One Night Only

Will Gluck’s would-be dystopian romantic comedy “One Night Only” takes place in a fictional version of America on the lone evening each year when outlawed premarital sex is officially legal for 12 hours. This means it comes across like a copycat version of The Purge series in which all crime is made legal for one 24-hour-period a year, as if some Universal executive yearned to get a piece of the Blumhouse horror pie. Travis Braun’s screenplay, however, was already on the so-called black list, promising scripts not yet produced, and plucked from there. I wonder, though, if everyone who read it and deemed it so promising was merely engaging with the overriding premise and not the nuts and bolts. Because romantic comedies are as much about plotting as they are about premise and despite the outrageous concept of “One Night Only,” the only thing outrageous about it is just how banal and prudish it proves to be. It’s as if John Carpenter envisioned the prison of “Escape from New York” as a white-collar, minimum-security resort, to quote “Office Space.” If not for the sequin minidress that Monica Barbaro spends most of the movie wearing, this would be the perfect sex comedy for your church lock-in. 

The central couple of “One Night Only” is aspiring singer Allie (Barbaro) and pizza place owner Owen (Callum Turner). She seeks an emotional connection as much as a 12-hour-fling while he seems to have already emotionally connected with Malika (Maya Hawke) to whom he plans to propose the night of the sex purge only for her to ditch him to try and sew some oats. In the aftermath of this heartbreak, Owen encounters Allie, they get to talking and forge a possible connection only for it go awry when Owen, uh, regurgitates his sushi dinner right in front of her. Relationships based on projectile vomit never work, I think is what Sandra Bullock said in “Speed.” As far as meet cutes go, this one isn’t much, causing as much gross discomfort as romantic tension. That lack of tension is underscored in their similar frames of mind. Even when they encounter other characters with whom they intend to sleep, Allie and Owen are portrayed as romantically chaste, meaning that the attendant plot complication of them scouring the city for a condom has no juice. Their need to fornicate is not dire. It says something that the hottest sequence in the whole movie turns out to be imaginary.

Like so much in “One Night Only,” their quest raises more questions than the movie is willing to answer. When Allie and Owen try to purchase the last remaining piece of protection at a convenience store, they become the victims of price-gouging, and though eventually Allie resorts to pilfering it, this is played for broad comedy rather than satire. The ideas that such price gouging intrinsically suggest, remain unexplored if not avoided altogether throughout. When Owen seems to stumble across a sexual assault on the street, it is revealed as nothing more than a movie being filmed, allowing for a couple brief celebrity cameos, shiny distractions from the complications to which the fake-out inherently alludes. That’s the thing, on some level “One Night Only” is aware of the dark side lingering just out of sight, but actively puts on blinkers, never curious about all the repeal signs in windows just as it is incurious about the looming specter of violence. For the most part, everyone on the streets just looks like the happy extra in a musical, content to play along with this one night only, I guess. When one character says, “I guess the fascists were right,” it’s a dumb joke that might have exposed the “One Night Only’s” point of view except it goes to such lengths to render its two characters as virtuous that I’m not even sure why we needed the fascism in the first place.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Branded to Kill (1967)

The two best movies I have seen so far in 2026 are not new movies but new-to-me movies. The first, 1987’s historical phantasm “Walker,” was so reviled in its time that it got writer/director Alex Cox blacklisted from Hollywood. (Cox, in fact, just released a new Kickstarter-funded movie this year and I really need to catch up with it.) The second, 1967’s surrealist Yakuza crime drama “Branded to Kill,” was so confounding to audiences and bigwigs that writer/director Seijun Suzuki was blacklisted by the Japanese film industry for a decade. What is this, what’s going on here, why are my two favorite films so far this year ones that left their filmmakers ostracized? Is this pure coincidence, or in this destabilizing moment in time, when AI is threatening to reorient the whole idea of art, am I subconsciously seeking genuine, full-throated artists that aren’t just feeding prompts into some app to do all the creative legwork but following their own emotions, instincts, predilections, and tastes right over the waterfall.

As “Branded to Kill” opens, the Japanese underworld’s third-ranked contract killer, Goro Hanada (Joe Shishido), arrives in Tokyo to do a job, greeted by a taxi driver, Kasuga (Hiroshi Minami), who was once a high-ranking hitman but now a shell of himself, bemoaning his old dream of being #1. This is truly hilarious dialogue equating Yakuza assassins with NFL or NBA power rankings, constantly being revised by some keyboard drone after the latest killing. Indeed, there is not much to the character of Hanada beyond his occupation. Through that light, the title assumes an almost deadpan air, as if hitmen are just livestock electrically branded by their employers. All that defines him are the jobs he does and his preeminent sexual fetish of sniffing rice. His own wife, Mami (Mariko Ogawa), who cavorts with the man who has hired Hanada out in the open, deems the two of them beasts, demonstrated in how their relationship is nothing more, really, than an endless series of primal urges, two figurative pigs raised to slaughter.

In its jump cuts and playful attitude toward gangster tropes, “Branded to Kill” suggests a Yakuza movie by way of the French New Wave, and it was one of the latter movement’s most famous figures, Jean-Luc Godard, who noted that all you needed to make a movie was a girl and a gun. As if honoring and elaborating on that sentiment, Suzuki includes a gun and two girls. In addition, to his wife, Hanada becomes smitten with the mysterious, mesmerizing Misako (Annu Mari). She enlists him to perform a superhuman job, one requiring a single shot so precise it is nigh impossible, and when it goes wrong, he is marked for death, told in no uncertain terms that the #1 ranked hitman will now have to take his life. Misako is introduced standing in the rain, and frequently posed in frames between fountains, and so if water emblemizes the unconscious, so does Misako emblemize Hanada’s. Her obsession with death, suggesting a noir version of the suicidal woman in the art gallery in “Play It Again, Sam,” echoes Hanada’s own. During one hallucinatory sequence where he gets drunk and wanders the streets, the hitman seems to be taking the end of life out for virtual spin. 

Yet, if that makes “Branded to Kill” sound like some arduous dark night of the soul, I cannot stress enough how despite such subject matter, it is also an absolute blast to watch on account of Suzuki’s almost euphoric formalist kick. In an interview with The Criterion Channel in 2011, Suzuki indicated his motivations did not really extend much beyond making the most entertaining movie possible and in one mid-movie sequence where Hanada knocks off three men right in a row, he brings that manifesto to life by dreaming up increasingly unorthodox hits. This rapid-fire sequence begins with a rifle emerging from the moving lips of a cigarette billboard and concludes on a getaway via advertising balloon. The last shot is a gas and is extra fascinating to compare against one earlier in the movie when another assassin runs out of a building on fire, demonstrating how Suzuki mixes blood curdling chills with boisterous comedy just as much as he mixes intense close-ups with thoughtful long shots and coats so much of it in a dissonant jazz score, the whole mélange epitomizing the absurdity of life itself. That absurdity is never more paramount than in the droll, winding denouement that finds the #1 ranked hitman animating his observation that killers cannot be human by endlessly tormenting Hanada before they finally come to face to face in a boxing ring in something akin to an existential sports movie ending on a note of irony so grim that it might as well be the most mirthless chuckle you’ve ever heard.

Studio Logos are Part of the Movie Too

Last week, America’s third most prominent idiot son announced that in the wake of Paramount Skydance acquiring Warner Bros. Discovery that the conglomeration will henceforth be known, simply, as Skydance. Even so, American Idiot Son #3 indicated that Paramount and Warner Bros. would still exist as so-called sub-brands, preserving their “distinct identities (and) extraordinary legacies…that have resonated with audiences for generations.” It doesn’t really matter what McDonald’s call its Big Mac, I suppose, so long as it’s good, and if Skydance produces movies under the Paramount and Warner Bros. umbrellas as good as their “extraordinary legacies” imply, that’s what matters. Of course, it’s difficult to picture David Ellison (we will drop the nom de guerre) as some sort of Thalberg-esque steward of creativity, and so more than a Big Mac, I keep imagining Paramount and Warner Bros. becoming the Arch Deluxe. Or maybe Saturn, the sub brand of General Motors that was discontinued in 2010 due to corporate bankruptcy restructuring. David Ellison does not have a face for movies or for radio; he has a face for corporate bankruptcy restructuring.

