tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-179519892024-03-16T13:52:22.350-05:00Cinema RomanticoSearching for The Ecstatic Truth...Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger4007125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17951989.post-25126059653342981202024-03-11T12:30:00.009-05:002024-03-11T13:33:12.460-05:0096th Academy Awards: Back to the BasicsAfter several years of chaos, woebegone makeover attempts, and Pandemic-related alterations, the Oscars finally returned to their true form as a big dumb show. They were entertaining, and eye-rolling, and enervating, and out of touch, and sporadically sincere, and sometimes stupid. There was plenty to complain about, of course, and that’s good! <a href="https://www.cinemaromantico.org/2022/02/a-brief-history-of-people-complaining.html" target="_blank">Complaining is part of the show</a>! The 96th Academy Awards were, in other words, an inspired, in manner of speaking, version of a classic dish with Steven Spielberg, on hand to present Best Director, assuming the old Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep role of unofficial Academy mascot, a sort of pomp and circumstance win for Auteur Theory. The show started an hour earlier (7 PM ET, 4 PM PT) even as it hilariously, <i>literally</i>, started several minutes behind schedule, yet never felt overlong despite, as it always does, <i>running</i> long, because by starting <i>earlier</i> it effected a nifty mental sleight of hand and still felt <i>shorter</i>. Maybe that’s a trick you can only manage once, so best enjoy it this year, whiners. <div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0jl8wuNBu-5bWgEIiX4y3p9dW978luXzyF0_IRfTdOq1QzAPC-VZeH_w41M8_dTd-ApA4PeaxSAOsEV5wv0eaY9fPnBxvNg1G9ApDT5XPFPZPKva2H3Zem9yBSxccrJtslcO8P-CcON3dsiWia16osAwk2o_muaHihikHJ9v063w39IDeNn1m/s900/oscar1.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="900" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0jl8wuNBu-5bWgEIiX4y3p9dW978luXzyF0_IRfTdOq1QzAPC-VZeH_w41M8_dTd-ApA4PeaxSAOsEV5wv0eaY9fPnBxvNg1G9ApDT5XPFPZPKva2H3Zem9yBSxccrJtslcO8P-CcON3dsiWia16osAwk2o_muaHihikHJ9v063w39IDeNn1m/w400-h266/oscar1.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div><div><div>Hosting for the fourth time, Jimmy Kimmel was mostly harmless, echoing a mostly harmless show, working best, it turned out, as a straight man. Like when John Cena was enlisted to present Best Costume Design via a bit, uh, honoring the 50th Anniversary of the infamous Oscar streaker that really, truly worked, impeccably timed and, this is crucial, not stepping on the toes of the ensuing winners, evocative of a smartly coordinated bevy of presenters that amusingly kept the train rolling. The “Twins” reunion of Danny DeVito and Arnold Schwarzenegger was a welcome homage to all of us old fogeys who rented that 1988 comedy from the Roadshow Video in West Des Moines; John Mulaney won this year’s coveted Why Doesn’t He Host Award? with an unlikely variation on the old observation that he could be funny just by reading in the phonebook by being funny in just recounting the plot of “Field of Dreams.” Maybe next year Mulaney could recount the plot of “Meet Joe Black?”</div><div><br /></div><div>The most memorable moment of Kimmel’s opening monologue wasn’t even a joke, it was his honoring Hollywood as a union town by bringing out “the truck drivers, Teamsters, and IATSE union members” who supported the WGA and SAG-AFTRA during their strikes, the only moment all night that referenced the industry’s year of significant and righteous upheaval. Hollywood might be at a tipping point, but most everyone pulled their punches on that topic, save for Cord Jefferson who in winning Best Adapted screenplay for “American Fiction” decreed “Instead of making one $200 million movie, try making twenty $10 million movies.” Hear! Hear!</div><div><br />
After an early run of downline awards for “Poor Things,” the evening was dominated as the Oscar fortune tellers predicted by Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer,” winning Best Editing and Cinematography and Original Score and Actor and Supporting Actor and Director and, yes, Best Picture, too. The latter was announced by living legend Al Pacino who, whether by some sort of ill-conceived comedy bit or going off the cuff going wrong, inadvertently underlined the moment’s lack of suspense by opening the envelope and essentially just sort of muttering something like, oh, hey, “Oppenheimer,” again. Kimmel, however, opened the evening by addressing “Barbie” first, the movie that shared a release date with “Oppenheimer,” creating a summer box office bonanza between them and forever linking the two in the public’s mind, an idea the Oscars only enhanced. “Oppenheimer” won seven, “Barbie” only one, but the latter won the show in spirit just as much. Ryan Gosling knocked his performance of “Barbie’s” Best Original Song nominee “I’m Just Ken” out of the park, and then he appeared onstage with “Oppenheimer” star and nominee Emily Blunt (see above) to comically address the ostensible Barbenheimer feud, my favorite moment of the whole night. More than anything, the 2023 year in Hollywood was defined by Barbenheimer phenomenon, and this moment hilariously lived it. </div><div><br /></div><div>Hollywood’s insistence that the show must go on, alas, has rarely felt as embarrassingly true as it did when ABC followed Ukranian director Mstyslav Chernov in winning Best Feature Documentary for “20 Days in Mariupol” saying he would rather have no Oscar and no war with an image of all the “I’m Just Ken” performers waiting in the wings. In fact, the Blunt and Gosling bit followed Jonathan Glazer winning for Best International Feature for “The Zone of Interest” and being the one person all evening to openly condemn the ongoing atrocities in Gaza, denouncing “the holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people.” In its way, so many attendees sporting ceasefire lapel pins as their method of silent solidarity put into perspective the potential cost of saying something aloud, and in the image of Glazer’s hands clearly shaking as he read his statement from a sheet of paper, you could see the weight of his words in real time. Courage.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjq2W0amc898x4dIN5ZBPLQqyDv6HQs_Y9Gnkd8MD3X7vRLSBTTzuhvCTlCQkbQgSEDyWgtKtWrkdhs7zl7eYl01CuBXcUlIoGtrfnSpMzCKH7cB24yBVP_LZNVrFJWKKUTldNe4WJ41BzHSY2Hz3ltZZg8JPcjl_YXYxaq0lFjUD360EBSaxfc/s1000/oscars2.webp" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="563" data-original-width="1000" height="231" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjq2W0amc898x4dIN5ZBPLQqyDv6HQs_Y9Gnkd8MD3X7vRLSBTTzuhvCTlCQkbQgSEDyWgtKtWrkdhs7zl7eYl01CuBXcUlIoGtrfnSpMzCKH7cB24yBVP_LZNVrFJWKKUTldNe4WJ41BzHSY2Hz3ltZZg8JPcjl_YXYxaq0lFjUD360EBSaxfc/w400-h231/oscars2.webp" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div>The acceptance speeches are generally a good barometer of the evening and last night, they trended up. The team that won Best Visual Effects for “Godzilla Minus One” joyfully took the stage together, all holding toy kaijus in their hands, and Takaski Yamakazi gave a loving, halting speech that might have technically got lost a little bit in translation but emotionally still shone through. Robert Downey Jr. won Best Supporting Actor for “Oppenheimer” in vintage RDJ fashion, refusing to take it too seriously in a way that still suggested just how thankful he was to be up there at all. Da’Vine Joy Randolph’s speech in winning Best Supporting Actress for “The Holdovers” acknowledged both the importance of representation and its limits, drawing a line all the way back to Hattie McDaniel in 1940, heartbreakingly noting “I pray to God I get to do this more than once.” Then there was Emma Stone. In winning Best Actress for “Poor Things,” her second Oscar, she defeated Lily Gladstone for “Killers of the Flower Moon,” who would have become the first Native American Academy Award winner. It was a difficult truth that seemed to emerge in Stone’s reaction, not overwhelmed, exactly, but overcome, I think, in manifestly grasping what had been denied in her victory. She acknowledged all her fellow nominees, but she singled out Gladstone, sharing it with her, she said, a sentiment that can sometimes ring hollow, though not here, because you would see the wrenching complication of it on their both faces. Stone has already gotten to do this twice, you might say, and she recognized it, and thread an impossible needle. She deserved it, but she also didn’t, and she expressed both those truths at once. </div><div><br />
That denying of history with Gladstone underlined the Academy’s ongoing, oddly strained relationship with its own. Academy President Janet Yang’s cursory mention of the Governors Awards winners, lifetime achievement recipients all of whom were merely glimpsed in images beamed to a backstage wall, was bad enough. It was improbably made worse when it was accidentally interrupted, through absolutely no fault of her own, by Billie Eilish who had just won Best Original Song with her brother Fineas O’Connell, because in a baffling move, the producers chose to have Yang address the camera in the wings where the winners walk through. The In Memoriam segment, meanwhile, the one thing that should be impossible to screw up but always is, was screwed up yet again, by thoughtlessly reducing the screen recounting the deceased to the background and emphasizing an interpretive dance and Italian tenor Andrea Boccelli and his son Matteo performing in the foreground. It’s an In Memoriam segment, not a concert, and every single person the movies lost in 2023 deserved better.</div></div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizCVJHBxEsv6oWsnizzKZsE2NBkUdaHoWK994SZHKCEO4vvHDh9x6HB5iMfHLkrb9kxhN2-xc-09y9he036G5dLKFp2gRiHT49N4UWXvD8u1bnk1Z3CqK63h4zoIRclLKyudzJCvN2QF3GvHkMOkfAJdQoo_Cj4uzs4shQI0opN1EW3EaKeKVm/s1296/oscar3.webp" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="730" data-original-width="1296" height="230" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizCVJHBxEsv6oWsnizzKZsE2NBkUdaHoWK994SZHKCEO4vvHDh9x6HB5iMfHLkrb9kxhN2-xc-09y9he036G5dLKFp2gRiHT49N4UWXvD8u1bnk1Z3CqK63h4zoIRclLKyudzJCvN2QF3GvHkMOkfAJdQoo_Cj4uzs4shQI0opN1EW3EaKeKVm/w400-h230/oscar3.webp" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div>Then again, the Oscars resurrected a bit from the 2009 ceremony in which 5 Best Acting winners from the past returned to highlight the 5 nominees in each Best Acting category. The scripts there could have occasionally had more oomph, and they worked best when there was a true cosmic connection between the presenter and the actor, like Sam Rockwell speaking to Robert Downey Jr., or Lupita Nyong'o speaking to Da'Vine Joy Randolph, or Nic Cage to Paul Giamatti, but I appreciated them for illustrating a historical through-line. I loved the shot of Cillian Murphy winning Best Actor for Oppenheimer as he ascended the stage and into a sort of polite scrum of his peers congratulating him, the new member of a highly eccentric lodge. No one, though, seemed to get the historical perspective better than Christopher Nolan. </div><div><br /></div><div>“To the Academy, movies are just a little bit over 100 years old,” he said in winning Best Director for Oppenheimer. “We don’t know where this incredible journey is going from here. But to know that you think I’m a meaningful part of it means the world to me.” Whatever I think of his movies, I admire Nolan for his commitment to creating experiences for the big screen, the biggest, these days, it seems, even if in those lines, he humbly saw himself as merely one ripple in the rain. </div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17951989.post-66338055989401244712024-03-08T06:00:00.304-06:002024-03-08T15:39:34.121-06:00Book Review: Oscar WarsAt the end of the 89th Academy Awards ceremony on February 26, 2017, Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway took the stage at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood to announce the winner for Best Picture. Beatty opened the envelope, hemmed, and hawed, and held the card inside the envelope out to Dunaway as one might hold a menu at a roadside diner in the middle of the night upon realizing they do <i>not</i>, alas, serve breakfast all day. Seeming to think Beatty was being a card himself, Dunaway chuckled, glanced at the card in his hand, and announced the winner, or what she thought was the winner, “La La Land.” But the winner was not “La La Land.” They had the wrong envelope. The winner was “Moonlight.” The kind of mishap typically relegated to the realm of urban legend had happened, and even if people behind the scenes of the Oscar ceremony were scrambling in real time to set things right, it was essentially left to not victorious “La La Land” producer Jordan Horowitz to explain what had occurred, summoning the real victors from “Moonlight” to the stage.