We Grown Now

“We Grown Now” begins with two young kids and best friends for life Malik (Blake Cameron James) and Eric (Gian Knight Ramirez) dragging a discarded mattress down a corridor of the Cabrini-Green housing project on Chicago’s near north side where they live circa 1992. Eventually they get it outside, where they and some other friends take turns leaping on to the mattress, like a makeshift high jump pit, talking about how they can fly, and filmed in low angled slow motion to make it look, at least for a moment, like they really can. It’s an evocative, spirited opening, deftly introducing the two boys as being of both limited means and unlimited imaginations, finding not just ways to cope or survive but to enjoy their lives. Cabrini-Green became a notorious symbol of American public housing, best remembered cinematically for its decrepit, terrifying presentation in “Candyman,” released the same year “We Grown Now” is set. I don’t know if that’s deliberate, but writer/director Minhal Baig presents an alternate view, the sunlight flooding windows of Malik’s apartment not the golden hues of a thousand Terrence Malick-inspired indies meant to imbue wistful nostalgia but to demonstrate how they make this place their own and imbue it with love and warmth.

Why there is even a sequence when Malik and Eric ditch school, ride the L (public transit > 1961 Ferrari 250 GT California Spyder), excitedly look out the window, allowing for a brief impeccable framing of an Over-the-Shoulder Sears Tower shot that made my heart full, and visit the Art Institute. They see Georges Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, but they also see Walter Ellison’s Train Station, evoking two different perspectives and how a day off in Chicago belongs just as much to two kids from Cabrini-Green as it does to three kids from suburban Shermer High. The difference in these two existences, however, is not just the size of their homes but the looming threat of violence, one that plagues the public housing community from within but just as much from those enlisted to protect it. The most frightening scene in “We Grown Now” is police not just knocking on the door but entering the home of Malik and his family, ostensibly to search for drugs. It’s not just the scenario but how Baig presents it in low-angled shots looking up, the police heard but still distant, like teachers on the Peanuts but without squawks, shouting but not explaining.

Yet even as Baig repeatedly yokes the camera to her youthful protagonists’ perspective, she never entirely gets inside their headspace. The conversations between Malik’s mother (Jurnee Smollett) and grandmother (S. Epatha Merkerson), debating whether to pull up roots and move on, have a tender truth (and a tender truth that is magnified by those two performances). But aside from one delightful argument about the 1992 Chicago Bulls, this conversations between Malik and Eric too often feel like supplied talking points from the director. That does not necessarily have to be a bad thing. There’s an argument to be made that a director of a movie should be as present in that movie as the characters themselves. It’s just, given the story Baig is telling, the kind too rarely presented onscreen, I was left wishing that Malik and Eric got to tell their version of it just a little bit more. 

Thelma

Writer/director Josh Margolin based “Thelma” on his own grandmother, demonstrating this connection with footage of her in the closing credits that matches an earlier scene almost verbatim. Even so, this action comedy belongs to its star, June Squibb. She plays the eponymous 93-year-old Thelma Post who inadvertently mails away $10,000 in a phone scam and then sets out with her semi-reluctant suitor Ben (the late Richard Roundtree) by scooter to cut across the sidewalks of Los Angeles, find the perpetrators, and get it back as her grandson Danny (Fred Hechinger) and daughter Gail (Parker Posey) give chase when she goes M.I.A. (The part of Danny is written with more dimension, presenting someone on the opposite end of the age spectrum, still trying to get his life started, but Posey’s performance deftly, comically embodies being caught in the middle, caretaker to both.) Margolin draws a semi-cheeky comparison between the physical obstacles confronted by Thelma and Ben on their quest with Tom Cruise’s “Mission: Impossible” stunts by briefly having her watch 2018’s “Fallout” on television. This is sometimes cleverer conceptually than it is in execution, but it also innately contrasts the idea of Cruise working so hard to defy aging with Squibb’s unsentimental embracing of it. Just as there is something edifying in the manic intensity with which Cruise runs in those movies, so is there something revealing in the way Squibb walks, one foot in front of the other, a careful determination not to go gently into the good night. 

September 5

“September 5” takes place almost exclusively inside an ABC Sports television control room on the eponymous day in 1972 at the Munich Summer Olympics when armed Palestinians took the Israeli contingent hostage. Seen predominantly from the viewpoint of Geoffrey Mason (John Magaro), overnight head of the control room, as he and his cohorts are forced to spontaneously adapt, the real-time sensation and fly on the wall aesthetic lend the feel of a docudrama. Indeed, ABC Sports President Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard) decrees that their job to “put the camera in the right place and...follow the story as it unfolds in real time. News can tell us what it means after it’s over.” In that way, “September 5” is less about the conflict than the coverage of it, the movie’s apolitical nature intertwined with its taut narrative, constant questions of what to show and what not to show, what to say and what not to say, often posed by the head of operations Marvin Bader (Ben Chaplin*). This is effective in so far as it goes but the limited perspective also means the larger idea of the broadcast establishing a dangerous precedent by transforming something grave into spectacle never fully resonates. To his credit, Magaro at least lets that knowledge flood his character at the end, of a new world the characters have all unwittingly entered, one that will have to be made a sense of in a movie called “September 6.”