I know, I know, it’s dumb to romanticize a brand, and there is plenty in the history of Paramount and Warner Bros. to denigrate. I mean, Olivia de Havilland, may she rest in peace, went to war with Warner Bros. in the name of labor while early Hollywood’s anti-competitive practices were regulated courtesy of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Paramount Decree. That is all part of their extraordinary legacies too. But then, Bogey and Bacall are also part of Warner Bros., and when Olivia de Havilland won the right to work with whomever she damn pleased, she went to Paramount and gave, perhaps, the greatest screen performance of all time in “The Heiress.” I don’t want to say things even out, but to borrow the title of a Universal picture, it’s complicated. I have been seeing those studio logos for Paramount and Warner Bros. all my movie-watching life. The moment when a movie studio logo appears, it’s like boarding the plane to fly somewhere new, the moment when you take a second to believe that the movie you are about to watch is going to be a good one. It’s why they will always instill a sense of whimsy in me, and it’s why I have always enjoyed it when movies see them with a sense of whimsy too.

Steven Spielberg famously opened “Raiders of the Lost Ark” by dissolving from Paramount’s artistic rendering of a mountain peak to a real one, a playful touch foreshadowing the entire 1981 action-adventure; no matter how dark it could sometimes get, Spielberg always had a gleam in his eye. “South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut,” which predicted the future, opened with an homage to Spielberg’s magnum opus by dissolving the Paramount logo into the mountain peak of the animated movie’s eponymous Colorado town. And both those movies were hearkening back to the Biblical epic “The Ten Commandments” in which Cecil B. DeMille began not with the Paramount peak but with an image of Mount Sinai before superimposing the Paramount logo over it, which always struck me as something like a concession to any God-fearing folk suspicious of those Hollywood infidels. 

The lamentable 1998 action movie “Hard Rain” turned the clouds surrounding the Paramount mountain peak into dark and stormy ones, complete with thunder and lightning, an effect that did not work quite as well as it sounds. I was always sad that Warner Bros. did not beat them to that punch with “Twister” two years prior. Rather than adhering to the Warner Bros. logo of the mid-90s that featured a blue sky and white cumulous clouds, “Twister” put its logo over a dark, stormy sky, but it should have begun with the blue sky before giving way to the stormy one, just like a May afternoon in Tornado Alley.

“Casablanca” did a nifty cross fade from the familiar Warner Bros. shield logo to a map of Africa while “You’ve Got Mail” fittingly transformed the Warner Bros. logo into a computer desktop icon. No movie, though, ever dressed the Warner Bros. logo up better than “Adventures of Robin Hood” which added a resplendent flourish to its original design, making it look like something you might see unfurled on a banner at Nottingham Castle.

Of course, studio logo tomfoolery was not limited to just Paramount and Warner Bros. “Waterworld” utilized the spinning globe of the Universal logo to simultaneously introduce its foremost plot point of melting polar ice caps. According to Ian Failes at Befores & Afters, this was no simple undertaking, and it was evocative of a movie that was much weirder (in a good way, some of the time) than its stink bomb reputation would suggest.

“Mo’ Better Blues” was released the year of Universal’s 75th anniversary, and for its 75th anniversary, Universal ran through all the logos of its past, making for a slightly longer introduction than usual. And so, in his musical-drama, Spike Lee deployed none other than Flavor Flav of Public Enemy to interrupt the Universal logo run-through to tell Spike to get the movie started. I mean, leave it to Spike to throw a little comical shade at his own financier. Lee was my introduction to the idea that directors are the true authors of their movies and that’s why I have always adored this touch: he is telling you that, yes, “Mo’ Better Blues” is a Universal Picture, but it is a Spike Lee film.

There have been various alterations to MGM’s Leo the Lion throughout the years, none better than 1983’s comedy “Strange Brew.” Hinting at the libation-centric comedy to come, this lion does not roar but belch, as if he’s had one too many, at which point the fourth wall is broken and we realize the movie’s own characters are trying to get the lion to roar. I always appreciated the meta nature of this joke, transforming the studio logo not into some static thing but a living, breathing part of the movie itself. 

“Ghostbusters” and “Ronin” both did something a little similar 14 years apart, just with music. The former put the first spooky notes of Elmer Bernstein’s score over Columbia Pictures’ torch lady, giving her the feel of an eerie apparition, while the latter placed the initial notes of Elia Cmiral’s score over the falling stars motif of United Artists logo. Both were letting you know that the movie was beginning – already. 

What makes Alfred Newman’s 20th Century Fox Fanfare (which is still called that, as far as I know, despite 20th Century Fox now being called 20th Century Studios) so great is that it innately communicates to the audience that the movie is now beginning, as it did with such classics as “Star Wars” and “All About Eve.” Indeed, in his typically theatrical way, Baz Luhrmann brought that to life in “Moulin Rouge!” by using computer graphics to have a curtain literally open on the 20th Century Fox logo while an orchestra in the foreground performs the fanfare. 

Yet, my favorite 20th Century Fox studio logo appearance, appropriately from my favorite movie “Last of the Mohicans,” is one when the fanfare is not heard at all. No, rather than Newman’s famous theme, we hear the rumbling percussion of Trevor Jones and Randy Edelman’s score, immediately evoking a movie of such primal urgency that there is not even a second to waste on a fanfare. And more than that, the percussion in tandem with the familiar 20th Century Fox searchlights manifests the way I have always felt about those studio logos in the first place: they represent the portal to the other side.  

The Weight

1953’s “The Wages of Fear” beget 1977’s “Sorcerer,” both adapted from Georges Arnaud’s 1950 novel in which hardscrabble men are paid to transport nitroglycerin canisters by truck through the perilous South American jungle. And though Padraic McKinley’s 2026 directorial debut “The Weight” is culled from original screenplay by Matthew Booi and Shelby Gaines, it owes a significant debt to those two movies, nevertheless, updating it for the present even though it takes place in the past. Set in 1933, “The Weight” involves several men hauling gold by backpack through the Oregon wilderness. That’s the first nifty twist on the original conceit: they are going on foot rather than by truck. (As David Bowie once noted, duplicate, then elaborate.) The second twist is that the crew is comprised of convicts hauling the gold to earn their freedom rather than money. Moreover, the man ostensibly in charge, Samuel Murphy (Ethan Hawke), also seeks freedom to reunite with his daughter, an appropriate detail. Because if Ethan Hawke was ever going to make a movie about a parent-child reunion, it was going to be served with a side of existentialism.

Widowed and raising the seven-year-old Penny (Avy Berry) during The Great Depression, Murphy is introduced as struggling to make ends meet, winding up evicted and then incarcerated when he confronts an undercover police office he thinks harbors bad intentions. With his daughter in state custody, Murphy ends up at a labor camp run by Clancy (Russell Crowe), fingering this prisoner as a man of strong aptitude and intelligence and enlisting him to enlist a small team to transport all the gold from a mine about to be claimed by the government on the condition of early release. That’s a lot of set up, and at several minutes under two hours, “The Weight” does an impressively economical job of doling out information while also establishing character in single scenes. When Clancy invites Murphy into his place to make his pitch, the way Hawke has his character take a beat as he does so, like he’s trying to get his bearings at being inside a real home, communicates so much. Hawke and Crowe develop such an enjoyable rapport as two equally wary men, in fact, that even if you understand why the narrative prevents the latter from appearing more, you still wish that he would.

