituted as an opium haze.
Just as there is no secret to happiness in life, neither is there any one secret to conjuring happiness itself on the movie screen. Sometimes you only see happiness for a split second, like Jeff Bridges as The Dude in “The Big Lebowski” listening to CCR in his car and tapping in time on the roof, and sometimes it takes the whole movie to effuse it, as happens in Aaron Katz’s masterpiece “Cold Weather” when you realize in the last shot along with the character on the screen that happiness has been, as it is sometimes said, the whole journey up to this concluding destination. Sometimes happiness is summoned in a flash by an actor, as Ashley Judd summoned it in “The Locusts” when her character thanks Jeremy Davies’s character for a dance, and sometimes it is suffused on screen by the director, as it was by Michael Mann in “Miami Vice” when Colin Farrell and Gong Li are speedboating off to Cuba for mojitos and the wind is whipping in their hair, and Patti LaBelle and Moby are on the soundtrack, and Mann frames it so the sky and ocean seem to stretch out forever to bring to life that old idiom: the world is their oyster (or, their Cuban highball). And sometimes happiness on screen blurs with happiness off screen as it did in “To Have and Have Not” when Lauren Bacall’s Slim shows Humphrey Bogart’s Steve how to whistle and when he smiles, the fourth wall ineffably dissolves, and you can no longer tell the difference between Bogey and Steve.
When I read that Brenda Fricker died on July 16th, aged 81, in her hometown of Dublin, I immediately went looking on YouTube for one scene in “So I Married an Axe Murderer.” It’s the scene when Charlie MacKenzie (Mike Myers) is going to see his parents, Stuart MacKenzie (Mike Myers, again) and May (Fricker), to watch a soccer match. It’s a Saturday night, and we know this because director Thomas Schlamme calls up The Bay City Rollers’ 1974 song with the sixth day of the week for its title. The number one hit is diegetic because we see Stuart moving in rhythm to it as he tends his Scottish Wall of Fame and because we see May grooving to it as she enters stage right and gets a beer from the mini-fridge and because then we see Stuart and May lock arms in a do-si-do.
There is a feeling to a Saturday night that can’t really be put into words, or that I can’t really put into words, I should say, no matter how many times I have tried, though The Bay City Rollers, bless their hearts, captured it and in their do-si-doing to it, Fricker and Myers capture it too, a brief flash of absolute satisfaction with life.
Longtime and extremely loyal frustrated followers of Cinema Romantico know that we begin each new year with a middling thriller-only movie preview. The problem, however, is that not all upcoming release information is yet available in January. Last year, the release of Kathryn Bigelow’s “A House of Dynamite” was not announced until June. And so, with unbearably scorching temperatures, wildfire smoke blotting the sky, dangerous lettuce on the loose, and virtually everything else in the United States being so bleak and stupid, we thought it might be a fine time to re-peruse the release list and see what additional middling thrillers we have to anticipate.
Mid-Year Middling Thriller Update
The Brink of War, August 14. A historical thriller for the dad in your life of Reagan and Gorbachev’s 1986 Reykjavík Summit might be notable to most for the casting of Jeff Daniels as the former and Jared Harris as the latter but is most notable to the blog that believes Hope Davis should be in everything for casting Hope Davis as Nancy Reagan. That casting decision is why we are willing to overlook writer and director Michael Russell Gunn having exclusively worked in television, cinema’s little brother, up until now and that truly frightening Netflix-like sheen to the cinematography.
Onslaught, September 4. A middling thriller about an Army sniper (Adria Arjona) living in a trailer park defending her family against a titular onslaught of genetically engineered super soldiers should star Hope Davis too, of course, or at least Marisa Tomei, who should also be in everything, but the casting of Michael Biehn and Reginald VelJohnson gives this one a cheerfully retro feel, like it was made in the 80s but accidentally got left on a shelf somewhere.