*I was fortunate enough to see Ben Chaplin in 2018 at The Old Vic in London in Mood Music and my foremost takeaway was wondering why movies could not harness the kind of electricity he emanated on the stage. “September 5” does. 

The Room Next Door

What kind of hospital room has a designer olive green sofa? I suppose the same sort of hospital room that has a view of the Manhattan skyline and a festive floral painting on the wall, the sort of hospital room glimpsed in “The Room Next Door.” I am not nitpicking. No, director Pedro Almodóvar is nothing if not the master of modern melodrama, and though we tend to think of melodrama as an exaggeration of characters, emotions, and situations, in his hands, melodrama is an exaggeration of stuff too. That exaggerated stuff takes on an almost spiritual dimension in Almodóvar’s 25th feature film and first in the English language. After all, “The Room Next Door” is about a terminally ill woman, Martha (Tilda Swinton), who asks an old friend who has just re-entered her life, Ingrid (Julianne Moore), to accompany her to a luxurious rental pad in upstate New York to be take up position in the room next door where Martha plans to take control of her ultimate demise by taking her own life. 

Loosely based (by all accounts, I have not read it) on a Sigrid Nunez novel, Almodóvar is less concerned with the ethics of this dramatic situation, essentially starting from a place of death being a personal situation and a personal decision. Establishing that straight away frees “The Room Next Door” to focus on the morals, of one friend putting the genuine request of the other friend first, an idea that comes alive in Moore’s performance, a true blow burn, fiery but quietly fiery. The emergent investigative subplot with a skeptical detective (Alessandro Nivola) has nothing to do with ferreting out the truth, since we already know it, and more to do with Ingrid defining her own sense of decency and truth. More than that, even, “The Room Next Door” is a contrast of light and dark, of finding the desire to go on when it’s literally hopeless to. 

One might draw parallels to our current world. In fact, Almodóvar does, at least in one scene in which Damian (John Turturro), a friend and former lover to both women, notes an overriding sensation of hopelessness in the face of climate change only to be challenged by Ingrid in the face of what she’s seen being at Martha’s side. Given that it’s the only real time this subject is broached, and that Damian never feels as emotionally integrated to the narrative, it plays a little too much like a septuagenarian movie director decrying someone who is, forgive me, woke than a genuine philosophical back and forth. More’s the pity because otherwise, in the colorful world that “The Room Next Door” presents, in its finely calibrated production and costume design, from that olive green couch to Martha’s array of cozy sweaters and comfy looking soft pants, “The Room Next Door” innately expresses feeling comfort and joy in the moment and finding the wherewithal to meet your maker with the perfectly chosen lipstick on your face. 

Is it strange that the most moving moment to me in the whole movie was the one when Ingrid and Martha go to Lincoln Center to see a movie? And Ingrid suggests that, hey, they better go find some seats? If I had a terminal illness, I thought, I would probably want to go see a movie too. And I would probably want to have the best seats in the house.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Little Murders (1971)

Based on Jules Feiffer’s stage play, and marking Alan Arkin’s first feature film as director, “Little Murders,” currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, takes place in a New York City that no doubt exemplifies and amplifies the crime and decay of the 1970s but that also might feel to a modern viewer like a sardonic manifestation of the urban hellscapes imagined by every modern-day conservative and F*x News commentator, filled with incessant gunfire and muggings. Indeed, Patsy Newquist (Marcia Robb) wakes one morning not to birds chirping outside her window but to the sounds of a man being beaten up on the sidewalk just below. She calls the police, but they put her on hold and disconnect the call. So, she goes down there herself and intervenes, only for the beaten, Alfred Chamberlain (Elliott Gould), to wander away in a daze, not even acknowledging her. Once she manages to extricate herself from the same attackers, she confronts him over his cowardice, not that he's interested, telling her off and trying to flee in a hilarious long shot where she chases after him, hollering, “Are you really so down on people or are you just being fashionable?!” It’s a Meet Cute by force, triggering something like a dystopian Neil Simon rom com.