In addition to the pair of armed men safeguarding Clancy’s interests, Murphy handpicks three fellow prisoners, Singh (Avi Nash), Olson (Lucas Lynggaard Tønnesen), Rankin (Austin Amelio), as his gold-hauling crew. Not long into their trek, they are joined at her insistence by the indigenous Anna (Julia Jones). Her inclusion is less a narrative stretch, frankly, than Rankin’s, the latter deliberately introduced as untrustworthy and beggaring belief that the otherwise thorough Murphy would call on him. (Amelio’s performance is still spot-on.) Indentured to servitude, Anna is nothing less than a prisoner too, seeing this crew passing by as her only chance at escape. And through nothing more than a single introductory close-up in which we see her sizing up these men as they pass her by, “The Weight” conveys her intelligence as no less formidable than Murphy’s. In one suspenseful sequence, she saves his life, a neat blending of presence of mind with romantic spark.

As he reproved with his Oscar nomination for last year’s “Blue Moon,” Hawke has a gift for talkative roles, though in “The Weight,” he demonstrates an identical knack for non-verbal communication. Even without the fancy shot reflecting a crackling campfire in Murphy’s eyes, Hawke figuratively conjures that fiery-eyed nature throughout in a determined gaze imbuing his character’s constant deliberation. Hawke also lets in just enough vulnerability to render the character believable. The tautest sequence involves transporting all the gold bars across a rickety wooden bridge by way of the most dangerous game of catch of all time, necessitating Murphy receiving one gold brick at a time in the middle of the overpass and then hurling it himself to the other side. With each reception and throw, Hawke evinces a palpable physical exhaustion that only amplifies the suspense.

The title of McKinley’s movie, of course, is not just literal but also figurative. Not just in the emotional weight that Murphy carries from wanting to reunite with his daughter but in how these men can only be set free in this capitalist society by doing capitalism’s bidding. The government’s very meddling that this quest seeks to avoid might intend to temper that sense of greed, and Singh is revealed as a socialist in a mid-movie monologue outlining the alternative, but the concluding twist also can’t quite square the circle between those opposing ideologies. Not that it necessarily needs to. “The Weight” still succeeds as something like a spiritually freeing heist movie, and besides, the penultimate scene in which a few characters do nothing but share a single cigarette by passing it around suggests its own kind of collectivist victory.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Take Aim at the Police Van (1960)

Seijun Suzuki’s monochrome “Take Aim at the Police Van” belongs to a post-war Japanese genre of film known as borderless action, blurring geographical lines by simultaneously blurring genre lines, utilizing an American-like spirit to appeal to American audiences, which feels eerily appropriate given America’s postwar occupation. Of course, if America was seeking to instill its values in the newly democratic country, what does a movie like Seijun Suzuki’s dynamite noir-thriller hybrid say about them? In fact, let’s amend that description to noir-thriller-comedy. The opening images seen through the scope of a sniper rifle on a dark mountain road show four signs in rapid succession – “MANY ACCIDENTS,” “HAVE OCCURRED,” “IN THIS AREA,” “CAUTION” – that is so emphatic it compels your laughter. It’s not so funny, though, when that same sniper rifle takes aim at, what else, a police van, assassinating two prisoners inside, an ambush that ends with the prison guard in charge, Tamon (Michitarô Mizushima), put on six-month leave. And though for one brief scene at home, he entertains the idea of a six-month vacation, he just as quickly decides to investigate the incident himself. Almost as soon as he does, he is pulled into his police precinct and kindly told by his boss to leave the investigating to them. Tamon agrees and leaves with a smile on his face. The second he closes his boss’s door, though, the tone immediately changes, his smile vanishes, and in voiceover, we hear him ponder his next lead. The tonal shift is so severe that, I swear, if you altered the soundtrack just a little, it could work as a scene in “Police Squad!” It’s a thin, thin line in “Take Aim at the Police Van” between black comedy and a black pit of despair.

Jean-Luc Godard was utilizing the jump cut in new and exciting ways that very same year in the trailblazing “Breathless,” and while “Take Aim at the Police Van” might not be quite so avant-garde in its own editing, it is impressively furious, nonetheless, constantly pushing the narrative forward by not lingering on the ends of scenes. It createss a rhythm that echoes Tamon’s dogged determination as much as the swift 79-minute run time. His character might be modeled on Sam Spade, but Tamon also effuses much less cynicism, viewing his prisoners as human and worthy of redemption. Yet, it is the surviving prisoner of the van attack, Goro (Shoichi Ozawa), who kickstarts Tamon’s off the clock sleuthing, bringing his hopeful worldview into tension with the sordid, cynical one he encounters that is defined by a human trafficking ring tying back to an enigmatic crime lord known only as Akiba. The so-called agency funneling girls to this ring is run by Yuko (Misako Watanabe), proving more formidable than she might first appear, conveyed in a conversation with another lowlife character where Suzuki’s masterful blocking of the actors demonstrates the ever-shifting upper hand in the power dynamics. Yet, even as Yuko proves formidable, she proves more vulnerable too, demonstrated in the revelation of Akiba that blurs love and hate to such a degree that you can’t even tell them apart.

Best TV Shows of the 21st Century

We are a movie blog, of course, first and generally foremost, and half-performatively, half-seriously contend that television is an inferior artform. Yet, at the same time, we must admit that because of TV’s semi-takeover of the culture and Hollywood’s emphasis on youth-focused formula, the small screen has become the only place you can find a postmodern version of a Douglas Sirk movie melodrama that takes place entirely on the other side of the looking glass. Which brings me to The New York Times recently naming the best television shows of the 21st century and then inviting readers to submit their own ballots. 

My ballot did not take long. See below.

Alright, back to regular programming on Friday.

Hope

Na Hong-jin’s two-hour-and forty minute sci-fi action-thriller “Hope” begins not with a slow build but a cold plunge, as if “Jaws” immediately dropped us aboard the Orca with the hunt for the great white shark already in progress. One minute, we’re standing with Hope Harbor police chief Ko Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min) on a rural road investigating the perplexing, grisly death of a cow and the next he’s tracking some unseen monster on foot through the rubble of his South Korean village with a shotgun. The dexterous camera yokes us to his point-of-view, making it feel as if we are along for this terrifying ride as much as he is along for the ride when he winds up in the car driven by rookie cop Im Sung-ae (Jung Ho-yeon) with the gas all the way to the floor. That we don’t get a sense of Hope Harbor before its destruction is not an unintentional oversight preventing emotional connection but a deliberate choice emphasizing the confounding immediacy. The scene is set via context clues, signs warning of enemy infiltrations, oblique references to fencing, and ordinary citizens armed to the teeth. This is the Korean Demilitarized Zone, in other words, and yet, the emergent enemy is not from the North but outer space, a revelation shrewdly teased out over the course of this hour-long opening chase. And when the payoff finally comes, “Hope,” it turns out, is just getting started.

Yet, in widening its scope to reveal far more rampaging aliens than just the one, and all not alike in form, it gradually becomes clear that Na’s pacing works better throttled up than throttled down. He not only introduces more E.T.s, but also more humans, like an old man getting stitched up in the hospital with a story to tell and hunting party in the forest who find themselves as prey, none of whom are conveyed with any real dimension. Even a bout of friendly fire that seems readymade to reveal character from the extreme circumstances ultimately comes to nothing. Maybe this could have been glossed over had “Hope’s” action stayed in the stratosphere, but in ramping back up, it becomes oddly repetitive, consequently monotonous, and so reliant on machine gun fire that by the end it had literally given me a headache. One endless sequence on a highway becomes emblematic of a movie that does not seem to know how to call it quits. What’s more, the striking tactility of so much of the first hour is undercut by much of the creature design that feels disjointedly inserted from a video game. It’s not just the old rule of thumb that the less you see of the monster(s), the better, but that one character’s evocative description of them being a mush of peas and beans proves too much to live up to.