<div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Even now, it’s surreal to watch, the show’s host, a crestfallen, almost visibly ill Jimmy Kimmel, trying to intercede, and Beatty explaining himself as in the background various people hand the Oscar statues they did not win to the people who did. (Dunaway, at some point, disappears backstage before flitting out for the Governor’s Party, as if quietly suggesting the shindig’s overriding frivolity no matter who wins, or that maybe the ceremony is just a vessel for the afterparties.) This is where New Yorker staff writer Michael Schulman concludes his sensational 2023 book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Oscar-Wars-History-Hollywood-Sweat/dp/0062859013" target="_blank">Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears</a>. After all, in recounting the nine decades of Academy Awards, the author finds an institution mired in perpetual crisis, where the line between winners and losers is often blurred, and the line between Black and White is not, and a ceremony that tends to be most rememberable when something goes wrong.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfQVlYVmbP8_cd0K3Nv_Vdc-H29NKuUYrReQDG62hE8f_r-3iOQaI81-j3ueRchbdxjeH6QvhnAFJN3KBuj1Lx5wBjx4YBToioCMf3H2lhlMpL5hEiIFCt_7HMOQkONuXmX4Eod6j2CgQ5BUymg37rf-Qc8h3im-K1adxefg931AS2MkHnqRNe/s780/oscar1.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="438" data-original-width="780" height="230" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfQVlYVmbP8_cd0K3Nv_Vdc-H29NKuUYrReQDG62hE8f_r-3iOQaI81-j3ueRchbdxjeH6QvhnAFJN3KBuj1Lx5wBjx4YBToioCMf3H2lhlMpL5hEiIFCt_7HMOQkONuXmX4Eod6j2CgQ5BUymg37rf-Qc8h3im-K1adxefg931AS2MkHnqRNe/w400-h230/oscar1.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">What are the Oscars, and who, exactly, are they for? This is the broad query regularly put forth by the inimitable collective “people” in advance of the Academy Awards, and then after them, especially if the TV ratings were bad. As Schulman’s intro suggests, however, the Oscars are essentially <i>anything</i> for <i>everyone</i>. They are for the pundits, some of whom have regrettably transformed Oscar prognosticating into a full-time job, an enervating year-round activity a la equally enervating never-ending NFL mock drafts. They are for fashionistas, the red carpet just one more runway. They are fodder for opinion columnists, and culture writers. They are the enemies of art, judging it rather than considering it, even if they are what force an industry to view their commercial products as art in the first place. They are as much a scapegoat for the industry’s flaws as they are a symbol. They are for you, and they are for me, and so, they are for all of us and none of us, which is why, as Schulman wryly notes in his first sentence, the Oscars are always getting it wrong. But more than anything, Schulman reckons, the Oscars are about power, “who has it, who’s straining to keep it...perpetually redrawing the bounds of the Hollywood establishment.”</div></div><div><div><br /></div><div>Through this light, the colloquial and existential adage that Awards Don’t Matter has never rung hollower. They do matter, a lot, an industry talisman, and Schulman proves it again and again in eleven rollicking chapters spotlighting Oscar season altercations between management and labor, between Old and New Hollywood, between independents and studios, between rival producers, and rival actors. And they mattered, Schulman illustrates, almost immediately, long before they possessed a historical footprint, highlighting not just the ambitious nature of Hollywood but the innate magnetism of awards. Echoing Carey Mulligan, who recently told The Hollywood Reporter that any actor claiming not to care about winning an Oscar is lying, Schulman evokes the cravings of the silver screen’s biggest, from Frank Capra to Bette Davis to Joan Fontaine to Olivia de Havilland. When the latter lost to Hattie McDaniel for Best Supporting Actress in 1940, she told Entertainment Weekly years later that she “ceased to believe in (God).” For one night, at least. </div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhlyJfAv9fNNL3PQ2qGQkty48IvQ3WP5msI0HJGBIFiOkNVeSsqxKZWzm8V432p7vbfkT5Hd96CpLqgHiBRFeD3cW2-ucC5tq-DCmWsHbUkhC8yVh-moqrRKVgK6glumyC6gCNZdnDQStPjtX2iFrfqLqCO5Y1VskuTHarfu6JYgI0LVjZbDU1/s1360/oscar2.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="576" data-original-width="1360" height="176" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhlyJfAv9fNNL3PQ2qGQkty48IvQ3WP5msI0HJGBIFiOkNVeSsqxKZWzm8V432p7vbfkT5Hd96CpLqgHiBRFeD3cW2-ucC5tq-DCmWsHbUkhC8yVh-moqrRKVgK6glumyC6gCNZdnDQStPjtX2iFrfqLqCO5Y1VskuTHarfu6JYgI0LVjZbDU1/w400-h176/oscar2.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div>Yet, the scope of Oscar Wars simultaneously puts into perspective how so often these awards season scuffles are rendered immaterial by the ultimate agent of indifference, time. William Randolph Hearst and gossip columnist Hedda Hopper might have worked to kibosh Orson Welles winning Best Picture for “Citizen Kane,” or maybe, as Schulman also submits, that was the studio system putting the kibosh on an uppity auteur, but either way, “Citizen Kane” has essentially gone down in the record as the greatest movie of all time, rendering its lack of Oscar love as laughable. The yawning 62-year gap, meanwhile, between McDaniel becoming the first African American to win an Oscar in 1940 and Halle Berry becoming the first African American to win Best Actress for “Monster’s Ball” in 2002 demonstrates the overriding inadequacy of the victories. Like Sidney Poitier, who became the first Black man to win Best Actor in-between in 1964 but whose career ultimately became stuck between a rock and a hard place, the passage of time exposed McDaniel and Berry’s awards as Potemkin Oscars, mere emblematic offerings, a way for Hollywood to claim progress even as everything continued like normal (a new normal, you might say), and the winners were cruelly left twisting in the wind. The book’s most heartbreaking moment is Berry recalling how returning home in the aftermath of her historic victory, she was already sensing how nothing was going to change. The Oscar might lead your obit, as William Goldman said, but so often their real value proves fleeting. </div><div><br /></div><div>Given such recurring narrow-mindedness, it almost beggars belief that the Academy Awards could have lasted a century. It’s not just their homogeny, but their cowardice during the 1950s blacklist, and the anti-labor sentiment rooted in their very conception. Yet, while it might be a stretch to deem the Academy adaptable, more like grudgingly reactive, Oscar Wars also illustrates how it has proved itself to be a wily survivor. Unions threatened the existence of the Oscars almost before they got rolling, yet they wound up co-existing instead, and when the Academy became old and out of touch in the 1960s and was revealed as too old and white in the 2010s, voter purges and infusions of diversity from Academy presidents, respectively, Gregory Peck and Cheryl Boone Isaacs, managed to keep the ship on course. They even survived the infamous opening number of 1989 starring Rob Lowe and Snow White, though show producer Allan Carr did not. You begin the chapter thinking Carr made his own bed; you end it feeling as if Hollywood metaphorically slit his throat, an appeasement to the public so that next year, the show could go on.
</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiab9oXIOCjyC70-XXzbVo-K00bXzXaUZUCMuykoRdzAvR1g2p7kMtWHEOZ1X5GXSnwwv4DzPEX8PwlcmbYQcjaS_kbSOquwdkYqrxsvogDHsQ91HEpzntbembOfK_7_5ED6Px3o7iM5qyhCb6j3B1k-2Z6m5rCn6i3apH3_Ql9kOsvLfbC5rsX/s3000/oscar3.webp" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1956" data-original-width="3000" height="258" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiab9oXIOCjyC70-XXzbVo-K00bXzXaUZUCMuykoRdzAvR1g2p7kMtWHEOZ1X5GXSnwwv4DzPEX8PwlcmbYQcjaS_kbSOquwdkYqrxsvogDHsQ91HEpzntbembOfK_7_5ED6Px3o7iM5qyhCb6j3B1k-2Z6m5rCn6i3apH3_Ql9kOsvLfbC5rsX/w400-h258/oscar3.webp" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div>Despite the Academy’s instinct for self-preservation, in his epilogue, Schulman nevertheless leaves us with the unmistakable impression that the Oscars are at a crossroads. True, they have benefitted from the most recent membership makeover engineered by Boone Isaacs, apparent in this year’s nominations, and there has always been a push and pull between the public’s taste and that of the Academy. But the divide has never seemed bigger, provoking questions not just about Oscar taste but relevance, reflected in dwindling ratings that has led to all sorts of desperate attempts to rope in a broader viewing audience, exasperating the motion picture lifers, a real lose-lose. And that’s to say nothing of the larger existential questions like streaming, and supply chain issues affected by the recent WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. In another time, Will Smith’s Best Actor win in 2022 might have been held up as a happy moment, but instead his slapping Chris Rock mid-ceremony became a symbol of something else, an Academy on the verge of coming undone. Schulman ends his book by describing the image of Smith dancing at the Oscar afterparties, a man Gettin’ Jiggy wit it as Hollywood burns.</div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17951989.post-43332963188963630982024-03-07T06:00:00.005-06:002024-03-07T07:55:39.861-06:001993 Oscar Best Original Song: Revisited<div>Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt’s “I’m Just Ken” and Billie Eilish and Finneas O’Connell’s “What Was I Made For” from “Barbie” marked the 18th time two tunes from the same movie were nominated for the Best Original Song Academy Award, the most recent being “La La Land” in 2016, the first being “Fame” in 1980. The tenth came 30 years ago when both Bruce Springsteen’s “Streets of Philadelphia” and Neil Young’s “Philadelphia” from Jonathan Demme’s Best Picture winner of the same city’s name earned nods. Bruce won the Oscar, and though revisiting this category given my being a widely known <a href="https://www.cinemaromantico.org/2013/07/springsteen-i.html?m=0" target="_blank">Springsteen devotee</a> would seem pointless, well, hey, don’t forget, <a href="https://www.cinemaromantico.org/2023/10/lets-talk-about-born-in-usa-scenes-in.html" target="_blank">I’m mad at Bruce</a>, our 1-percent blue collar hero whose obscene ticket prices are just a reflection of the market, man, so what if you have to sell your house up in Fairview to be able to afford to go see him. Maybe he won’t win our retroactive category! You never know! TBD.