The Mongoose, October 30. Hey! Look at this! It’s a Liam Neeson middling thriller co-starring Marisa Tomei! Hollywood is finally starting to get it! The plot description on IMDb reads more like the first sentence of the screenplay and, honestly, I get it because, really, what else do you need to know than this: “A highly decorated combat vet, Ryan ‘Fang’ Flanagan, is fleeing a murder scene at 130 miles an hour in a Mustang Shelby cobra GT 65.” LET’S GOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!
The Fix, September 11. Another Liam Neeson joint, because why not? This sounds a lot like “Triple Frontier,” J.C. Chandor’s not-entirely successful ex-military operatives pull a heist movie from 2019 but trading the South American jungle for Afghanistan. The crucial difference is that Neeson is playing a character named Larry and for reasons I can’t quite articulate but utterly feel, nevertheless, Neeson as a Larry tickles my funny bone. He’s definitely less of a Larry and more of a ‘Fang.’
The Runner, September 2. “Phone Booth” for exercise junkies.
Motor City, July 24. The screenplay for this 1970s-set revenge thriller was apparently on Hollywood’s so-called Black List, screenplays liked around town not yet produced, but to me this seems more like one more piece for the Shailene Woodley Was Blacklisted evidence pile.
By Any Means, September 4. Imagine if Mark Wahlberg said, “Get me my own version of ‘Mississippi Burning.’” A movie like that could be the thinking guy’s movie for guys who like movies, or it could be a disaster of epic proportions.
Masterplan, October 16. If Stanley Tucci asked me to help him steal the Mona Lisa, I would probably say yes.
The Whisper Man, August 28. A middling thriller of a widowed crime novelist, his retired police detective dad, and the son of a serial killer with a cast of Robert DeNiro, Adam Scott, Michael Keaton, and Michelle Monaghan is, well, exactly what it sounds like: prestige last weekend of August fare.
Penélope Cruz: not in Bunker.
Bunker TBD. Speaking of prestige middling thrillers, Penélope Cruz starring as a wife who takes umbrage with her husband (played by her real-life spouse Javier Bardem) building a survivalist bunker for a tech billionaire sounds like free agent LeBron James signing with the Charlotte Hornets. I wonder if the bunker will be more lavish than a Pe Emirates luxury first-class private suite?
Above the Below / Above and Below. Upon reading about “Above the Below” (December 4), co-starring and co-directed by Idris Elba, in which three astronauts find themselves stranded at the bottom of the ocean after their space capsule crashes upon re-entry, I went looking for the trailer and found one instead for another 2026 middling thriller called “Above and Below” (July 29) in which two people are trapped beneath the ocean in a shark cage. Did I hallucinate? Are these two movies, in fact, the same and A.I. just caused one to accidentally morph into the other? I was going to make a joke that “Above and Below” might morph between now and then into “As Above, So Below” but that movie was already made in 2014.
The funny thing about confidence game movies is that because they tend to rely on familiar narrative devices and patterns, they effectively become confidence games themselves, persuading the audience to believe what they are seeing no matter how clichéd and obvious. James Foley’s “Confidence” (2003) was not especially good at such persuasion, save for one sequence ripped directly from David Mamet’s superior “House of Games” (1987). As I watched it, I thought, “this is like ‘House of Games,’” and yet, Rachel Weisz still got me to sign on the figurative dotted line. Adam Carter Rehmier’s “Carolina Caroline” is the latest confidence game movie as confidence game itself, though in this case, screenwriter William Thomas Harper IV has melded a confidence game movie with a lovers on the lam movie. If that renders the task doubly difficult, it makes the result all the more remarkable; just like Caroline herself, you might well spot the emotional swindle and then give yourself over to it anyway.