The imagery is all the more disappointing given Na’s willingness to see the aliens as more than unthinking predators. He demonstrates this via narrative revelations of his screenplay, but even more than that, through a pair of captivating lengthy close-ups of deceased outsiders. These seem primed for classic horror movie jump scares, holding and holding the shots until...nothing happens. Like Chief Ko finding himself unexpectedly moved by looking long and hard at the creature he’s chasing when he’s supposed to be taking aim with his rifle, Na lingers over these alien faces to instill compassion. But even if he does, he continually undermines it, giving his his characters, including Chief Ko, so many familiar action movie one-liners that he seems to suggest these aliens really are just brainless beasts to be dispatched. The sequence in which Chief Ko enlists a doctor to perform an alien autopsy yields ferocious blood-splattered comedy, though the movie itself does not seem to know what we’re supposed to be laughing about.

The monotony of the overstretched conclusion, meanwhile, is ironic because “Hope” leaves us not just with myriad loose ends and unresolved feelings but literally drops a whole other gigantic question right out of the sky. When this question arrives, it will leave you feeling like the characters on screen, literally unsure what you are seeing in more ways than one. This lack of resolution, though, leaving the human characters spiritually stranded, running along a road toward figurative points unknown, conjures the sensation of ontological response that we are generally told would go hand-in-hand with the discovery of not being alone in the universe while simultaneously imparting the unmistakable sense that they are not really the protagonists in this story. In that way, the whole two-and-a-half hours plus might have paradoxically locked into place without locking anything into place at all. Except that afterwards, I discovered “Hope” was merely set-up for a sequel, a post-movie revelation as the most predictable revelation possible, leaving me not only disappointed but retroactively insulted, unmasking a movie without even the courage of its seeming enigmatic conviction. 

Friday's Old Fashioned: Linda Linda Linda (2005)

When a teenage Japanese rock band calling itself Paranmaum loses both its singer and guitarist with three days before the Shiba High Holly Festival at which they are set to perform, the remaining trio presses on by having the keyboardist switch to guitar and recruiting the Korean exchange student as their new vocalist. It sounds readymade for crisis and complication and yet what’s notable about the 2005 comedy drama “Linda Linda Linda” (the title is the name of a song by Japanese punk rock band The Blue Hearts) is how it mostly eschews traditional drama. Once the band is in place, director Nobuhiro Yamashita emphasizes the sweet camaraderie that emerges in late night practice sessions while his preferred visual approach of long takes and static frames epitomize how so much of teenage life takes places in the in-between spaces where nothing and everything happens. (Yamashita also likes to include all four bandmates in those static frames to underline their emergent group dynamic.) Their school principal seems ripe for antagonism, but secretly, he’s their biggest fan, charting their progress from afar with a wistful countenance, as if he’s daydreaming about his own lost rock and roll dreams. When a rainstorm briefly delays the band getting to the big gig, it feels like a deadpan nod to such manufactured machinations and can’t slow them down. And though rock and roll movies often turn climactic performances into catharsis, by deploying a narrative that does not culminate in anything momentous, exactly, Paranmaum’s climactic performance is given a spectacular immediacy that would do their punk rock forebears proud.

Late Fame

Set in present-day New York, the resurgent celebrity of director Kent Jones’s “Late Fame” is Ed Saxberger (Willem Dafoe), a one-time poet of the city’s downtown bohemian art scene. Based on a posthumously published novella written in 1895 by Arthur Schnitzler (Samy Burch adapted it), “Late Fame” begins with Saxberger’s lone published collection of poetry, Way Past Gone, having been discovered by recent NYU grad Meyers (Edmund Donovan) who loosely runs a small artistic circle. That Saxberger is less a celebrity, really, than a cult favorite, and that he is reclaimed by this miniscule clique rather than, say, a poetry foundation, or a New York Times culture writer, evokes “Late Fame’s” more modest aims and quiet revelations, both of which help to temper some of its broader elements, as does Dafoe’s affecting, understated performance.

Saxberger has been working at the post office for decades with his poetry-writing past so far behind him that his dive bar buddies are unaware of it. Yet, for one brief moment, we also glimpse Saxberger with a plastic bag that appears to contain a couple books, not only suggesting that he has maintained his interest in the art world but subtly rebutting the frequent movie cliché that a blue-collar lifestyle and intellectual pursuits do not go hand in hand. He is carrying that bag, in fact, when he is approached by Meyers, who lavishes him with praise. Meyers talks about how much the poems relate to the present moment, an idea that is never expounded upon any further, tinging it with the scent not so much of someone blowing smoke but the way a young person who doesn’t yet know any better tends to talk in too many superlatives. As he prattles on, Jones gives Dafoe a big, juicy close-up, his lips transforming into a smile at once flabbergasted and flattered, instantly communicating that no matter how much he begs off, he will become ingratiated with Meyers and his group.

That group dubs itself The Enthusiasm Society, an alternative to the cynicism and snark that rules the modern age, even if occasionally in their Whit Stillman-like affectations a little snark still shines through, especially when addressing the social media influencer gang that hangs out in the same place on the other side of the same room. They welcome Saxberger into their group as some odd mixture of mentor and mascot, urging him to write a new poem for a reading they plan to stage. Given not just these plot points but The Enthusiasm Society’s retro attire, like it’s a “Midnight in Paris” costume party, “Late Fame” tiptoes right up to the line of caricature. Yet, if they become semi-unwitting caricatures in the context of the movie’s world, they never quite become caricatures in terms of the movie itself. You find it hard to take them seriously, but you believe that they take themselves seriously, rich kids cosplaying as struggling artists. 

Their performative nature is echoed in Gloria (Greta Lee), the lone female member of their expectedly male-heavy group. Saxberger does not meet her initially, a shrewd narrative decision to enhance her intentionally created air of mystery, and from the moment she first sweeps into the room in her cabaret star-like costuming and larger-than-life manner, it is obvious to us and to him that she is performing. It’s a charismatic performance, both Gloria’s and Lee’s, and though Saxberger is partially content to let himself get caught up in it, he also delicately presses her for the truth. That truth is not hard to foresee and speaks to the screenplay’s occasional tendency toward pat predictability. Yet, just as often, the script transcends it, appearing to plant familiar seeds that don’t quite pay off in ways you expect, or even more refreshingly, such as in the case of Saxberger being on the wagon, don’t pay off at all.

The Enthusiasm Society does expectedly combust, but this is portrayed less as a nominal surprise than a reflection of how such movements are always destined to burn as briefly as they might brightly. Indeed, the one fragment we hear in an internal monologue of Saxberger’s never-finished new poem merely evokes how the season of Saxberger’s poetry has long since passed. The poem he reads at the climactic event turns out to be an old one, and that poem turns out to be an act of remembering, providing the sequence two layers of reflection. And the way Dafoe infuses his character’s reading with a sense of peace rather than disappointment or even wistfulness brings “Late Fame” home. It’s as if he is flipping through an old photo album and when he’s done, he shuts it and puts it back on the shelf, happy to have the memories, content in knowing that’s all they are. And the final scene goes to show that in a movie made of so many words, or attempted words, that sometimes, no words need to be spoken at all.