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOhgIm2KvluhpX025VmHrfNE1-nIcvceSglOak7o_4KVzgr5SzxrWzBBRSTKDm06ivKKsBfhm_kO7j3AdsJyne57PatiXVcRSgv3DTzKH8lDAgaZ50OFoGQHky8aTuud3olImXY3nfIQvAyEMafLGbBZtWEk8vVNxs-rwPBR5zF_PlqMz0M7-A/s1454/springstreet.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1086" data-original-width="1454" height="299" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOhgIm2KvluhpX025VmHrfNE1-nIcvceSglOak7o_4KVzgr5SzxrWzBBRSTKDm06ivKKsBfhm_kO7j3AdsJyne57PatiXVcRSgv3DTzKH8lDAgaZ50OFoGQHky8aTuud3olImXY3nfIQvAyEMafLGbBZtWEk8vVNxs-rwPBR5zF_PlqMz0M7-A/w400-h299/springstreet.png" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><b><u>1993 Best Original Song Oscar Nominees & Winner (in bold):</u></b></div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUHtwV8wkOU" target="_blank">“Again” from “Poetic Justice”</a> – Music and Lyrics by Janet Jackson and Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis</div><div><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aX3ylDNlqjQ" target="_blank">“The Day I Fall in Love” from “Beethoven’s 2nd”</a> – Music and Lyrics by Carole Bayer Sager, James Ingram, and Clif Magness </div><div><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHpQFF_Et4s" target="_blank">“Philadelphia” from “Philadelphia”</a> – Music and Lyrics by Neil Young </div><div><b><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4z2DtNW79sQ" target="_blank">“Streets of Philadelphia” from “Philadelphia”</a> – Music and Lyrics by Bruce Springsteen</b></div><div><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6VUxXM7Nx0" target="_blank">“A Wink and a Smile” from “Sleepless in Seattle”</a> – Music by Marc Shaiman; Lyrics by Ramsey McLean</div><div><br /></div><div>We are required to remember right up front that this category, as the name implies, is strictly limited to Original Songs, in whatever byzantine way the Academy defines originality, eliminating old pop hits used in movies which should be a category unto itself but, as always, do not get me started. That means “I’ve Got You, Babe” by Sonny & Cher in “Groundhog Day,” as evocative a deployment of pop music in cinema as you will ever get, is verboten, as is a personal favorite, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osGUM0Zz7rA" target="_blank">“I Ain’t Got Nobody” by Louis Prima in Mad Dog and Glory.”</a> Add “Blue Moon Revisited (A Song For Elvis)” by Cowboy Junkies in “Untamed Heart,” <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raeWEAHR-As" target="_blank">“Slow Ride” by Foghat in “Dazed and Confused,”</a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAptFMadyqo" target="_blank">“Saturday Night” by The Bay City Rollers in “So I Married an Axe Murderer”</a> and, once again, my God, what a category. Alas. </div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9VC8To5B-Pdl0FOwGaVlN85n6QeVY79ZBVJa5ZUDS7tA-KLe4TxCa6RH06PLyfgTYfOL3WarQGDeKew2gNP-XyvsDKg4QAdm_CX2hKljieGYH1B8SdUOKvYVU7ZpHBV3PfP5EQbGqwesErua4IjLMDjNfgv7Mzj2sDESlI-M0QYZj8MPe668d/s1024/best%20song.webp" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="556" data-original-width="1024" height="224" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9VC8To5B-Pdl0FOwGaVlN85n6QeVY79ZBVJa5ZUDS7tA-KLe4TxCa6RH06PLyfgTYfOL3WarQGDeKew2gNP-XyvsDKg4QAdm_CX2hKljieGYH1B8SdUOKvYVU7ZpHBV3PfP5EQbGqwesErua4IjLMDjNfgv7Mzj2sDESlI-M0QYZj8MPe668d/w400-h224/best%20song.webp" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div>It’s true that the “Sleepless in Seattle” soundtrack was ubiquitous in 1993, going all the way to the top of the Billboard chart, but do you what soundtrack went to #17 on the Billboard chart that same year? “Judgement Night,” that’s what, a forgettable movie I think I might have watched at someone’s birthday party but with a soundtrack that featured hip-hop and rock artists collaborating and that was destined to appeal much more to a rap-obsessed central Iowa teen. So, “A Wink and a Smile” gets the heave-ho, and though a lot of other “Judgement Night” soundtrack fans might disagree, remember, I’m the sole judge and jury in this category revisitation, and<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2fPIo_lTUQ" target="_blank"> “Missing Link” by Del tha Funky Homosapien and Dinosaur Jr.</a> gets the nod by a mile.</div><div><br /></div><div>I am tempted, <i>really</i> tempted, to nominate a deep cut in the form of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8gTrKkMkHQ" target="_blank">“Don’t Waste My Time” by Lisa Taylor</a> from “The Meteor Man” soundtrack in place of “Again”...but then I listened to “Again,” well, again, and I can’t do Janet like that. That song is still dope. It stays. </div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EecUGOngvM" target="_blank">Delbert McClinton’s “Weatherman”</a> sort of sounds like something the quirky singer-songwriter might have come up with on his own, but no, it was recorded specifically for “Groundhog Day,” and as such, gives “Philadelphia” the boot, no disrespect to Neil Young. </div><div><br /></div><div>As it turns out, 1993 was a heck of a year for material appearing on soundtracks that didn’t qualify for Best Song because of the Academy’s aforementioned byzantine rules, chief among them Tina Turner’s “What’s Love Got to Do With It.” That song won three Grammys but was ineligible at the Oscars. But there was also Boy George’s “The Crying Game,” which was a cover and therefore ineligible too, and even “Soul to Squeeze,” from “The Coneheads,” which I owned on cassingle, even though I never saw the movie, my second favorite Red Hot Chili Peppers track after “I Could Have Lied,” but recorded for the band’s celebrated fifth record “Blood Sugar Sex Magik,” not the movie, and disqualified. </div><div><br /></div><div><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/GW2sSshA624?si=KCAld-VD7DEz9L2n" title="YouTube video player" width="420"></iframe></div><div><br /></div><div>As best I can tell, however, and I really did dig into it as much as I could without emailing director Jon Turtletaub, “Rise Above It” from the “Cool Runnings” soundtrack, credited to a band called Lock Stock & Barrell that I could not find much about, and featuring MC PC and Howard Chen, was an original specifically for the <a href="https://www.cinemaromantico.org/2014/02/cool-runnings-was-good-even-if-it-may.html" target="_blank">beloved (by me) movie</a> about the Jamaican bobsledding team. (I remain available, free of charge, to write the essay for its Criterion edition.) And because the American version of the “Cool Runnings” soundtrack was egregiously released sans “Rise Above It,” and because this was 1993 and before the advent of every single song in the history of the world being a digital click away, and because “Rise Above It” was never going to appear on Q-102 in Des Moines so I could tape it to a mix, I was forced to record it by literally holding my boombox up to the television speaker during the montage featuring the song as it played on my rented VHS. I really did this! And unless we get a last-minute note before the faux restaging of the ceremony, we are including it over the elevator dross of “The Day I Fall in Love.” In fact, you know what, I have loved “Rise Above It” and “Cool Runnings” so much, for so long, that...</div><div><br /></div><div>I was almost going to do it, I swear I was, but I can’t just because I’m mad at Bruce. I’ve written variations of this before, but in eschewing director Jonathan Demme’s request for a rock song to essentially write a hymn instead, Springsteen transformed the opening credits of “Philadelphia” into nothing less than a preamble of America itself. I watch it now, and I still get goosebumps. What’s more, in rewriting history, I don’t wish to erase Burce’s Oscar speech, “Back to the Future”-style. Have you <i>seen</i> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYG3oigQDzc" target="_blank">that Oscar speech</a>? Eloquent, thankful, and to the point. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQV91ON2yak" target="_blank">“The Line”</a> is a model of the story song, and that is the model of an Oscar speech. “You do your best work and you hope that it pulls out the best in your audience and some piece of it spills over into the real world and into people's everyday lives, and it takes the edge off of fear and allows us to recognize each other through our veil of differences. I always thought that was one of the things popular art was supposed to be about, along with the merchandising and all the other stuff.” </div><div><br /></div><div>[Wipes away a tear.] Dammit, it’s almost enough to make me think I’m not mad at him anymore. </div><div><br /></div><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/aViW5QQoVko?si=QZNnIWB270eP0CNt" title="YouTube video player" width="420"></iframe>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17951989.post-6443546424558163932024-03-05T06:00:00.046-06:002024-03-05T08:07:19.765-06:00Let's Remember Some Early Paul Giamatti Roles<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEik1GRMpaKYWilCAdtZBzMgVLiC5YqprkdLxLMhOUtEjX9GbpxHGrG1RxtHEN8t3BYYNwrMruoh9kN1wzHD2rTFgcjud1Pl3hQUFEXATUBB85KqsndpCWLAfd6sU2ze0VboQ7rhXw2PTdvGmiMU5xQ9NJt-JMhOC25s0mgRTV2WVMdEqRNeted3/s2000/paul.webp" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1089" data-original-width="2000" height="221" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEik1GRMpaKYWilCAdtZBzMgVLiC5YqprkdLxLMhOUtEjX9GbpxHGrG1RxtHEN8t3BYYNwrMruoh9kN1wzHD2rTFgcjud1Pl3hQUFEXATUBB85KqsndpCWLAfd6sU2ze0VboQ7rhXw2PTdvGmiMU5xQ9NJt-JMhOC25s0mgRTV2WVMdEqRNeted3/w400-h221/paul.webp" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div>If the Oscar fortune tellers are to be believed, Cillian Murphy has emerged as the front-runner for Best Actor, meaning that it might well not yet be Paul Giamatti’s “time.” I can’t lie, it breaks my heart a little bit. Then again, if Giamatti does not win, perhaps it’s appropriate. Perhaps this isn’t the way Giamatti was meant to win. After all, twenty-ish years ago, when Giamatti was first blowing up, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/07/movies/07carr.html" target="_blank">a New York Times article</a> by the late David Carr wrestling with the actor’s unlikely leading man status, Giamatti said of himself: “I have the mentality of a supporting actor.” Indeed, Giamatti might have graduated from the illustrious Yale School of Drama, but there were no red carpets rolled out for the 56-year-old when he first showed up on the Hollywood. His father Bart might have been the Commissioner of Major League Baseball, but in Hollywood, Paul was no golden boy, no Bryce Harper, no Adley Rutschman, he was just some guy; he was Steve Buechele, he was Tim Teufel, he was Mike LaValliere. </div><div><br /></div><div>