Alfred is a self-described “apathist,” lived in Gould’s hilarious checked-out countenance, and in the character’s occupation. A photographer, he sees the world through his camera lens, and what he photographs is literally excrement, one of merely many examples of satire that goes to the extreme. (“I’ve been shooting s*** for over a year,” he says, “and I’ve already won half a dozen awards,” suggesting how art can’t defeat a dystopia or perhaps suggesting how a dystopia deliberately has no art. Hmmmmmm.) Patsy, on the other hand, is an interior decorator, maintaining fastidious control over her own world as the one outside her door has gone to pieces. Then again, the constant phone calls she gets from stalker breathing on the other end of the line go to show such control is a mirage. Listen to the way she speaks, a comical cacophony at a high register impeccably playing off Alfred’s quieter decibels; she sounds like someone screaming on the inside but screaming on the inside on the outside.

Seeking to instill the same sort of desperate convention in Alfred’s life, she brings him home to meet her family and convinces him to get married. The wedding sequence is a riotous interlude, officiated by the pastor of First Existential (Donald Sutherland, momentarily commandeering the movie just as he famously commandeered “JFK”) not so much mocking the ritual of marriage as deconstructing it as a UC Berkeley Professor might, triggering a brawl that ends with him on the floor but still with a smile on his face, the inverse of Alfred, acceptance rather than apathy. True to his prognostication, their union brings no salvation, undone in the one moment when the movie’s brutal comedy gives way to sheer brutality. This leads to Alfred riding the subway in a bloodstained shirt, bringing to mind Tom Cruise in “Collateral” telling the story of the guy who dies on the MTA that “nobody notices.” That 2004 thriller portrayed violence as the logical outgrowth of humanity’s disconnection, but “Little Murders” concludes on an appropriately, explosively droll note portraying violence as perhaps the only thing that brings humanity together.

In Memoriam: Al Trautwig

Al Trautwig, who died in February at 68 from complications due to cancer, was born in New York, and died in New York, and went to college at Adelphi on Long Island, and in his long career as a sportscaster, he spent much of it working for the MSG network covering the Knicks, Rangers, and Yankees. His deep voice was the kind you could imagine cutting through the harsh wilds of New York talk radio, one that left little room for equivocation, for better or worse. As a Midwesterner, however, I only knew Trautwig for his national sports coverage. He started with ABC both on Wide World of Sports and its Olympics telecasts before transitioning to NBC went the Games took up permanent residence on that network. That meant he was at ABC in the final years under industry visionary Roone Arledge. It was Arledge who recast the Olympics in the image of “Bugler’s Dream,” and it was Arledge who invented Monday Night Football. In other words, Arledge did as much as anyone to transform televised sports into spectacle and entertainment, a belief manifestly instilled in his protégé. 

Al Trautwig preparing to eat sugarcane on live TV at the 1987 Sugar Bowl.

During my beloved Nebraska Cornhuskers’ brutal seven-year bowl-less streak between 2017 and 2023, I would instead watch one of their older bowl games on YouTube each December as a semi-satisfactory replacement. One of those games was the 1987 Sugar Bowl in New Orleans against LSU. Trautwig was sideline reporter for that one though rather than reporting in-game news as the role typically requires, he did things like literally eat sugar, check in on the Superdome’s air conditioning system, and interview, in a manner of speaking, LSU’s live Bengal tiger mascot. It’s all corny, even stupid, but I confess, it also evoked a kind of ballyhoo that once went together with bowl games, meaningless exhibitions, after all, that also tended to have their own parades and king and queen courts. Trautwig understood the Sugar Bowl as show business as much as a gridiron showdown. A year later at the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics, ABC aired a feature in which Trautwig sampled pastries in the Canadian host city, contemporarily criticized by both Sports Illustrate and the Los Angeles Times. Yet, if choosing pastries over live events might technically be wrong, I remember how much that sequence appealed to me as a kid, opening my eyes to how the Olympics were intended, underline, as a celebration of the host city itself as much as the feats of strength. 

Back then, the Olympics were in limited primetime telecasts and ABC and NBC still packaged many events in heavily edited segments, treating them as stories as much as real-time athletic events. In narrating these, as he did with cross-country skiing, or the cycling road race, Trautwig brought a sense of storytelling melodrama. That approach did not work when he was tasked with traditional play-by-play duties, and even in the settings where it was more suitable, it could rub people the wrong way. For ESPN the Magazine in 2000, Tim Keown lamented that Trautwig turned the inaugural women’s triathlon at the Sydney Summer Olympics “into the Peloponnesian War.” Keown wasn’t entirely wrong, but I remember that women’s triathlon. And though I never became an Olympics agnostic, during the strange period of my life between 1996 and 2000, I sort of lost sight of them, and I will never ever forget how that women’s triathlon and the way Trautwig presented it made the Games instantly click right back into place for me. What drew me to sports, and what continues drawing me still, is competition, yes, and feats of strength, sure, but also, a sense of theater. Trautwig saw sports as theater too. Not for nothing did he appear in the Jamaican bobsled team cult classic “Cool Runnings” (1993) as himself: “Go, Jams!” RIP. 