The Show Went On

It has been 25 years and 10 days since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and so that means it has been 25 years since America: A Tribute to Heroes. That was the hybrid telethon-benefit concert broadcast live on all four major television networks, and all cable channels too, organized by George Clooney and produced by Joel Gallen in which various celebrities phone banked and esteemed musicians performed to help raise money for the United Way’s September 11th Fund. The show opened with Bruce Springsteen offering “a prayer for our fallen brothers and sisters” by repurposing his unreleased song about his adopted hometown of Asbury Park, “My City of Ruins,” as one about New York City and Washington. (Watch here.) It’s a singularly powerful performance, one that meets a moment no one wishes they would ever need to meet. As a noted Springsteen admirer, you might think I would have been on my couch and in front of the TV for America: Tribute to Heroes, but I wasn’t. No, I was at the Val Air Ballroom in West Des Moines, Iowa seeing Lucinda Williams live for the first time.

You know the cliché when it comes to music: “I like everything except for country.” And for the first 20 or so years of my life, I was under the impression that I liked everything except for country too. I worked at a pizza place in high school, and the owners loved country most of all, and so most of the time, the little radio propped above the pizza prep table was tuned to 92.5 KJJY: Iowa’s Country Station. This meant enduring lots of Alan Jackson, Brooks & Dunn, Tim McGraw, and Faith Hill. Enduring might not be the right word. There are plenty of people, snot-nosed critics included, who would go to bat for those artists, and fair enough, it’s just, they never did much for me. How many times can one sullen teen who prefers Public Enemy listen to “Gone Country?” The one song that I remember hearing on KJJY and liking was Mary Chapin Carpenter’s “Passionate Kisses.” It was only some years later that I learned this song was, in fact, written and originally recorded by Lucinda Williams.

If I can credibly claim that any two albums changed my life in so much as they fundamentally reoriented my taste in and understanding of music, they are “Fever” by Kylie Minogue and “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road” by Lucinda Williams. Grunge was the genre always said to speak for my generation, but it never really spoke for me, not like Kylie did and has continued to with her unique blend of authenticity and joy. And I innately and spiritually connected with Lucinda’s synthesis of blues, country, and rock ‘n’ roll in a way I never did with grunge’s sludgy guitar, or all the soft-as-The-Andrews-Sisters pop-punk that followed it. I had already been drifting toward country through deeper inspections of The Rolling Stones, but “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road” was the light and the demarcation line. Lucinda not only opened my eyes to country but made me realize that music was alive, that on some level it was all love and theft, to borrow the phrase of Bob Dylan, and that genre was flexible. For me, all music is Before Car Wheels and After Car Wheels. 

Nobody would confuse suburban Des Moines with rural Louisiana, or Mississippi, or Texas, or Arkansas, places where Williams cut her teeth and set her songs, but when you stepped inside the Val Air Ballroom back at the turn of the century, you felt transported to some honkytonk down south. Lucinda certainly made it appear that way when she and her band, including Iowa native and guitar hero Bo Ramsey, strolled on stage that Friday night on September 21, 2001, most of them sporting cowboy boots and shit-kicker hats. She leaned into the microphone and in her immaculate southern drawl said one word: “Hey.” Then they tore into “Metal Firecracker,” the greatest break-up song ever recorded, and proceeded to play, I don’t know, four, five, maybe six songs in a row before she said another word, foreshadowing the theme of the night: we’re here to play.

It’s not that Lucinda did not speak. She did, briefly commenting on how much the Val Air resembled an old honkytonk, in fact, and as a prelude to her bluesy onslaught “Joy,” she excoriated the 43rd President. And though Iowa was still a purple state in those days, this was the patriotically correct post-9/11 era, remember, where a single discouraging word could bring you up on charges of treason in the court of public opinion, and so her boldness stayed with me. Mostly, though, she just played. She and her band played so long that they reached a point where they had obviously exhausted their planned setlist and at the end of a song, they would stand there on stage for a minute and discuss what to play next and then play it. During this improvised portion of the show, they played “I Envy the Wind” off the record she had just released that June, and midway through it, a woman standing near me ran off in tears, hiding her face. Maybe the song made her cry, maybe the world did, or maybe it was both. It was 10 days after 9/11, everybody was a wreck, and nobody would have minded if the show just kept going forever.

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Rose Bowl Story (1952)

There’s a line in “The Rose Bowl Story” (1952) about how the only thing that matters in Pasadena, California is keeping the Tournament of Roses committee happy. It suggests the fabled Rose Parade and those who oversee it as akin to a nefarious cabal running the whole southern California city. Alas, nothing so diabolical is allowed to infiltrate this wholesome, humdrum motion picture. Why at one point the Rose Queen, Denny Burke (Vera Miles), lectures the star player of an unnamed Midwestern college team, Steve Davis (Marshall Thompson), that he is not paying proper homage to the so-called Grandaddy of the Bowl Games. Perhaps not, but I also wonder why if the Rose Bowl was so significant, William Beaudine’s movie was made under the umbrella of a low-budget studio like Monogram Pictures rather than, say, MGM, or 20th Century Fox. The camera panning the interior of the mighty stadium nestled in the Arroyo Secco at night that ends with an obvious cut to disguise that its two actors sitting in the bleachers are not really in the Rose Bowl at all made me wonder if Beaudine broke in overnight to steal the shot.

Though the scene-setting narration of “The Rose Bowl Story,” with accompanying aerial images of Pasadena, hint at a movie about the Rose Bowl itself, that’s not really the case. It proves more of a melodrama-romantic comedy hybrid with Coach Hadley’s (Richard Rober) wife in the hospital, and Steve not only falling in love with Denny once his team arrives in California but struggling to learn the right reasons for playing – that is, for love of the game rather than money and future business prospects. It’s a storyline that current shadow college football commissioner Nick Saban and his junior senator from Texas consigliere could love. The plotting, editing, and blocking, however, evince next to no snap, crackle, or pop. Even at a mere hour and thirteen minutes, “The Rose Bowl Story” is one of those movies that moves like it’s stuck in mud. The only time it perks up are the scenes in Denny’s home. Yes, her father Iron Mike Burke (Jim Backus), predating the other Iron Mike, a one-time football player himself, is just a broad, if not occasionally insulting, caricature, but the scene where he re-enacts an old football play with a decorative artifact is more exciting than the climactic Rose Bowl game itself. What’s more, Denny’s phone-hogging younger sister Sally is played by a young Natalie Wood who, bless her heart, brings energy where there generally is none. And though it’s not enough to redeem this stinker, in so much as it has one, Wood is “The Rose Bowl Story’s” MVP.  

A Post That Goes Without Blogging

I have been listening to the new record by Wild Pink and enjoying it given that its modern spin on heartland rock evokes an updated version of the kind of 90s alternative country album I would have loved. Indeed, the opening cut “Box Store” contains a rather conspicuous lyric for a person of a certain age:

There’s a box store in a strip mall
Where I got my TV
I watch old movies from the late 90s
When casting directors loved William Fichtner

Now, I’m not sure I agree one hundred percent with Wild Pink’s ensuing analysis of Fichtner’s acting style, declaring him “measured and calmer / Than the other big dogs / Like Clooney and Wahlberg.” I mean, has Wild Pink seen “Albino Alligator” (pictured above)? But I also like the embedded notion in these lyrics that even a person who shops at a big box store gets to be a critic. Either way, when I heard those lines, I may as well have been an old Bluetick Coonhound picking up a scent. What actor, I immediately wondered, would I have cited in such a song? For about half-a-second, I imagined an epic blog post in which I would work my way through all manner of late 90s acting stalwarts to reach a conclusion. It was about half-a-second because as soon as I envisioned this epic blog post, I realized I already knew my answer. Here, then, is the revised line in my make-believe cover version of “Box Store.” 

There’s a box store in a strip mall
Where I got my TV
I watch old movies from the late 90s
When casting directors loved Hope Davis. 

That was easy. Now, if we can just get some more casting directors with late 90s taste, please. 