His first official credit was in the 1991 thriller “Past Midnight,” which was also Quentin Tarantino’s first credit (he got one as producer after rewriting the script), and which I have never watched though <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upMVAlAVQ4U" target="_blank">the trailer</a> kind of makes me want to? After that, it’s a bunch of itty-bitty bit parts, and then a step or two up from itty-bitty bit parts, and then some smaller supporting roles, even after his break in Howard Stern’s “Private Parts.” “I think those are the hardest,” Giamatti said of his early roles at<a href="https://www.independent.com/2024/02/15/paul-giamatti-blows-us-all-sideways-with-a-peek-at-himself/" target="_blank"> the Santa Barbara International Film Festival’s Cinema Vanguard Awards</a>. And it’s why even though I wouldn’t mind discussing the actor’s prickly surprise in roles like “Win Win” and “Barney’s Version,” or even going long on his electrifying delivery of exposition in “San Andreas,” in seeking to celebrate Giamatti, I find myself thinking most about his earliest roles, when we didn’t even know it was him.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpmK_O0Gvr-IAz83FERIBfMMJ1Fbf4AYhA35mxONkL8CVpDiOKIVGwvbfkd_RlgeZGkXIpQU7_DuSOAYoalTWZAq2e4HlYWfnGN-Gx7K816uCiS1ZQSSC8lpTqj3ylsHgPBQTHpGXOsqjTc6J5uBVqsyCDmfERMyTaP14wTT_0lsMboa4nYqZJ/s500/paul1.gif" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="276" data-original-width="500" height="223" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpmK_O0Gvr-IAz83FERIBfMMJ1Fbf4AYhA35mxONkL8CVpDiOKIVGwvbfkd_RlgeZGkXIpQU7_DuSOAYoalTWZAq2e4HlYWfnGN-Gx7K816uCiS1ZQSSC8lpTqj3ylsHgPBQTHpGXOsqjTc6J5uBVqsyCDmfERMyTaP14wTT_0lsMboa4nYqZJ/w400-h223/paul1.gif" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div><div><b>Singles (1992).</b> “I thought he was literally going to swallow her,” says Campbell Scott to Kyra Sedgwick after their date in Cameron Crowe’s comedy about the credited Kissing Man (Giamatti) slovenly making out with his lady friend across the way. And that’s how Giamatti plays it, committed to the bit, and even getting a one-word line, “What?,” which is not angry, or loud, just genuinely incredulous. Wasn’t everybody publicly making out in coffee shops in early-90s Seattle?</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitqy2jYmU-xOeJgydZyauWRJPEUAqdRdYJISfIrj5Gkzn_k4VnjjgDVdvBag7WikWuPGRvAAtnB9YompdLK-AklcY51_8ErXD2ItFaYN4bUp1091Ck_C3jAwcckpcpNecgCxfOEHP_JJPFEpoKTPWiu8CgN1QeA0YWcmUyJNoIqm8NEouVuLfU/s828/paul2.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="828" data-original-width="828" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitqy2jYmU-xOeJgydZyauWRJPEUAqdRdYJISfIrj5Gkzn_k4VnjjgDVdvBag7WikWuPGRvAAtnB9YompdLK-AklcY51_8ErXD2ItFaYN4bUp1091Ck_C3jAwcckpcpNecgCxfOEHP_JJPFEpoKTPWiu8CgN1QeA0YWcmUyJNoIqm8NEouVuLfU/s320/paul2.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div><b>Mighty Aphrodite (1995).</b> If his part in “Singles” was designed to stand out, his part as the Extra Guilds Researcher in <strike>Woody Allen’s</strike> 1995 comedy was designed as just the opposite. And he does what is asked, nothing more, a team player. If he didn’t turn out to be Paul Giamatti, would you have even remembered he was in it? I didn’t! And I once owned this movie on VHS!</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhf87vsUtB_vhxEZBsyyNfQUfdThrATvHn8mw9PuXS24hRFZZEWcOSJdj-xeZAOmWLowd9j-Hoq1KaK-F7AosQ659nLaGvvFWYxVxcwsEqLfTFOTFvRf4QICTd7_D_KSf3AyMl36lnjOjsDYujjCdshLtEHyWQu0T-NXHh_CxvNk13M5LXyWj7b/s1544/paul3.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="675" data-original-width="1544" height="182" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhf87vsUtB_vhxEZBsyyNfQUfdThrATvHn8mw9PuXS24hRFZZEWcOSJdj-xeZAOmWLowd9j-Hoq1KaK-F7AosQ659nLaGvvFWYxVxcwsEqLfTFOTFvRf4QICTd7_D_KSf3AyMl36lnjOjsDYujjCdshLtEHyWQu0T-NXHh_CxvNk13M5LXyWj7b/w400-h182/paul3.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div><b>Donnie Brasco (1997). </b>As FBI Technician, Giamatti, and Tim Blake Nelson in one of his earliest roles too, are enlisted as the inherently geekier counterpoints to the cooler undercover Johnny Depp while he is giving his <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FV9y0nySqMg" target="_blank">unforgettable monologue</a> about what “forget about it” means. In fact, here Giamatti gets to take his own stab at “forget about it,” as if giving us an orange with none of the juice, and going to show, years before “Spy” (2015), that deep down, every technician wants to get on the field. </div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNS4II7t20J9riBcj-UMsp-10o2mWxObZPphIxfD7i5GDBplTzd9csydjOt-4w8WpcS8glo5gx-2AyrUAIUFPKXM-BO282JeV5n36q-uf2DEVJK7vcVdrXSjThkmmYnsFu-01kgnJRXjxArr22r9gcefA35ZGybt5QmQZw8qjhNOjHuEA3bkpI/s500/paul4.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="209" data-original-width="500" height="174" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNS4II7t20J9riBcj-UMsp-10o2mWxObZPphIxfD7i5GDBplTzd9csydjOt-4w8WpcS8glo5gx-2AyrUAIUFPKXM-BO282JeV5n36q-uf2DEVJK7vcVdrXSjThkmmYnsFu-01kgnJRXjxArr22r9gcefA35ZGybt5QmQZw8qjhNOjHuEA3bkpI/w400-h174/paul4.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div><b>My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997).</b> Released the same year as “Private Parts,” you could make an argument that Giamatti’s walk off role here demonstrated his burgeoning excellence just as much. It’s one scene, but as Richard the Bellman, Giamatti effortlessly transitions from service industry schmo to guardian angel, the way his character shares a cigarette with the one played by Julia Roberts underlining not only how they <i>share</i> the scene but how so many little moments like this one go together to make something big.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_knF3rvnMmowFa3PW97FzdcuJZk3yB34NTO-wzJrVvUGNDnHUScB918oNha-efcm23LEpKX_g30TbMPdJvfIAYpb_deIUkCvNGTR3WSC-4ToFlvLlXJnP1Rt1f33xtJyjPSgh7-AKU76pIy5RJe_LI0HGjeij1x4VUC2LWeSW-bm55Dm8pqY2/s600/paul5.webp" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="325" data-original-width="600" height="216" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_knF3rvnMmowFa3PW97FzdcuJZk3yB34NTO-wzJrVvUGNDnHUScB918oNha-efcm23LEpKX_g30TbMPdJvfIAYpb_deIUkCvNGTR3WSC-4ToFlvLlXJnP1Rt1f33xtJyjPSgh7-AKU76pIy5RJe_LI0HGjeij1x4VUC2LWeSW-bm55Dm8pqY2/w400-h216/paul5.webp" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div><b>Saving Private Ryan (1998). </b>If in “My Best Friend’s Wedding,” Giamatti winningly played off Julia Roberts, in “Saving Private Ryan,” he winningly played off Tom Hanks, or more accurately, winningly portrayed the loser spiritual opposite of Tom Hanks, no small thing. And in doing so, he renders it totally believable that this meathead would pull off his boots in the middle of a skirmish to try and get out a hitchhiker to trigger the sequence’s climax. </div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgM2KgrM4ZTKvGt18UzkzsSnUgjmrcKVlDkhJn-US_6AGI3-dwngfxU068u451NOmsQ8_nTG48FNfQ2f4hK2z1vn4LOw8S3rAz-7H8WPdgVMiKcY9_c8IGImy25pG-XY01hXvOKII2t46Q2i7AOdBY2Ux06bzO21BdoxGmEhw4W6NnJoc-TXDyc/s1024/paul6.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="576" data-original-width="1024" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgM2KgrM4ZTKvGt18UzkzsSnUgjmrcKVlDkhJn-US_6AGI3-dwngfxU068u451NOmsQ8_nTG48FNfQ2f4hK2z1vn4LOw8S3rAz-7H8WPdgVMiKcY9_c8IGImy25pG-XY01hXvOKII2t46Q2i7AOdBY2Ux06bzO21BdoxGmEhw4W6NnJoc-TXDyc/w400-h225/paul6.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div><b>The Truman Show (1998). </b>If Steven Spielberg employed Giamatti as the spiritual opposite of Tom Hanks, then Peter Weir employed Giamatti as the spiritual opposite of Christof (Ed Harris), creator and executive producer of the eponymous reality television show, the schlemiel to Christof’s God. You need the guy who will lose track of “the world’s most recognizable face,” you call Paul Giamatti. </div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17951989.post-76339846009477254922024-03-04T06:00:00.023-06:002024-03-04T06:00:00.152-06:00American FictionI cannot rightly claim to have read Percival Everett’s 2001 novel “Erasure” on which “American Fiction” is based, and so I can’t say what is similar and how they differ, and which is best. But I have seen Spike Lee’s 2000 satire “Bamboozled” in which a Black television writer creates a Black minstrel television show out of anger at the medium’s misrepresentation that becomes a hit instead. It’s not an unfair comparison because the narrative is eerily reminiscent of the one in writer/director Cord Jefferson’s Best Picture-nominated adaptation of “American Fiction,” and it’s a useful one, too. Because whereas Lee’s satire is truly that, exaggerated, hyperbolic, Jefferson has virtually strained all his satire out, melding it with a domestic drama rendered in such a polite aesthetic that the caricature mostly just plays as regular old comedy. There’s an early scene when author and professor Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright) is on his phone, detailing how racism doesn’t really exist while a cab drives right by him, picking up a white passenger instead. It’s a familiar joke that Chris Rock radically re-altered a quarter-century ago (!) in his Bigger & Blacker stand-up special, an inadvertently deft illustration of a movie that wants to comment on the times yet feels behind them, nonetheless. <div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBR_6xCxAkpA77d8yVfvkGfe-MO6I8qdXbpEWBt-4mKRLqgqMF_7Bb4r3hp2zQ4fOOji5oQozGRv_YF5EYwFAcD0rhfK_5adrPk-h7HQntM9XDRWjL3doKjEQRcwa7K9LCt_2pNFvemmA2SsC358nBPwgZ2Eo7riXkvpTBuFHp81Gd8OloU0c9/s681/fiction1.webp" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="383" data-original-width="681" height="233" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBR_6xCxAkpA77d8yVfvkGfe-MO6I8qdXbpEWBt-4mKRLqgqMF_7Bb4r3hp2zQ4fOOji5oQozGRv_YF5EYwFAcD0rhfK_5adrPk-h7HQntM9XDRWjL3doKjEQRcwa7K9LCt_2pNFvemmA2SsC358nBPwgZ2Eo7riXkvpTBuFHp81Gd8OloU0c9/w400-h233/fiction1.webp" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div>“American Fiction” begins with Monk being placed on temporary leave by his university after putting a problematic, in the parlance of our times, Flannery O’Connor quote on the markerboard. The presentation of this moment, however, in which an offended student walks out, is less provocation on the movie’s part than evocation of Monk as a man out of time. His terminal lack of place is underscored at a literary seminar where he leaves his poorly attended panel for a packed one with Sintara Golden (Issa Rae) who has become the toast of the publishing world with a book titled We’s Live in Da Ghetto, exploiting the sort of African American stereotypes that Monk detests, and are eaten up by white liberals with a spoon. Between the standing ovation that follows, and the blackened bar to which Monk repairs after, he is rendered as essentially invisible, a modern version of Ralph Ellison’s famous protagonist. </div><div><br /></div><div>In a fit of rage, Monk pens his own version of the same sort of book under a pseudonym, My Pafology by Stagg R. Leigh. Intending it merely as a middle finger to his own industry, it becomes a best-seller, necessitating a cover story, that his pseudonym belongs to a wanted fugitive, meaning he cannot appear in person to promote the book. Even as the lie grows, Monk is forced to deal with more grave matters back home in Boston. His sister Lisa (Tracee Ellis Ross) dies of a sudden heart attack, leaving the distant son to negotiate his mother’s (Leslie Uggams) descent into Alzheimer’s while also struggling to corral the impulses of his newly divorced and gay brother (Sterling K. Brown). </div><div><br /></div><div>The more traditionally dramatic scenes at home begin well, especially in the chemistry that Wright and Ellis Ross achieve in their scenes together, movingly embodying two people who clearly have not seen one another for a long time yet share a history they can’t deny. It’s so good, in fact, that it’s unfortunate her character has to die to trigger the narrative, and that the history their characters share never feels as charged as it does with anyone else. Monk’s mother, his brother, especially his late father, the roots never go all the way down, these characters and relationships just skimming the surface, too obviously revealing this whole parallel narrative as an allegory for the sorts of Black stories that Monk would rather see in popular culture. The dueling storyline of Monk’s book success, meanwhile, feels like satire directed by, well, the dude directing the other half of the movie, gently humorous rather than humorously bracing, and oddly unimaginative. The one scene from My Pafology played out as fantasy comes across staged and deadened rather than an illustration of the imagination, and the worldwide phenomenon of his book never really comes through.