If Faye Dunaway’s Bonnie Parker was a bored waitress in small town Texas than Samara Weaving’s Caroline Daniels is a bored gas station attendant in small town Texas. Her life is altered, however, when Oliver Anderson (Kyle Gallner) walks in and hoodwinks her owner with a shortchange con. Caroline calls him on it, but only because his charismatic chutzpah sweeps her off her feet, and because she sees an opportunity not so much to leave her small town as go find the mother who abandoned her in South Carolina. Before long, she has left her genial dad (Jon Gries) behind for a life on the road in which she learns the confidence game ropes before graduating to bank robberies, wielding a weapon and getting the cash while Oliver drives the getaway car. Rehmeier typically conveys these scenes in montages scored to pop songs and just as Oliver dismisses free will as an illusion, that we are guided by neurons firing in our brains, I confess, when Rehmeier cued up Margo Cilker, or Sarah Shook, or Chris Stapleton, or Emmylou freaking Harris covering Bruce freaking Springsteen, I had to confess that neurons were being fired in my brain over which I had no control.
“Carolina Caroline” does not merely get by on its soundtrack, however, but also Weaver and Gallner’s chemistry, which defies description, a real you have to experience it to understand it sort of situation. It not only carries the movie through the fallow first half, but makes the back half when events take a turn for the worse hurt for real. Yet, at the same time, there is an undercurrent of nihilism that “Carolina Caroline” can’t quite square; if anything, Caroline’s eventual meeting with her mother works as an overly neat excuse for it. Oliver seems to have a nihilistic streak too, though “Carolina Caroline” never peels back the character’s mask enough to let us know. If Caroline can’t help but see him through the haze of romantic projection, that’s how “Carolina Caroline” ultimately chooses to see him too, meaning that with the capping confidence game the character and the movie unite in pulling the wool over their own eyes.
Alex Cox’s fifth feature film “Walker” was beset by a rash of bad reviews, including two thumbs down from Siskel and Ebert with extreme prejudice. Even among the contemporary notices, though, there were occasional positive ones, like Vincent Canby of The New York Times complimenting Cox’s “nerve.” That’s a good way to put it. If hope is a dangerous thing to have in real life, then nerve is a dangerous thing to have in Hollywood, and after “Walker” was written off, so, too, was Cox, effectively blacklisted in La La Land for the rest of his career. He has intimated that it was a blessing in disguise, and I hope that was true, but boy, watching “Walker” for the first time almost 40 years later could not help but make me wonder what he might have been capable of had financial backing been easier to acquire. In telling the true story of one-time Nicaraguan president William Walker, Cox creates a truly hyper-surreal sort of aesthetic by not merely fudging the truth but often outright ignoring it, honoring the mid-19th century setting and not honoring it at all, commenting indirectly and unequivocally on President Reagan’s own Nicaraguan adventures, creating something that feels of its time, not of its time, and out of time, a Monte Hellman acid western reimagined as a historical biopic. Nerve is a good word but there’s another one: awesome. “Walker” is awesome.
“Walker” begins with its eponymous filibuster (Ed Harris), at least according to the 1850s version of the term, failing in his invasion attempt of Mexico, warning his men that they have no chance at an escape short of an act of God. At that, the wind picks up and a dust storm settles, allowing an avenue for escape, the very act of God Walker is hoping for, so funny as to be farcical even as it simultaneously invests in Walker a misplaced belief that God is on his side. In subsequent Sam Peckinpah-like scenes of gruesome violence, Walker walks through the bullets like someone walking between the raindrops, his imperviousness implying such ostensible divine favor. At the same time, Cox cuts that belief down to size in the most acerbic of manners. When Walker lectures his men on how to conduct themselves, he declares that cursing in public is forbidden, to which one of his men wonders in a deadpan line heard off camera, “Can we curse in private?” That’s how a lot of dialogue goes in “Walker”: so unexpectedly funny you take a beat to confirm in your mind what you just heard and then you laugh.