Erupcja

In “The Moment,” Charli XCX channeled Larry David for the TikTok generation. In the Polish American “Erupcja,” on the other hand, in her capacity as both co-star and co-writer, Charli XCX is reimagining “Serendipity.” Kate Beckinsale’s character in that 2001 romantic comedy believed that fate sent her signs and that how she read those signs determined her happiness. In director Pete Ohs’s “Erupcja,” every time Bethany (XCX) and her childhood Polish friend Nel (Lena Góra) reconvene after years apart, a volcano erupts, which they read as fate sending them a sign of their being soulmates. And if you can’t stop a volcano from erupting, only seek to contain the fallout, when Bethany and Nel reconvene in Warsaw at the same time Bethany’s boyfriend Rob (Will Madden) plans to propose, there might well be another chemical discharge but also emotional fallout to which they remain oblivious. That turns “Erupcja” into something not quite profound, perhaps, but with deeper knowledge than this genre typically allows, a diaphanous 71-minutes drama that manages to knock you over with a feather.

Every time Rob mentions Warsaw, he says, “Warsaw, Poland,” just like that, both city and country, as if he’s willing himself to be there, perhaps, but also determined to embrace it since it means so much to Bethany. It’s evocative of his unwitting sweet nature, even if that sweet nature proves no match for what his girlfriend feels with Nel. “The earth doesn’t shake,” Bethany explains of her relationship with Rob. “Volcanos don’t erupt.” These are sensations that Ohs brings to life on the soundtrack through rattling glasses and tableware, even luggage on the cobblestone streets, making it seem as if distant volcanic tremors are sending a warning on a frequency that not everyone can hear. Indeed, at breakfast, Rob gets a notification on his phone of a cancelled flight home: Italy’s Mount Etna has erupted. That’s the sign: Bethany essentially ghosts her would-be fiancé just as Nel inadvertently ghosts her ex-girlfriend Ula (Agata Trzebuchowska) just back in town. It’s not so much that the rest of the world can wait as it ceases to exist.

Among the most intriguing elements of “Erupcja” is that Bethany and Nel’s relationship is presented as platonic yet conveyed with the same sort of headlong rush typically associated with a physical relationship, suggesting that romantic soulmates exist in all manner of shapes and sizes. Ohs brings that connection to life less through traditional scenes with beginnings, middles, and ends than through aesthetic jolts of montage and music – eruptions, if you will. Such an approach is unsuitable to filling out backstory and so Ohs leaves the exposition to novel-like narration by Jacek Zubiel that in his wry tone suggests a kind of cheeky cultural anthropologist. Nel works at a flower shop, and through this narration we learn that she and Bethany met when the latter was buying flowers for herself, an action that can appear as self-care through one lens and narcissism through another.

Indeed, if there is self-evident selfishness to Bethany and Nel’s way of life, that is not glossed over but made clear. Nel’s American expat artist friend (Jeremy O. Harris) goes so far as to point out that, like, you know, “Volcanos kill people.” To Bethany and Nel, though, this concrete fact seems to go in one ear and out the other, making me think of the recent SNL sketch where in playing one real-life media influencer feuding with another real-life media influencer, Chloe Fineman described her character’s dispute as “worse than 9/11.” Another movie might also have written off Rob as collateral damage, but the denouement of “Erupcja” cedes the stage to him, imbuing a genuine sense of his confusion and dismay, as if Bridget Monyahan’s character had been given a say in “Serendipity.” And as the narrative gets handed off to him, Bethany recedes from view, her quasi-resolution mentioned in passing by the narrator as an afterthought. Before that happens, though, she delivers a monologue straight to the camera by reciting Lord Byron’s poem Darkness, which comes across like the most XCX touch of all. This poetry recitation is what passes for an explanation, like a celebrity apologizing via Instagram without apologizing for anything in particular.

12th Annual Not-at-TIFF Film Festival

The only thing that stayed with me from the otherwise unnecessary “Anchorman” sequel was Marion Cotillard and Jim Carrey as “the incredibly polite Canadian news team” concluding each sentence with a preemptive sorry. There was just something about those almost aggressive anticipatory apologies that tickled my funny bone. It’s one of the classic Canada jokes, right, a civility that a certain sort of American who will cut in line ahead of you at the supermarket and say that’s what freedom is would mock. And yet, considering that we, the United States of America, willingly gave the car keys back to a President with pudding where his brain should be and that now he has incited a trade war with our kindly neighbors to north in the manner of an imperious monarch who got indigestion from some pure Canadian maple syrup and decided to MAKE THEM PAY, I think it’s time we start being the ones to apologize upfront. Going forward, when talking to a Canadian, any and all Americans should be required to issue a preemptive “Sorry” of our own and Canadians should never have to say “Sorry” to us again until they have determined our national apology sufficient. On that note, here is the lineup for this year’s Not-at-TIFF, our annual alternative to the Toronto International Film Festival kicking off today in, well, obviously. Sorry.

All screenings theoretical.

12th Annual Not-at-TIFF Film Festival 

Tu dors, Nicole. Even by the standards of my least favorite season, this summer has been wretched, and there are few movies that capture the somnambulant, nigh unbearable suspended animation of summer with as much style and dry wit as Stephane Lafleur’s 2014 French-Canadian comedy-drama.

Straight Talk. I have seen “9 to 5,” and I have seen “Steel Magnolias,” and I have even seen “A Smoky Mountain Christmas,” but I have never seen the late Dolly Parton’s 1992 romantic comedy in which she plays a small-town Arkansan who comes to the big city of Chicago and through some sort of humorous mix-up finds herself on a radio show dispensing advice and wisdom to so many callers. The reviews seem to have been mixed, but what do snooty critics like me know about anything? Dolly Parton as an uncredentialed radio psychologist sounds like the greatest movie ever made! 

Twice as Nice. Women’s professional basketball in the United States has not merely had to fight for relevancy but its very existence since the beginning, as Jessie Maple’s 1989 drama demonstrates. It’s not just that “Twice as Nice” starred real-life twin USC basketball stars Pamela and Paula McGee as fictional twins battling to be the #1 draft pick in a fictional women’s basketball league almost a decade before the WNBA was inaugurated, but that the movie itself was nearly lost forever until a 2015 grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation ensured the literal film would be saved. Now, the WNBA has grown so much that specious forces have gone from outright ignoring it to co-opting it, exploiting the league to help foment a new version of the welfare queen and sucking all the joy from the Caitlin Clark Experience by using her as a cudgel in their never-ending culture wars. There was Russell and Wilt, and then Bird and Magic, but Clark’s foremost rival is shaping up to be The Discourse. If she can beat the formless, shapeshifting, malevolent Discourse, she really will be the GOAT.

Adaptation. I have no quarrel with Emily Wilson going scorched earth on Christopher Nolan’s “Odyssey.” As the French are fond of saying, if you pay for your seat to the show, you reserve the right to criticize it. (Then again, Wilson appears to have attended a press screening.) The whole kerfuffle that erupted, however, interested me less than the bigger question of whether an adaptation should pay fealty to the work it is adapting, or whether the only limitation should be a filmmaker’s imagination. And no movie has better captured the toil and tricky nature of modifying one artform for another quite like Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman’s 2002 screen adaptation of Susan Orlean’s “The Orchid Thief” that in its meta knottiness lives the adapting ideal as breaking free of the original pan and doing your own thing. 

The Swimmer. Speaking of The Odyssey, here is a perfect movie for our moment, the 1968 Frank Perry-directed adaptation of a John Cheever book combining an Odysseus-like quest via suburban swimming pools by a narcissistic, hollowed-out has-been still toiling under the impression that he’s the bees-knees without realizing that emotionally, intellectually, and mentally he’s underwater. You sometimes see people speculate that Burt Lancaster’s WASP version of Odysseus is dead but that’s just because “The Sixth Sense” ruined message boards for the rest of time. He is alive and everyone in his orbit is forced to suffer his delusions of grandeur along with him. 