</div><div><br /></div><div>It would have been interesting to see Wright’s restrained performance contrasted against a truly explosive satire, a man who can’t put back in the box what he has unleashed, but as it is, he melds with the tamer impulses of this “American Fiction” anyway. It’s as if Monk is never entirely committed to playing Stagg R. Leigh in the first place, and as if the walls confining a Black artist in this world can’t really be breached. That’s what makes the end, of all things, the best element in the movie, which brings it to a conclusion though something apart from a true resolution, Wright playing his final act as a kind of weary sigh, resigned to sacrificing himself, in a manner of speaking, for nothing much at all.</div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17951989.post-52308378415341385972024-03-01T06:00:00.068-06:002024-03-01T12:50:28.402-06:00Friday's Old Fashioned: Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFXL_thOANIXnpWXmTP3dyCFgIdsYOJ38cb_NVVV4ezxV5D2YZ7XGRay0oBkF8nkqKY_QDZwCh4peXINQFyx2r4M2j0NyTow1BWBRo3Fhg7lbCwN0CKxrcz8DSpQcLNf6Y4jlJW7p2VHTChSKDGgwPkaQoKAAroxJx3VKfaMdauqKQdgCD52Hv/s1200/berlin.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="900" data-original-width="1200" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFXL_thOANIXnpWXmTP3dyCFgIdsYOJ38cb_NVVV4ezxV5D2YZ7XGRay0oBkF8nkqKY_QDZwCh4peXINQFyx2r4M2j0NyTow1BWBRo3Fhg7lbCwN0CKxrcz8DSpQcLNf6Y4jlJW7p2VHTChSKDGgwPkaQoKAAroxJx3VKfaMdauqKQdgCD52Hv/w400-h300/berlin.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div>As part of its Settle In series, “six films that test the limits of runtimes,” the Gene Siskel Center here in Chicago recently screened “Berlin Alexanderplatz.” Based on the famous 1929 German novel by Alfred Döblin, the 1980 adaptation written and directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder was originally presented as a television miniseries in West Germany, 13 parts plus an epilogue running 902 minutes. That’s nine-hundred-and-two, a little over fifteen hours, if you’re keeping score, which I certainly was, and My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife and our friend Chad with whom we went to see it were probably keeping score too. It was too long for the Gene Siskel Center to condense into a single day, in fact, prompting two showings on Saturday and Sunday, February 3rd and 4th. That was the day after Groundhog Day, of course, which in many respects has become as associated with living the same day of your life over and over thanks to the Harold Ramis 1993 movie borrowing the holiday’s name. And it was appropriate that our showing of “Berlin Alexanderplatz” coincided with Groundhog Day weekend since, honestly, Sunday felt a lot like Saturday. Our alarm went off at the same time, we caught the train downtown at the same time, the movie started at the same time (11 am), the three of us stood in the exact same place at each brief intermission, chatting and stretching as we geared up to go watch some more, we essentially ate popcorn (which was made free) for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. “I think I’m tripling down on the popcorn,” Chad said at the second intermission on our first day and My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife and I followed suit. It was only two days, I know, not the seeming lifetime that Phil Connors lived in “Groundhog Day.” But then, have you ever watched a 15-hour German movie about the doomed Weimar Republic over the course of two days? It feels endless.</div><div><br /><div>I don’t mean this as a criticism. Rarely, if ever, has my experience watching a movie so effectively mirrored the movie itself, not just its immersive nature but the almost punishing emphasis on repetition and the habituating plight of its main character, Franz Bieberkopf (Günter Lamprecht). He is released from prison as the movie opens after serving four years in the murder of his girlfriend Ida and into a Berlin that is a mess of conflicting interests and ideologies, and Franz himself is nothing less than a walking, talking confliction, a hectoring brute, and a happy buffalo, in one astonishing sequence falling off the wagon by drinking three beers and cooing to each one like it’s his little newborn baby, as amusing as it is devastating as it is gripping, more gripping, in fact, than most movies these days in total (see photo above). As it demonstrates, Franz is determined to stay on the straight and narrow but can’t, swept along in the economic, political, and social maelstrom, and never quite smart enough to realize he’s stupid, making the same mistakes again and again. Fassbinder underlines this in ways as small as the relentlessly blinking neon light outside Franz’s apartment, or the roughly sixteen-thousand glasses of kummel he imbibes, and big, like the murder of Ida, seen in flashback over and over, and not just a flash but the whole gruesome thing, a sin for which he cannot atone. All this might call to mind the Biblical Job, but the real parallel is the Book of Ecclesiastes, which the narrator essentially quotes mid-movie, “Man’s fate is like that of the beasts,” adorned with images of a slaughterhouse, equating Franz Bieberkopf, and man in general, with animals biding time until they are butchered. </div><div><br /></div><div>The epilogue, then, when it arrives, is as discombobulating as it is refreshing, in a sense. Driven to madness, and into a mental asylum, much of the concluding Part XIV is a trip into Franz Bieberkopf’s psyche. There is so much happening here, and it is all ripe for literary study, but as movies in this vein often are, it’s best just to let yourself go and feel your way through the aesthetic punchbowl. What has very much been in a movie set during 1929 suddenly feels of its own time in the hairdos and disco balls and angels that are like less glam versions of Ziggy Stardust, as My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife noted, yet not of its time either, with Janis Joplin and Leonard Cohen and Velvet Underground on the soundtrack. Released in 1980, it was a year ahead of MTV, and if you told me Fassbinder’s epilogue inspired a legion of confounding Bonnie Tyler-like MTV music videos, that reading would be as good as any. Whatever it is, it’s what I was in the mood for, whether I knew it or not, having been in a movie theater for virtually two days straight, my knees and back beginning to ache, filled to burst with popcorn, my mind swimming from a Voodoo Ranger IPA, ready to leave but still needing to stick it out, I felt like I was starting to hallucinate and so does the movie, two moods merging as one. When we came to, Franz Bieberkopf seemed not found, though not quite lost either, more like the fleshy antithesis of “2001’s” Star Child, reconciled, and without thought, sleepwalking toward, well, 1929 Germany, you know what.</div><div><br /></div><div>Afterward, standing on the sidewalk outside the Siskel Center in the darkness, the weekend somehow going by in the blink of an eye despite spending it watching a 15-hour movie, Chad, who had proposed the idea in the first place, thanked us for accompanying him on the journey, before noting, circumspect but not necessarily critically, “I probably wouldn’t do it again.”</div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17951989.post-36219692509159340322024-02-29T06:00:00.082-06:002024-02-29T06:00:00.238-06:00Lessons in Darkness (cont.)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiakTdqD8ZsFbrB_zEH2_IHiDFkzw6j-hhvgD1Qj3gZnuWaNR6YV1daB99cYUruGgOYcqQut5kReKR-mOxonqjWP6V317h4rYs07VGekhGMmwRw8igUX1VRqyo7pJu6O42x4gcZZS5JLqXh_Mxr_w6mwtIrMsJ6eSb1MvO07N69eoYyoqi9eUrm/s1280/lessons.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="720" data-original-width="1280" height="230" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiakTdqD8ZsFbrB_zEH2_IHiDFkzw6j-hhvgD1Qj3gZnuWaNR6YV1daB99cYUruGgOYcqQut5kReKR-mOxonqjWP6V317h4rYs07VGekhGMmwRw8igUX1VRqyo7pJu6O42x4gcZZS5JLqXh_Mxr_w6mwtIrMsJ6eSb1MvO07N69eoYyoqi9eUrm/w400-h230/lessons.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">In a Best Picture race that is all but over, Werner Herzog at least threw a little more flour into the dying flame with his controversial, or maybe just confusing, <a href="https://variety.com/2024/film/news/werner-herzog-barbie-hell-1235920960/" target="_blank">remarks on Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie.”</a> Talking to noted horse’s ass Piers Morgan, the eccentric and esoteric German director was asked to weigh in on the Barbenheimer phenomenon that in so many ways defined moviegoing in 2023. Herzog confessed he had yet to see “Oppenheimer,” likely Best Picture winner, but of “‘Barbie,’” he said, “I managed to see the first half-hour. I was curious and I wanted to watch it because I was curious. And I still don’t have an answer, but I have a suspicion – could it be that the world of ‘Barbie’ is sheer hell?” Of course, Herzog also admitted he had only watched the first 30 minutes of “Barbie,” which perhaps ruled his view out of order, though plenty seemed to suggest he was just out of order in the first place. </div><div><br /></div><div>Though like most takes on “Barbie,” if not most takes in general, this one could stand to just be laughed off and ignored, I feel somewhat qualified to weigh in, nevertheless. After all, astute readers might note that this blog’s banner deploys a phrase - The Ecstatic Truth - of one Werner Herzog. What is The Ecstatic Truth? That can be hard to pin down. He sort of laid it out many years ago in a 12-page speech in Milano, Italy, <a href="https://www.bu.edu/arion/files/2010/03/Herzog.pdf" target="_blank">translated by Moira Weigel</a>, describing The Ecstatic Truth as “the enemy of the merely factual.” In his discursive manner, he eventually arrives at another explanation, describing “a deeper stratum of truth—a poetic, ecstatic truth, which is mysterious and can only be grasped