Walker might seek to spread his ideology abroad but his financial backer, Cornelius Vanderbilt (Peter Boyle), has other ideas on his mind. He enlists Walker to invade Nicaragua to open a land route between oceans to spur trade and, of course, line his own coffers. Boyle plays Vanderbilt not as a captain of industry, nor even quite as a robber baron, but something else, like, say, a backwater version of Dom DeLuise as Emperor Nero in “History of the World, Part One,” evinced in what is undoubtedly among cinema’s greatest fart jokes. In another way, Boyle’s portrayal feels almost modern, like a 1980s tycoon has slipped the surly bonds of time, an anachronistic sensation that Cox makes more explicit with amusing little touches like the glimpse of a People Magazine where Walker is billed as Nicaragua’s “Gray-Eyed Man of Destiny” or the saxophone that sounds cut from “Jewel of the Nile” occasionally appearing on the soundtrack. History is not repeating itself, Cox seems to be saying, so much as such ideological urges are simply in our blood, brought home in a climactic speech in which Walker may as well be laying out the United States of America’s foreign policy for the next 200 years.
If Walker has any kind of moral counterweight, it’s his deaf fiancé Ellen Martin (Marlee Matlin), who in keeping with the rest of the movie’s tone is not some patient saint but palpably repulsed by the company her husband to-be keeps. In one hysterical sequence, Walker translates her radical opinions for those who don’t know sign language by softening their tone, nothing less, really, than a literal evocation of the mealy-mouthed kind of centrism. She dies, though, not long after from cholera, leaving Walker with no one to temper his certitude, and as he invades Nicaragua and installs himself as President, it all goes to his head, eventually referring to himself in the third person just as he does in the recurring voiceovers that in Harris’s plainspoken tone juxtaposed against often blackly comic scenes suggest, I swear, Ted Striker’s narration in “Airplane!” Indeed, Ebert might have hated “Walker,” but his old adage about a performer being funniest when they don’t know they are wearing a funny hate proves true here – Harris plays Walker as someone wearing a funny hat who doesn’t realize it. He also plays him with little dimension or nuance, reducing the character to utter zealotry, in himself and his mission so that they are virtually one and the same, a terrifying living embodiment of manifest destiny.
Sam Neill’s name came first on the poster for “Jurassic Park” (1993), but he wasn’t really the star. No, the stars were the dinosaurs, and to a lesser extent, Jeff Goldblum and his off-kilter charisma, and so, even though he was at the center of the biggest blockbuster up ‘til then, Neill was the fulcrum, not the lever, to borrow a phrase of the esteemed Roger Ebert. Everybody remembers the scene where Goldblum’s Dr. Ian Malcolm takes Richard Attenborough’s dino resurrector John Hammond to task for scientific, if not philosophical, recklessness, but in that same scene, when Neill’s Dr. Alan Grant is asked for his thoughts, the actor assumes the air of a true scientist, cautious skeptic, like he’s waiting for Jurassic Park to be peer-reviewed. It was befitting of the Ireland-born, New Zealand-raised actor’s gentlemanly air and his steady career progression from stage to screen to Hollywood. After all, he auditioned for no less a role than James Bond post-Roger Moore and later admitted that he did not really want the part and was happy not to get it and starred in one of the preeminent dudes rock movies of all time, “The Hunt for Red October” (1990), as the most stoical sort of dude of all – the loyal lieutenant. Even in the (more than middling) hall of fame thriller “Dead Calm” (1989), in carrying his non-Nicole Kidman half of the movie almost entirely on his own, Neill gives a delicate internal performance that does not call all that much attention to itself. He always prioritized the movie.
Not that Neill was just one thing. “I like playing villains and bad guys,” he told The Los Angeles Times during the press tour for “Jurassic Park,” “characters with moral ambiguity, because, in a way, they are easier to play.” His breakout role as the aptly named Smith in Roger Donaldson’s “Sleeping Dogs” (1977) was not a villain, per se, but in playing a character dropping out of a society on the brink only to be unwillingly pulled back in, Neill evinced something like ferocious indifference to the whole world around him. He brought great intensity to the lead role in John Carpenter’s “In the Mouth of Madness” (1995) and in his other 1993 movie, Jane Campion’s Best Picture-nominated “The Piano,” he served as a convincing antagonist. He got to play the bad guy in “Event Horizon” (1997), possessed by the eponymous evil spaceship, delivering the money line as God intended, a perversion of “Back to the Future’s” money line, like he was Doc Brown gone bye-bye. That movie was, uh, not nominated for Best Picture, critically reviled, as its mid-August release date suggests, but it made for one of the great movie-going experiences of my life, an employee-only midnight sneak at the multiplex where I worked that summer that felt as much like watching a college football game as a movie. It’s too bad we didn’t have air horns for Neill’s line.