The French Revolution. It was only after Sam Neill died, I am ashamed to say, that I learned he had starred as America’s greatest friend in liberty, my dawg, the Marquis de Lafayette, in a 1989 two-part international television historical drama, “La Révolution Française.” And though I am as hesitant to watch Movie Lafayettes as much as I am Movie George Washingtons, which is one of several reasons I steered clear of “Young Washington,” a movie starring not only Sam Neill as Lafyette but Jane Seymour as Marie Antoinette piques my interest. I mean, not even Meryl Streep has played Marie Antoinette and Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman. If you can play Marie Antoinette and Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman, then Karen Silkwood is a cakewalk.

Days of Thunder. Is Tom Cruise’s 1990 NASCAR movie good? Well, no. Did it require the sequel that was recently announced? God, no. But if I were rich and attending a benefit for an arts organization auctioning off a package to go see the “Days of Thunder 2” with Nicole Kidman (who will apparently and for understandable reasons not reprise her role from the original) and her girlfriends reviewing it aloud in real time and requiring me to sign a non-disclosure agreement to not repeat anything they say, buddy, I would break the bank. 

As always, on the eighth day we rest and watch a YouTube video. And at this year’s TIFF, Penélope Cruz will be receiving the Special Tribute Award for her “extraordinary and unique contribution to the world of film.” Oh, right, I apologize, Cruz will be receiving the Special Tribute Award, presented by CHANEL. Cruz, after all, has been a brand ambassador for CHANEL since 2018, just as she has been the brand ambassador for Emirates and its Fly Better campaign since 2023. And though it might speak poorly of the modern film industry, what’s true is true and what’s true is this: there is still no better Movie Star Moment from the 2020s than Penélope Cruz in the above Emirates ad. In that moment, she is not shilling for Emirates, no, she is remaking Emirates entirely in her image. 

Side Out. As a longtime Olympics devotee, attending one of those quadrennial sporting spectacles has always been high on my bucket list and I was recently able to procure tickets to four different events for LA28. One of my tickets is for beach volleyball. It felt appropriate given southern California being the spiritual home of the two-person version contested at the Games, and because the sport made its Olympic debut at the last American Summer Games in Atlanta in 1996. That was four years after it appeared as a demonstration sport in Barcelona and six years after C. Thomas Howell’s dramatic comedy “Side Out” which stands the test of time as the preeminent beach volleyball movie of our age by essentially being the only beach volleyball movie of our age. I also have tickets to handball and water polo, but those sports have even fewer movies than beach volleyball.

Independence Day. Sometimes I see the German-born dual citizen Roland Emmerich as cinema’s version of Roger Bennett, the dual British American citizen and soccer nut who in 2021 wrote a book as love letter to his chosen home. Emmerich had not yet obtained American citizenship in 1996, but you see the same sort of spirit in his magnum opus “Independence Day,” nevertheless, a corny, boisterous ode to American exceptionalism that even a partly cloudy patriot, to borrow the phrase of Sarah Vowell, such as myself yearns to believe in from time to time. Let’s close Not-at-TIFF by blowing this one up to 70mm and for two hours and twenty-six minutes believing with all our might.

Watched on a Plane: How to Make a Killing

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

John Patton Ford’s “How to Make a Killing” was based on the 1907 novel Israel Rank: The Autobiography of a Criminal, as was the 1949 film “Kind Hearts and Coronets” in which Sir Alec Guinness played eight roles, all members of a wealthy family that a distant relative murders one-by-one to claim dukedom. The loose remake, then, would seem tailor-made for its star Glen Powell to follow in Guinness’s footsteps given that he convincingly played multiple roles in 2023’s “Hit Man.” Instead, Powell takes one role, starring as Beckett Redfellow, son of a teenage mother (Nell Williams) exiled from her affluent family for deigning to keep her baby and risk bringing shame to the family name. Despite her banishment, however, Beckett’s surname remains intact, and when his mom stresses that he should lead the life he deserves, he eventually takes that to mean murdering all his relatives in line for the massive Redfellow inheritance so he can claim it for his own. He is spurred to drastic action not only by his mother but by Julia Steinway (Margaret Qualley), his old childhood friend and “How to Make a Killing’s” resident femme fatale, in a sense laying a piece of Pule cheese at the end of an elaborate maze that Beckett cannot resist. And though Powell is only technically playing one part, in another sense, he assumes multiple personalities in so far as Ford’s screenplay requires him to cycle through different ones as the complicated plot plays out. Those personalities, alas, come across more like a matter of narrative convenience than they do a complicated sense of self, creating a fatal emotionally muddled tone. 

The story is framed as Beckett’s confession to a priest (Adrian Lukis) while awaiting his execution on death row in a few hours. Here, Powell deftly turns his own movie star features against themselves to fully inhabit the air of a charming psychopath. Problem is, in the flashback scenes, as Beckett hesitantly wades into his run of murders, egged on by Julia, the character and subsequently the performance feel altogether different, less psychotic than lucid. This is epitomized in how Beckett falls in love with Ruth (Jessica Henwick), girlfriend of his obnoxious cousin Noah (Zach Woods). Though the narrative speeds through their courtship, the chemistry that Powell and Henwick have is real, but overall, their genuine warmth never squares with the cold, calculating individual narrating the story. As the murders pile up and his choices close in on him, it’s as if “How to Make a Killing” wants to portray Beckett as a noir sap gradually ensnared in a web of his own deceit and lies even as the Beckett narrating the story suggests just the opposite. Ford’s camera, meanwhile, might salivate over Qualley, but Powell never does, never quite sure if he is supposed to, evocative of how his performance is compromised by the writing and direction as everything culminates in a scene that cannot decide between comedy and tragedy, a would-be punch to the face that whiffs.

My Favorite College Football Games: Game 5 redux

October 21, 1989: Alabama - 47 Tennessee - 30

In early 2011, someone professing to be Al from Dadeville called the long-running college football radio show of Paul Finebaum and claimed to have poisoned the historic oak trees at the intersection known as Toomer’s Corner on the campus of Auburn University. It did not take long for police to connect the caller’s nom-de-guerre to that of an Alabama football superfan named Harvey Updyke, arresting him on a charge of first-degree criminal mischief. He would eventually plead guilty, serving 180 days in jail and ordered to pay $796,731 in restitution, though he never came close to fulfilling that obligation prior to his death at the age of 71 in 2020. In the immediate aftermath of his arrest, Updyke provided various hedges, even fabrications, like claiming someone else had told him about poisoning the trees and he merely appropriated the story as his own. Whatever his shifting narratives, the phone call to Finebaum always made it clear to me that Updyke grasped from the outset the gravity of his deed. Because if we accept that Finebaum is something akin to the supreme pontiff of southern college football then, in effect, Updyke’s calling him was a confession in a religious sense as much as a criminal one. And though he would say he did it because of how much he hated Auburn, his beloved Crimson Tide’s archrival, in his 2011 ESPN profile of Updyke, Wright Thompson knew better when he wrote, “He loved a football team so much he ruined his life.”