with effort; one attains it through vision, style, and craft.” He submitted another version of that same sentence <a href="https://www.rogerebert.com/roger-ebert/herzogs-minnesota-declaration-defining-ecstatic-truth" target="_blank">in 1999 at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis</a>, transcribed by the late Roger Ebert who deemed it the “‘Minnesota Declaration’ of (the director’s) principles.” “There are deeper strata of truth in cinema,” Herzog explained, “and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.” </div><div><br /></div><div>Fabrication, and imagination, and stylization? Werner, baby, <i>that’s</i> “Barbie.” But then, as some on social media suggested, was Herzog even really <i>insulting</i> “Barbie,” or was he <i>complimenting</i> it in his own enigmatical way? After all, the final point of his 12-point Minnesota Declaration is this: </div><div><br /></div><div><i>“Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of a hell that during evolution some species - including man - crawled, fled onto some small continents of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue.”</i></div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCR_PltdXRHJWMcIl-nPjYPM6Jrz3jjLDgrZo2ef5pSenYkxnGfFGbnKUqAo4CG-YYymeQgsy92j_oRCUuGhyphenhyphenCuVSL0YqNMKBZS8zHA1TVuYuCyuEZqIkaHPj6aJWldLIUXl6qcL0MuDKwvZaD5eo_4hnnes87lK9dZbqoP_PmG-VoEUi_zOZT/s2048/land.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="978" data-original-width="2048" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCR_PltdXRHJWMcIl-nPjYPM6Jrz3jjLDgrZo2ef5pSenYkxnGfFGbnKUqAo4CG-YYymeQgsy92j_oRCUuGhyphenhyphenCuVSL0YqNMKBZS8zHA1TVuYuCyuEZqIkaHPj6aJWldLIUXl6qcL0MuDKwvZaD5eo_4hnnes87lK9dZbqoP_PmG-VoEUi_zOZT/w400-h200/land.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div>I mean, could one not argue that <i>is</i> “Barbie?” Barbieland is life in a pink-hued ocean of artificial hell, and in traveling out of Barbieland to the real world, and eventually passing from plastic doll to human, Barbie herself has evolved, crawled, and fled, with a conclusion suggesting nothing if not the Lessons of Darkness continuing. “Oppenheimer” can have Best Picture, mate, no worries; “Barbie,” on the other hand, found something deeper, the poetic, ecstatic truth.</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17951989.post-67987168978046897802024-02-27T06:00:00.003-06:002024-02-27T06:00:00.158-06:00One Perfect MomentIt might seem strange to consider Tony Gilroy’s “Michael Clayton” (2007) in conjunction with Wim Wenders’s “Perfect Days” (reviewed yesterday), even if, like me, the former is a movie you are thinking about all the time. “Perfect Days” is a contemplative drama in which nothing much happens. Indeed, nothing much happening is the point. It is a portrait of mindfulness, of a man, Hirayama (Kōji Yakusho), fully aware of and present in the moment, and how he seeks to remain that way each successive day. “Michael Clayton” is a fast-moving crime thriller with a jigsaw plot structure and an eponymous character (George Clooney), a law firm fixer, who is anything but mindful, his mind always churning instead, eternally on the clock, evinced in the opening scene’s early morning consultation. He is dealing with familial strife stemming from a deadbeat brother, and a bar business that went bust in part because of his deadbeat brother, and a mob debt on account of the bar business that went bust, and trying to wrangle one of his firm’s lawyers who has gone off the deep end, or maybe just come to see the light, making a case against his biggest client who, in a way, Michael starts making a case against too, all of which comes to a head during a fateful drive through the country roads of upstate New York in a car with a bomb wired to the GPS by two corporate hatchet men who are tailing him, or trying to, and trying to find the right moment to trigger the explosion. <div><br /></div><div>The contrasts extend further than the narrative too, and to the character, the performance, the framing. Hirayama is frequently seen alone in “Perfect Days,” but he is not alone, whether reading in his small apartment by lamp, or eating alone at a noodle bar, a picture of contentment. In images of Michael Clayton alone, on the other hand, he is the furthest thing from. When he’s sitting at a police precinct, waiting for the off-the-deep-end attorney he is struggling to corral, Clooney puts his chin on his hand, staring into space, and you can practically see his mind on everything. One of my three-hundred favorite moments in the whole movie is when Michael is in his office and on the phone with a client and says “Let me get a pen,” even though we can see he already <i>has </i>a pen in his hand, and as he momentarily lowers the phone, pretending to go find a pen, he comes across as a bone-weary man trying to steal a moment for himself in a world that won’t let him have it.</div><div><br /></div><div>There is one moment ostensibly confounding moment in “Michael Clayton,” “the case of the three horses,” as a Roger Ebert Answer Man column put it the year of the movie’s release. This moment occurs at the climax, when Michael is driving around upstate New York, and suddenly pulls off to the side of the road, and gets out of his car, and ascends a small hill, all because he is riveted by the semi-surreal sight of three horses all on their lonesome in the early morning light. It’s true that Gilroy has planted little seeds in the narrative to make this make literal sense for the message board-styled critics, but it’s also true that you could not so much interpret this moment a thousand different ways as <i>project</i> what you think this moment means a thousand different ways, as Googling “Michael Clayton horses meaning” will attest. But a movie is only “exactly what is shows us,” as the esteemed Ebert also once noted, “and nothing more.” And what we have is an unmindful man who, for the first time all movie, becomes fully aware of the moment, and only the moment, and as his car going up in flames over his right shoulder illustrates, that newfound mindfulness saves his life. </div><div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtPhQf29YNg7WGB_CoKYH7-aLpnt5zcvfWYPGJ1pCU9CjG-QKIPb-vTPzEhKz8B8aF9UlKYrJsqqUHo00SU9fXhunVxSlZG2fbft6eS9t5VEeeS2tyQw43FstJ8v4D_5W64J9EziYsE8XSAAIIgdVz3jyQ-OWb_6crF02JiG_2SZJyHF1C5JQ0/s600/clayton.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="223" data-original-width="600" height="155" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtPhQf29YNg7WGB_CoKYH7-aLpnt5zcvfWYPGJ1pCU9CjG-QKIPb-vTPzEhKz8B8aF9UlKYrJsqqUHo00SU9fXhunVxSlZG2fbft6eS9t5VEeeS2tyQw43FstJ8v4D_5W64J9EziYsE8XSAAIIgdVz3jyQ-OWb_6crF02JiG_2SZJyHF1C5JQ0/w400-h155/clayton.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17951989.post-7341990471769676682024-02-26T06:00:00.030-06:002024-02-26T06:00:00.131-06:00Perfect Days<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuR7TSPA10vgK188pVEkW3GFRwQrhfLRkQ3sn_n-JBohdCVJVD_67bmacg7kZycnQKWyH8dnzMoLNxoqgpw-4GM3eoedigI0i7XSB7J_q4UiPs-T4bJl00krf4o6Cj-2RdiuRp-rDf_q9nZcBEdxkA02Co9vBIWaMUzM3DDyWBBhQrcWEWnmSN/s2048/days.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1152" data-original-width="2048" height="233" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuR7TSPA10vgK188pVEkW3GFRwQrhfLRkQ3sn_n-JBohdCVJVD_67bmacg7kZycnQKWyH8dnzMoLNxoqgpw-4GM3eoedigI0i7XSB7J_q4UiPs-T4bJl00krf4o6Cj-2RdiuRp-rDf_q9nZcBEdxkA02Co9vBIWaMUzM3DDyWBBhQrcWEWnmSN/w400-h233/days.png" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div>Hirayama (Kōji Yakusho) wakes every morning in his small Tokyo apartment naturally, no alarm clock, to the sound of a woman sweeping up outside, suggesting the sleep of the contented. He trims his salt and pepper moustache and steps outside, stopping to glance up at the sky before grabbing a canned coffee from a nearby vending machine and setting forth on his job cleaning public toilets across the wide expanse of the Japanese capital, evoked in the name emblazoned on the back of his blue uniform, The Tokyo Toilet. When he’s done for the day, he cleans up at a public bath, grabs dinner at the same subway noodle shop, and then settles in for the evening, reading, usually a classic, until he turns out the lights and goes to sleep, seeming to dream in half fragments of the day he’s just experienced, like he really does live 24 hours at a time.</div><br />
These are Hirayama’s perfect days, in other words, and for an hour of this two-hour movie, this is essentially all it is, plotless, and defined by the smallest variations, slight changes in camera angles, a different cassette tape on his way to work, Van Morrison one day, Lou Reed another. At lunch in the same park each afternoon, from the same bench, Hirayama looks up at the trees, noting the cracks of light between swaying leaves, snapping a photo that he files away with the hundreds and hundreds of photos before, suggesting “Perfect Days” as a sort of cinematic version of Monet’s haystacks, intending to capture the small shifts in the everyday. <br /><br />
Initially, there is no drama, no real conflict, even his job, suggesting something unpleasant, features no more trouble than an annoying co-worker and a still-drunk salaryman stumbling for a place to relieve himself. Gradually, however, hiccups emerge. His annoying co-worker up and quits, leaving Hirayama to cover two shifts in one day. His niece shows up announced, leading her mother, his sister, to come find her, leading to brief, cold interaction hinting at familial drama. An interruption of a routine toward the end prompts Hirayama to buy beer and cigarettes, suggesting an addictive past. But that’s all these are, suggestions, as Wenders pointedly refuses to fill in blanks, never following up on these narrative strands and forgoing a voiceover that might have provided more clarity. That, however, is not the kind of clarity Wenders seeks. <br /><br />
Though Hirayama favors legacy acts on his musical cassette tapes, one artist he does not play is Bruce Springsteen, though I kept thinking of him anyway, and how his work in the 90s, both released and unreleased, is packed with his own variations of lines about slipping, or shedding, his skin. Hirayama has shed his skin too, and all these encounters signify fragments of the past he has left behind. And that’s where they remain, too. They do not alter his future, because in “Perfect Days,” there is no future, and there is no past, there is only now, a line he literally says at one point, which, for a minimalist movie, I honestly could have done without. And that only goes to show why “Perfect Days” requires no voiceover; whatever he says, would be redundant. <div><br /></div><div>What needs to be said is said in Hirayama’s face, in his expression, in his looking to the sky, in the way he cracks open his can of coffee, in the way he leans back at the noodle bar, so that you can practically see contentment wash across his face. More than merely a man sticking to his routine, “Perfect Days” is a portrait of mindfulness. </div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17951989.post-67921359803392054982024-02-23T06:00:00.016-06:002024-02-23T06:00:00.155-06:00Friday's Old Fashioned: The Match Factory Girl (1990)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikK66vDdLwIwuQ2KSomBtP2WFCM3iHnokVNYQECfEHwEeNxr8Amu3y9HM0lvmQLOkzRhRSgSZ7FSL1ueqdSPBTdFAPTk_OP6fAzjb_fu71f_QNTrX1XUP0Yv5HbLQABf4mUc3hpKwGXm5Nf6985sBaHBvWYHo8FQKNQxXUYMaifAHXyk7k9jGk/s1000/match.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="621" data-original-width="1000" height="257" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikK66vDdLwIwuQ2KSomBtP2WFCM3iHnokVNYQECfEHwEeNxr8Amu3y9HM0lvmQLOkzRhRSgSZ7FSL1ueqdSPBTdFAPTk_OP6fAzjb_fu71f_QNTrX1XUP0Yv5HbLQABf4mUc3hpKwGXm5Nf6985sBaHBvWYHo8FQKNQxXUYMaifAHXyk7k9jGk/w400-h257/match.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div>“The Match Factory Girl” brought Finnish director’s Aki Kaurismaki’s Proletariat Trilogy (see: two previous Friday Old Fashioneds) to a close by essentially mirroring the execrable downward mobility of the exploited working class. Indeed, it is the grimmest of the three, by far, and perhaps why it’s also the shortest, running just seven minutes over an hour. If it went any longer, you might be tempted to drink rat poison yourself. But then, I’m sort of giving away the end. No, “The Match Factory Girl” appropriately begins as an industrial montage, two minutes taking us through the processes of the eponymous workshop, seeing exactly how a matchstick, or matchsticks, get made. You’d be forgiven, in this moment, for thinking the machines have won, and not in the Marxist utopian sense but in a John Mellencamp writes an album about Skynet sense. It takes two minutes before we see a human being, Iris (Kati Outinen), working on the matchmaking line, and even then, it takes several more minutes before we hear a person speak. And when we do, it’s not her, it’s her father, and when he does, you wish he wouldn’t, not once, not ever again.</div><br />