As fun as it was, that wasn’t my favorite movie-going experience involving Neill. No, that one doubled as my favorite movie-going experience during my brief interlude of living in Phoenix. One Friday night, hot and unhappy as I generally was, I went and saw an Australian movie called “The Dish” (2000) based on nothing, really, but the poster and exited a couple hours later beaming from ear to ear. A comedy telling the true story of the Parkes radio telescope in New South Wales that wound up broadcasting the famed images of the Apollo 11 moon landing, Neill starred as the observatory’s chief, Cliff Buxton, giving a performance as warm as the cardigan sweater he is always sporting. It is an ensemble and he both blends in and binds it together, quietly carrying the weight of the death of his character’s wife and never raising his voice, until the one time he does, making it count. It occurs when the stiff-necked NASA man and one of Cliff’s Aussie colleagues butt heads in that way dudes do. “We are in the middle of the greatest feat ever attempted,” Cliff tells his colleague in calling him out. “What are you doing? Standing around bitching.” “The Dish” is a movie of so much goodwill and such little anger, and this lone angry moment, delivered by Neill in such a way to make it clear that he is angry about having to get angry at all, is a breathtaking rebuke not only of his colleague’s lack of goodwill but in a larger way, the cynicism and even nihilism that often feels so pervasive. Twenty-five years on, it still takes my breath away.
Sam Neill died on Monday July 13th, 2026. He was 78.
“Omaha” begins with an unnamed dad (John Magaro) waking his nine-year-old daughter Ella (Molly Belle Wright) and her younger brother Charlie (Wyatt Solis) early one morning, asking them to round up the family dog, gather a few of their favorite things, and set off on a vaguely defined road trip. The title gives away the destination, of course, even if at the same time the title doesn’t explain half of it. This is evocative of director Cole Webley’s withholding approach, conveying information less through obvious exposition than behavior, context clues, and even camera placement. It’s often effective, and generally lets us understand what’s happening, even occasionally what the characters are feeling, though not, necessarily, what the characters feel once this journey comes to a head, an evasion that can’t help but drag otherwise good movie down.
Their beater of a family car frequently requires a push start, a la “Little Miss Sunshine,” though unlike the kind of comical valor of that movie’s recurring bit, the one in “Omaha” is more wearily matter of fact. Money is tight, evoked not just in the mention of food stamps but in Magaro’s air every time his character goes into his wallet; you feel the weight of what each dollar means. That is not to suggest “Omaha” is merely one more exercise in indie miserabilism. Though their road trip is not exactly a vacation, it is made to feel like a vacation, nevertheless. Sing-alongs to songs on the car radio, a visit to McDonald’s Playland, and a stop for gas station ice cream all evoke the kind of specific car-centric getaway that any middle-to-lower class kid might recognize and might recognize as being so much fun in that way of fun being what you make it no matter the financial constraints. The dad might be recently widowed, eliciting a sense of mourning, but the joy of these scenes still evokes a happy family.
Throughout these road trip scenes, Webley also honors Ella and Charlie’s point of view without ever doing that thing that some filmmakers do with preadolescent characters and render them too much like little adults. What’s more, in straight-on shots of Ella in the front seat, Webley quietly communicates how Ella is aware their dad is not telling them everything just as shots of their dad from behind the headrest of his car seat communicate that he is, in fact, concealing something just as “Omaha” is concealing something from us. A movie does not necessarily owe us an explanation; often, deeper emotional power stems from such ambiguity. But the problem is less “Omaha” lacking an explanation, because its denouement suggests that such extreme measures might make one impossible anyway, than it is a refusal to let its characters express themselves about what happens. And in that refusal, Webley betrays the characters he clearly loves and ultimately renders “Omaha” incomplete rather than ambiguous.
“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.
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.
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