Almost from the beginning, college football has been compared to religion. John Tunis made the comparison in 1928 writing in Harper’s that college football seemed poised to become America’s national religion. He was criticizing, not praising, but in his negative assessment, he was, nevertheless, concurring that in its customs, fellowship, and belief in something akin to an unseen order, to paraphrase Columbia University Professor Emeritus of Religion Wayne Proudfoot, the sport did, in fact, function as a religion. If it was a problem to Tunis in the 1920s, it has only grown worse, and I wonder what he would make not only of declining church attendance and football’s increasing popularity but modern coaches like Dabo Swinney and the late Bill McCartney seeking to blur the lines between church and state. Yet, if the whole sport might be deemed a religion, no place in America remains more religious than the Bible Belt, and the Bible Belt loves college football more than anyone. There was a reason that the late Alcorn State coach Marino Kasem’s famous regional classification of college football saw fit to ascribe a holy purpose to one sector only: “in the South, football is a religion,” he said, “and Saturday is the holy day.” That’s merely a more lyrical version of the Southeastern college athletic conference’s highfalutin present-day slogan, It Just Means More, just as Wright Thompson’s poetic love letter to southern football, Pulled Pork & Pigskin, innately demonstrates how every southern football fan is but one more bourbon and cola solo cup away from metamorphosing into Harvey Updyke whether they know it or not. I am from, and live in, and root for a team affiliated with Big Ten country but I know it means more down there.

19th century anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor argued that “a minimum definition of religion” could be defined as “belief in Spiritual Beings.” The title of his treatise, Primitive Culture, mirrors the primitive cultures that Emile Durkheim examined in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life in which a belief in a god manifested itself in the form of a totem, symbolizing the deity, to paraphrase Michael Serazio, associate professor of communication at Boston College, writing for The Atlantic in 2013, while “also implicitly offer(ing) vessels for fellowship.” Ida Mae Kilgore Bryant, mother of Paul Bryant, nicknamed Bear, wanted her son to go into the ministry, though he opted for coaching college football instead, reasoning that they were virtually the same. Indeed, in coaching his alma mater the University of Alabama from 1958 to 1982, he resurrected it into the premier program of the sport, so worshiped in the Magnolia State that all kinds of unsanctioned art, from decals to postcards, proliferated in the 1960s of the ceremonial Bear walking on water while his signature houndstooth hat turned that two-tone pattern into a totem of team as much as its own school colors. In saving the football program, he also redeemed the Old South, the antebellum mystic referenced in the title card of “Gone with the Wind,” an eyebrow-raising idea advanced by both Warren St. John in his 2004 book about Alabama football fandom “Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer” and Frank Deford in his seminal profile of the coach for Sports Illustrated in 1981. Deford also noted that the Bear scoffed at such water-walking allusions, though that did not mean their prevalence was any less telling. When Deford dared humanize the Bear in that very same profile, he was besieged by letters from angry Alabama fans. Of course, Deford himself was not above religious allegory, deeming Bryant “football incarnate” in the state and noting how hard it would be for whomever was eventually tasked to succeed him.

That happened two years later in 1983 when Bryant retired and subsequently died at the age of 69 from a massive heart attack. Ray Perkins was first into the breach, getting so much flack for decent-enough success that still paled relative to the Bear, he jumped ship of his own volition by going to coach what was then the nadir NFL franchise, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. If Perkins was an alum of Alabama, at least, his successor Bill Curry was not, and if Bryant’s houndstooth hat was the totem of Crimson Tide football, then the brick that was thrown through Curry’s office window early on the morning of October 9, 1988, might have been its most cursed object. It was the day after Curry’s second Alabama team not only lost to the University of Mississippi for the first time at home but lost to them for the first time at home on homecoming. Appropriately, the brick comes with its own conspiracy theory intimating that Curry threw it through his own window in the manner of the speculation that tobacco industry whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand might have put a bullet in his own mailbox, which is just the crimson icing on the white cake, blaming the victim to try and mask the setting of unattainable standards. And yet, the next season in 1989, Curry seemed positioned to, if you will permit me, turn the tide by starting the season 5-0, including a revenge game against Mississippi in which his squad overcame a 21-point deficit by detonating for 62 unanswered points, and ascending to #10 in the country ahead of meeting 6th-ranked and also undefeated Tennessee on, as tradition once dictated, the third Saturday in October.

Growing up in Big Eight and Big Ten country meant those were the games I usually watched, but the Alabama versus Tennessee showdown was nationally televised by CBS, and I happened to be watching, praise be. It was not a dramatic contest, per se, but a fun, high-scoring one with Alabama forging a big lead and Tennessee futilely trying to play comeback. The Crimson Tide asserted itself with one big play early in the second quarter. Leading 10-7 and lined up 75 yards from pay dirt in the shotgun formation, string bean Tide quarterback Gary Hollingsworth received the snap and drifted back a couple steps to intentionally invite the Volunteer defensive line toward him before flipping the ball forward to running back Siran Stacy, previously lined up to his QB’s right. Stacy sliced through a hole opened by that little bit of misdirection and his offensive line, angling at first toward the left sideline before reading a block out wide by a receiver and gently slaloming back to the right. As he approached midfield with one Tennessee defender hurrying to try and catch him from behind and two converging on him from both the right and the left, Stacy accelerated, not so much shedding or even slipping the last desperate attempt at a tackle but surging beyond it, making it look for all the world like Tennessee was trying to catch the wind. He coasted alone into the sun-filled end zone, a 75-yard-touchdown as exultation, echoed in the overwhelming roar of the crowd and CBS announcer Brent Musburger, who no one would accuse of being a man of few words, tingling the spine by shutting up and laying out after just three of them: “Siran Stacy explodes!” By modern-day standards, this touchdown might appear prosaic, nothing more than a little shovel pass. Yet, that underlines its timelessness, living the apotheosis of football since the beginning by transforming the muddle of so much helmeted humanity into the divine.

I had never thought much about Alabama football, or the SEC, until this game, or until this play, really, though in the new century of the sport, I had to think about them a lot as Nick Saban fashioned an evil empire out of his cherished process. If you’re not from Alabama, or maybe just not from the south, you’re not supposed to like them, and I suppose I don’t, though I must confess that this Siran Stacy touchdown caused me to see the light. I have often wondered if in its aftermath, if Curry thought that Alabama fans had seen the light, if he had been redeemed. This victory would spur them toward winning the conference, after all, going to the Sugar Bowl, and inching as high as #2 in the national rankings. But they would lose the Sugar Bowl to Miami and worse than that, they would lose their last game of the season to archrival Auburn, unforgivable, conference title or not, evincing that strange college football version of math where a 10-2 season equals 0-2. In the offseason, like Perkins before him, Curry ditched, taking the Kentucky job and his career never recovered, though maybe it was unrecoverable the moment that brick went through his window.

Writing in 2021 for the most southern-coded magazine ever, Garden & Gun, Tommy Tomlinson surmised that college football in the south was not so much religion as it was spiritual, “the hunger for that rare and precious moment of transcendence.” I think Tomlinson is underselling how the religious-like structure of the sport can help stoke that transcendence, even as he hints at that idea throughout, but I take him at his larger point, ending on a note that might as well be describing Siran Stacy’s touchdown: “(O)ne Saturday night, late in the game, your man breaks into the clear. You rise and shout. Rapture.” Up until then, college football had hinged for me on victory and defeat for my chosen team, whether it was my beloved Nebraska Cornhuskers, or my native state Iowa Hawkeyes before that. Stacy’s touchdown, however, made me realize that gridiron transcendence could exist independently of rooting interests, and that the momentary rapture could matter as much if not more than the result. College football has always been based on results, of course, though that sense of the bottom line has only been amplified in the new-fangled 12-team playoff era as athletic directors, commentators, and fans have taken What Have You Done for Me Lately to unprecedented extremes. It’s as if every college football team is fast becoming like 1989 Alabama, destined to suffer spiritually winless seasons no matter how many games they technically win if they don’t make the playoffs. It’s only natural. In sports we tend to overrate the outcome and undervalue the experience. It’s times like those when I want to sit down, bring up YouTube, find Siran Stacy’s touchdown run from that sunny day in October 1989, and get some of that good old-time religion.