Iris still lives at home, even though her parents treat her like dirt, and falls in love with a man, Arne, who thinks she’s a prostitute, and when she gets pregnant with his kid, he tells her to get rid of the brat. It’s relentless, this movie and her life, living as existing as a series of gut punches. In long shots, Iris seems to disappear amid her drab surroundings, the bleak(er) Nordic version of the <a href="https://arresteddevelopment.fandom.com/wiki/Milford_School" target="_blank">Milford Academy</a> stressing that one should be neither seen nor heard. In close-ups, she betrays nothing, her unforgettable visage, the slope of her forehead, like a human eave, the daily rain of b.s. rolling right off. And though Kaurismaki’s entire trilogy might exist on a muddy line between crying and laughing, “The Match Factory Girl” stretches that line the furthest, a movie that virtually sacrifices any kind of commentary to simply sustain itself as one, long grim mood, pushing you and her to the breaking point until finally, at the end, it figuratively twists its lips into a blackly comic grin. Sometimes you just have to laugh knowing that the world is a hellhole from which there is no escape. Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17951989.post-40813394981840446262024-02-22T06:00:00.006-06:002024-02-22T06:00:00.124-06:00Ten Biopics + OneIf you thought Peter Jackson’s 3-part, 468-minute <a href="https://www.cinemaromantico.org/2022/03/get-back.html" target="_blank">“Get Back”</a> was as close to a definitive, what-else-do-we-need experience of The Beatles, a rock n roll band from Liverpool, as we were ever gonna get and/or needed, think again. This is 2024, son, savvy? Rather than leave the people wanting more, we seek to give the people more than they ever needed, or better (worse) yet, wanted, and so Sam Mendes has <a href="https://variety.com/2024/film/news/beatles-movies-sam-mendes-directing-four-films-2027-release-1235916841/" target="_blank">announced plans</a> to make four Beatles movies, one biopic each of John, Paul, George, and Ringo, sort of the cinematic version of each member of four-person Kiss recording his own solo album in 1978. And that, as it absolutely had to, got me to thinking. It got me to thinking about what band I would want to see get the same treatment.<br /><br />
There are so many ways to go here, too many fact, so many that no matter how many bands I mention, I leave myself open to comments of “What about…” and “You didn’t mention…” Still, it’s too tempting not to attempt. Dueling Hall & Oates film would be sublime. Three Smashing Pumpkins joints would be great, mainly because I imagine Billy Corgan demanding final cut on all of them. If my faux movie studio had unlimited funds, I would green light a movie about every Go-Go in a heartbeat. But the only suitable answer, at least from where I’m blogging, has to be Fleetwood Mac.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhe1J8yWXLDied1ZxpSk_S-m4LZeIxdy8XmYsT08nJctz8IEC0eKnwGQ8Zw3ToT7s6d8maP9BcsNwalMwVLUEqsSSEDrMNGoSNLxm5Ujifnn5fLJFTJo3yNAZZDhiF-gBZc1IzuvBW26lhWfNFNu9XfBFZo5SArq_OsJJnDuAzH278LT1oUHfUB/s624/mac1.webp" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="420" data-original-width="624" height="269" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhe1J8yWXLDied1ZxpSk_S-m4LZeIxdy8XmYsT08nJctz8IEC0eKnwGQ8Zw3ToT7s6d8maP9BcsNwalMwVLUEqsSSEDrMNGoSNLxm5Ujifnn5fLJFTJo3yNAZZDhiF-gBZc1IzuvBW26lhWfNFNu9XfBFZo5SArq_OsJJnDuAzH278LT1oUHfUB/w400-h269/mac1.webp" width="400" /></a></div><br />
The only real problem with a Peter Green movie followed by a Jeremy Spencer movie is that we would need 60s Dennis Hopper to direct them both.<br /><br />The Fleetwood Mac rhythm section will be combined into one movie, recounting the period when Mick Fleetwood and John McVie just tried holding the whole thing together between Green & Spencer and Buckingham & Nicks.<br /><br />
The Christine McVie movie would cool things off, at least a little. <div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgE4fEwLpO-FWm4ATujewkA0NPPJDSOBBd42LR3l8ZZbXrWFgD3TtuZLfTBbxiGGwtE_PmP8xxd56h6Jy1Opp0J3ul31FCPaRf65bjzEJG8pL7N0S5NOLhxSa8Rhjisnh70FFbq50YrwdxmBlY8JqCS2_O-eT8yCltSwBsl34mxBeydaNrwxTKs/s3004/mac2.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2097" data-original-width="3004" height="279" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgE4fEwLpO-FWm4ATujewkA0NPPJDSOBBd42LR3l8ZZbXrWFgD3TtuZLfTBbxiGGwtE_PmP8xxd56h6Jy1Opp0J3ul31FCPaRf65bjzEJG8pL7N0S5NOLhxSa8Rhjisnh70FFbq50YrwdxmBlY8JqCS2_O-eT8yCltSwBsl34mxBeydaNrwxTKs/w400-h279/mac2.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div>There would be six Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham movies, three each, all of them answering the one before it.<br /><br />Buckingham I. <div>Nicks I. </div><div>Buckingham II. </div><div>Nicks II. </div><div>Buckingham III. </div><div>Nicks III.<br /><br />
Then a Stevie Nicks solo movie.</div></div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5gBH1juNxwr09E5mWLAzO_1MmuhQo0B0L1JDgtKYSeOTvD8Nc6Lx-_uWmHjUK8rneNS-wyRclCV3oCwW2tp5GlfWxAkbfrIOWP42MU-8Yj0GUOyp3YapGq0lJxWwLLSQv5XzPvefSYCYX9RIok6s852stjUWWNRTIZv27gzlmcCaxnEkFdhQf/s1123/mac4.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="617" data-original-width="1123" height="220" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5gBH1juNxwr09E5mWLAzO_1MmuhQo0B0L1JDgtKYSeOTvD8Nc6Lx-_uWmHjUK8rneNS-wyRclCV3oCwW2tp5GlfWxAkbfrIOWP42MU-8Yj0GUOyp3YapGq0lJxWwLLSQv5XzPvefSYCYX9RIok6s852stjUWWNRTIZv27gzlmcCaxnEkFdhQf/w400-h220/mac4.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17951989.post-72561526544173833612024-02-20T06:00:00.139-06:002024-02-20T06:00:00.137-06:0020 Days in Mariupol<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuR_qDQ_qfH80uWgHbErd9AK81arG2giSe0UfgT6F3Qo6p6WKPlN6q5jDbt6oVYuRou14x4IYLKraPBcBsd8Hxl68VyOOjm2N3fvAIK-I5qrsGtOftEpIEEaaQNQT1ZrRqTD1VPWsFWGTQqdE9NQ7JGlcH6GaTCx6rrBoJ6Z25egHAADMzDXr5/s1920/20%20days.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1080" data-original-width="1920" height="228" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuR_qDQ_qfH80uWgHbErd9AK81arG2giSe0UfgT6F3Qo6p6WKPlN6q5jDbt6oVYuRou14x4IYLKraPBcBsd8Hxl68VyOOjm2N3fvAIK-I5qrsGtOftEpIEEaaQNQT1ZrRqTD1VPWsFWGTQqdE9NQ7JGlcH6GaTCx6rrBoJ6Z25egHAADMzDXr5/w400-h228/20%20days.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div>As “20 Days in Mariupol” begins, three Ukrainian journalists, including director Mstyslav Chernov, watch from a Mariupol hospital as black plumes of smoke from artillery shells rise in the distance and tanks emblazoned with the letter Z, marking them as Russian, roll into view. It feels like something culled from a war movie aiming for intense realism, but this is no docudrama, this is a documentary, and when the camera briefly zooms out so that we see one of the journalists perched at the window, snapping pictures of the unfolding scene outside, it breaks the spell. “Film it,” someone says in a line functioning as the film’s dire mantra. Chernov and his Associated Press colleagues, Evgeniy Maloletka and Vasilisa Stepanenko, might have eschewed fleeing the eponymous city in the Donetsk Oblast as Russian forces mounted their invasion of Ukraine in 2022, but they are not cowboys, and this is not “Live from Baghdad,” the 2002 HBO movie recounting CNN’s broadcast of the beginning of the Gulf War. Those airstrikes were timed specifically for the American evening news and became advertisements, militaristic cheerleading, the “We’re going to war!” scene in “Starship Troopers” (1997) lived out for real. “20 Days in Mariupol,” on the other hand, takes the form of Chernov’s detached voiceover, numbed by trauma. </div><div><br /></div><div>Though occasionally Chernov and his team are waved away by people who would rather not appear on camera, they are just as frequently approached by people who would, like a policeman specifically wanting to bear witness to the atrocities he has seen, or a doctor who matter-of-factly recounts a pregnant woman who lost both her own life and her baby, transforming the entire documentary into something akin to moving testimony. The images here are as brutal as they are relentless, death and terror and the terrorized aftermath, people with no place to go, their homes destroyed, their lives violently upended. Chernov repeatedly shows us the images that he and his skeleton crew shot, and then he shows us these same images being broadcast over various news networks, at home and abroad. This is less self-congratulatory than an evocation of their mission, to show the world what’s happening, all of “20 Days in Mariupol” rendered in the image of one shot peering through a spider-webbed window caused by a bullet, a cracked view into this obscene conflict. </div><div><br /></div><div>“My brain wants to forget what I saw,” Chernov says at one point in voiceover, “but the camera will remember.” It’s an observation as broad as it is specific, underlining the purpose and power of a movie camera in the first place, and becoming an emphatic rejoinder to Russia’s UN Ambassador, seen near the doc’s end dismissing so much of the footage emerging from Mariupol as fake news, the standard-issue deflection of blowhards, con artists, and strongmen, daring us to bury our heads in the sand, to not believe all that we have just seen. Watching this unfold, you can only hope there is a Chernov on the ground in Gaza right now. </div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17951989.post-76385391261935698782024-02-16T06:00:00.002-06:002024-02-16T06:00:00.253-06:00Friday's Old Fashioned: Ariel (1988)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqzrO687DFh7HeqYKR4MaiFqvomm8_EH93QQgX6leJrD80vkTO3Yh1wnZFuBgVA7Pui3GwswdF3x2S2HvEINNO_eRjTIq5ocDDfbhPDCoxBRrDElYjWhRt8JyDSM35-dqP_R6qH6SVuheU46k-0R_YZk5g3Mex52ree22Vxy6kaEEPWVbbREr2/s1600/ariel.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="900" data-original-width="1600" height="231" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqzrO687DFh7HeqYKR4MaiFqvomm8_EH93QQgX6leJrD80vkTO3Yh1wnZFuBgVA7Pui3GwswdF3x2S2HvEINNO_eRjTIq5ocDDfbhPDCoxBRrDElYjWhRt8JyDSM35-dqP_R6qH6SVuheU46k-0R_YZk5g3Mex52ree22Vxy6kaEEPWVbbREr2/w400-h231/ariel.