An Ode to Japanese Breakfast

In a 2023 CNN interview, Michelle Zauner was asked by Chris Wallace to explain the origin of her band name Japanese Breakfast. After all, Zauner was born in Seoul to a Korean mother and American father and subsequently raised in Eugene, Oregon, an upbringing she chronicled in her 2021 memoir “Crying in H Mart.” Maybe by then Zauner had grown tired of the query, not quite giving as full an answer as she has given in other places, just sort of vaguely referencing the pleasing imagery of a Japanese-style morning meal. Indeed, on the A24 podcast a year earlier, Zauner professed regret about her band name and how people reflexively assumed she was Japanese, wishing she could go back and rename it. Just as Patterson Hood has lamented, he never thought his own band Drive-By Truckers would get so big, and once it did, it was too late to change the moniker. And so, in a way Zauner’s own intention got the best of her. In speaking with Sandra Song of Teen Vogue in 2017, Zauner said she liked the name because it combined the familiar with the exotic. “I thought it would make people curious,” she said, “like ‘What is a Japanese breakfast?’”

I missed the first couple Japanese Breakfast albums, catching up with “Jubilee” in 2021 which, as it happened, was the year My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife and I had originally planned to visit Japan. The global pandemic delayed our visit, and we wound up going for two weeks last fall in 2024. All our vacations, long or short, abroad or in the states, make eating a focal point, but in a city like Tokyo, which has roughly the number of restaurants that Syracuse, New York has people, it became even more paramount. Given My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife’s diligent planning of lunches and dinners, and snacks in-between, we were content to keep breakfast simple by having it each morning at the hotel. And though one might not ordinarily think of a hotel breakfast buffet in the same sort of breathtaking terms as, say, a multi-course Kaiseki meal, like the one we had in Kyoto, Japanese breakfast, it turned out, took my breath away, nevertheless.

The layout brought Zauner’s description of her band name to life. Because upon entering the dining room, an American such as myself would first see a familiar western style breakfast spread off eggs, bacon, sausage, and toast. Take a few steps forward, however, and then turn to the left and there it was, an exotic Japanese style breakfast buffet of rice and miso soup and shumai and all manner of side dishes right beside it. I don’t want to go overboard here and say it was like going from black and white to Technicolor in “The Wizard of Oz.” I had some croissants and pastries, and some jam too, and the truth is, they were far better than you will get at virtually any breakfast buffet in the actual west, evoking that Japanese idea that whatever you are doing should be done to perfection. But it did feel like how the late Anthony Bourdain described Tokyo, as a whole window opening up into a whole new thing. “Mesmerizing. Intimidating. Disorienting.” That first morning I went for it, availing myself of almost everything, from candied sweet potatoes to fish cakes to salted cod roe to natto (i.e. fermented soybeans). You might deem it the Pacific Rim version of an unlimited steakhouse salad bar and, hey, I’m never one to shy away from the green marshmallow fruit salad, so why I wouldn’t try natto? (The natto was the one item that didn’t work for me. They can’t all be winners, can they?)

As I quickly learned, however, the real secret to Japanese breakfast was studying other Japanese people in the dining room and copying their moves. One morning, I noticed the Japanese man at the table next to ours finishing his breakfast with what appeared to be pudding in a jar. I went and got one for myself. This, it turned out, was Purin, a kind of Japanese flan, crème caramel or vanilla, take your pick, and for the rest of our trip, I finished every one of my breakfasts with Purin. I mean, c’mon, seriously, breakfast dessert: that’s advanced. Another morning, I saw a Japanese man at a table near ours stirring a raw egg into rice. This was Tamago kake gohan, which Zauner referenced in that CNN interview, though as a lover of porridge, I thought of it as egg porridge, sort of state-of-the-art oatmeal, often adding a little scallion and seaweed. Once I figured it out, I ate it every morning. It’s not hyperbole to say it changed my life.

Tamago Kake Gohan (e.g. egg porridge)

The sheer abundance of quality food in Japan is hard to imagine until you experience it. Restaurants stacked on top of restaurants stacked on top of restaurants. Noodles that were impossibly toothsome; broth so flavorful and rich I did as the Japanese did and brought the bowl right up to my mouth and slurped up every last drop; egg salad sandwiches from 7-Elevens that have no right to be that good; I had the best sushi experience of my life in Kyoto; I had grape soft serve twice! And yet, five months out, what I think about most, and what I miss the worst, is that egg porridge chased with Purin. All of which is to say, once you’ve had Japanese breakfast, believe me, you will never need to ask Japanese Breakfast why they are called that ever again.