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div>As “Ariel” begins, Taisto (Turo Pajala) is put out of work when his mine in the far north of Finland closes. Seeking council in a café, Taisto’s father hands over the keys to his 1962 white Cadillac convertible, councils his son to leave town and get further south, that staying put will leave him drunk or depressed, or both, hands over the keys to his car, goes into the bathroom and blows his brains out. It is difficult to explain without the scene’s accompanying tone just how funny this is, so long as you’re into bleak humor, which, I confess, I whole-heartedly am. It’s evocative of a movie in which the characters speak little yet when they do, tend to say exactly what they mean, no fuss, no muss, and pitched between a line of all-out surrender and taking extreme action, evocative of a world so downtrodden there isn’t much middle ground left between the two. Taisto simply lights another cigarette after his dad’s demise, then packs up what he little he owns, withdraws all his money from the bank, and drives his new car away, the wooden shed where it’s been kept crumbling in the background he does, barely one step ahead of a fallen world. </div><div><br /></div><div>In this, the second of writer/director Aki Kaurismäki’s so-called Proletariat Trilogy (see: previous Friday Old Fashioned), there are echoes of The Coen Brothers, the formerly united Ethan and Joel who were getting their start around the same time, and whose movies are often akin to elaborate torture devices for their main characters, comic theaters of cruelty, to borrow a phrase by the critic J. Hoberman. Indeed, as Taisto hurries south, he is beaten and robbed of all his money, loses a dock-working job to make that money back, and winds up in prison after he roughs up the very same thief who robbed him. That all sounds like a comic maze of cruelty, too. Yet, in his tall, wiry physique and long black hair, Taisto never comes across like a mere punching bag, cutting the image of an off-kilter movie star, like if Hollywood had known how to utilize 1990s Kevin Corrigan, and his character, and those he counters, virtually breathe defiance. When he meets cute with a meter maid (Susanna Haavisto), she tosses her meter maid hat to the ground and goes for a joy ride in his convertible. After he sells his convertible for peanuts to an unscrupulous dealer, he eventually goes and steals his car back, manifesting the point where antihero loops around to become hero again.</div><div><br /></div><div>An early scene when Taisto briefly bunks in a hostel ultimately feels no different from when he’s locked up in his prison cell, underlining how little difference there is in “Ariel” between the world outside and inside the cell. When Taisto and his cellmate (Matti Pellonpää) make an escape, it’s less about breaking out of prison than it is taking the moose by the antlers, though this sense of carpe diem is as ironic as it is earnest, mirrored in deploying “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” as the credits roll, not to mention just about the greatest deadpan payoff I have ever seen in a movie. It involves the convertible, and the top that won’t go up all movie, and when it finally does, the characters watching with the air of people watching explosions in the sky with the air of people watching paint dry, it’s as if shelter from life’s storm is just that close, and yet so far, so very, very far away.</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17951989.post-3536070682565345162024-02-14T06:00:00.029-06:002024-02-14T06:00:00.139-06:00Maestro“Maestro” begins with American conductor and composer extraordinaire Leonard Bernstein (Bradley Cooper) playing his home piano. For a second, you might think he is alone, until you notice the television cameraman hovering in the upper left-hand corner of the screen, and as the shot gradually closes in on Bernstein, the more cameras and lights come into view. He is performing, in other words, an apt emblem for a movie that is all about performance, and as much about performance in terms of its filmmaker and star and his co-star as it is about Bernstein, making for a fascinating yet frustrating film. After this sequence, we flash back to the past, the day Bernstein takes a call in his bedroom to guest conduct the New York Philharmonic, setting him on his way to professional glory. When the call ends, the dark curtain that has been drawn over a large window, is suddenly thrust open, revealing an exultant Bernstein standing on a window ledge. It put me in mind of Seinfeld’s immortal Elaine Benes saying of Rava’s boyfriend, the flamboyant possible thief Ray, and his penchant for theatrical flourish and melodramatic monologues, “Shouldn’t you be out on a ledge somewhere?” Cooper spends all of “Maestro” on the ledge.<div><br /><div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjB7SuAeFLoqh9PQ_hXkcJL4vAkRuCarn9fLBpK-QA4_M4xgmZ1fiuC1bQLL0oa9FklVM_4Yen2iAyHQJC4aiMova1i4EEUjduEXmQnbLO6Rw5gzYJxFp2_1y19Ry6osDLx2K_eXGP8er-BanarLRNtaiiMu0iy1a91d1m5-z1Wk4tIftijY_fM/s1024/maestro.webp" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="587" data-original-width="1024" height="233" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjB7SuAeFLoqh9PQ_hXkcJL4vAkRuCarn9fLBpK-QA4_M4xgmZ1fiuC1bQLL0oa9FklVM_4Yen2iAyHQJC4aiMova1i4EEUjduEXmQnbLO6Rw5gzYJxFp2_1y19Ry6osDLx2K_eXGP8er-BanarLRNtaiiMu0iy1a91d1m5-z1Wk4tIftijY_fM/w400-h233/maestro.webp" width="400" /></a></div><br />In directing and co-writing the screenplay with Josh Singer, Cooper has opted out of making a traditional biopic, eschewing Leonard’s childhood and even forgoing any real insight into what made him a musical savant and how that manifested itself. No, “Maestro” suggests an artier “Walk the Line” in so much as the latter, despite a cut and paste kinda non-quality, found its spine through the love story of Johnny Cash and June Carter in so much as “Maestro,” too, preeminently functions as a love story of Leonard Bernstein and Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan). Indeed, it proves <i>her</i> movie as much as his, foreshadowed in that same opening scene where in his on-camera interview, Leonard talks of sensing his deceased wife’s presence in their home, as if she’s still with him in death. In Cooper’s telling, Felicia was very much a moon pulled along in the orbit of Leonard’s massive planet, though one with the wherewithal to keep up. “You have a lot of energy,” he says to her the first time they meet, and the ring Cooper gives this line lets you know it’s a compliment. And though I can’t confess to knowing the real nature of their relationship, and though it is crucial to note “Maestro” was made with the blessing of Bernstein’s children, indicating a movie made in the image of their own feelings on the subject, despite all the wrenching complications that go hand-in-hand with Bernstein’s bisexuality, there is genuine electricity between Cooper and Mulligan that makes their love believable in spite of it all. </div><div><br /></div><div>If a thousand movies have contained a Supportive Spouse standing in the shadows, Cooper pulls Felicia into the spotlight, demonstrating her own artistic pursuits and honoring her point-of-view, literally even, slipping into a breathtaking shot from her perspective as she lies on her deathbed. And if he puts Felicia in the spotlight, he puts Mulligan there too, putting her name first in the closing credits and offering her smattering of smashing close-ups, ones in color that come across like moving Life Magazine covers, and a monochrome one on a sidewalk as she walks toward the camera as the camera moves toward her, as if illuminating its pull toward her, the wordless language of movie stardom laid out before us. In other shots, though, like the camera gradually pressing in on Felicia as she lays on her side on a blanket, telling a friend about her husband’s incompatible dimensions, Cooper is essentially allowing Mulligan’s acting to carry the image. That occurs later, too, for both of them during a Thanksgiving Day row, conveyed in one take and a long shot that turns their blocking into a reflection of the words. It works so well to leave each character spent and wrecked that the comic capper of a Macy’s Parade balloon floating past in the background falls flat.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCFc1ii95PS8mnjgKAQ6FXZq6KFWVJQDHgn3S69GDyCDOhQh9P0bh9IlfAVFQmFx5PGNx8KQtnJkoFlnwUoJXlkmQU5scm0G-H4mmb33r-LPJX9xGd0tW8iu6mUTYLrwClbOYIubwJAZW5tVApQkL8lpflhjljd3wgav2G5n8Pw-7GWgW36bJt/s2866/maestro2.webp" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2160" data-original-width="2866" height="301" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCFc1ii95PS8mnjgKAQ6FXZq6KFWVJQDHgn3S69GDyCDOhQh9P0bh9IlfAVFQmFx5PGNx8KQtnJkoFlnwUoJXlkmQU5scm0G-H4mmb33r-LPJX9xGd0tW8iu6mUTYLrwClbOYIubwJAZW5tVApQkL8lpflhjljd3wgav2G5n8Pw-7GWgW36bJt/w400-h301/maestro2.webp" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div>For all the attention lavished on Mulligan, however, Cooper the director kind of hangs Cooper the actor out to dry. His controversial prosthetic nose and considerable old man makeup as Bernstein all would seem to symbolize how Cooper vanishes into the character, though in reality, the opposite is true, how despite so much virtual transformation, Cooper <i>himself</i> still shines through. This is never more acute than the climax in which Bernstein conducts the London Symphony Orchestra in Mahler’s Resurrection. Recounted in a six-minute single take, Bernstein is left drenched in sweat, though because Cooper has done so little to demonstrate his character’s conducting genius, what makes him one, how he harnesses the power of the orchestra, this moment becomes nothing more than an exhibition of Cooper’s own technique. It isn’t Bernstein’s sweat we’re seeing; it’s Cooper’s.</div></div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17951989.post-86235488905068176792024-02-12T06:00:00.163-06:002024-02-12T08:01:33.524-06:00Old Movies That Could Have Streamed After the Super Bowl<div>Just as the importance of the Super Bowl halftime show (is Halftime Show capitalized?) has waxed and waned over the years, so too has the importance of the post-Super Bowl time slot. When I was growing up, the former was extraneous, background noise for bathroom breaks and loading up on more pulled pork while the latter was of great consequence, utilized by whatever network was airing the big football game that year to launch a new show, like “Airwolf” in 1982 on CBS or “The Wonder Years” in 1988 on ABC, or to try and take an already big show higher, like NBC did for “Friends” in 1996, or Fox did for “Malcolm in the Middle” in 2002. Now, though, the pendulum has swung the other way. The Super Bowl Halftime Show (?) has become a showcase event for music’s biggest and the lead-out Super Bowl show has become a half-hearted shrug. This year CBS chose to premiere something called “Tracker,” which sounds like “Poker Face” if Natasha Lyonne was a survivalist. No thanks.</div><div><br /></div><div>This no doubt stems at least in part from the growing irrelevance of broadcast TV, mostly just existing these days for live sports, not what comes after the live sports. And why stick around for “Tracker” when you could just, like, go stream that new “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” show, or the new last season of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” or “The Equalizer 3” on Netflix. Speaking of Netflix, in 2018 the streaming company tried to an invent a whole new Super Bowl lead-out move by surprise premiering “Cloverfield Paradox.” It did not draw as many viewers as Netflix might have guessed, though, and nobody has attempted to replicate their move again. And though I could pitch some brand-new movie ideas for the post-Super Bowl future, I found myself thinking more about the past, and what movies released the same year as certain Super Bowls might have worked as mythical streaming lead-outs. </div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><u><b>Old Movies That Could Have Streamed After the Super Bowl</b></u></div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7dlwjQtGdS8tKJR11y5L1ZkRTlzFYDWT3iFv9Z5CyS0L0F5LndwhF2cewx40jyAmHwgXFZ0-yR5ihTKHDs8TZE4dp2l51jHlUn0NnL0ZsciwUw9coB1-Cazoxkk-MjT8OsqUv15CRynnWM90C-tkd66WbBxEU-YM1qZd9rsK2BFHVxZTKJR4q/s3000/super1.webp" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1941" data-original-width="3000" height="259" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7dlwjQtGdS8tKJR11y5L1ZkRTlzFYDWT3iFv9Z5CyS0L0F5LndwhF2cewx40jyAmHwgXFZ0-yR5ihTKHDs8TZE4dp2l51jHlUn0NnL0ZsciwUw9coB1-Cazoxkk-MjT8OsqUv15CRynnWM90C-tkd66WbBxEU-YM1qZd9rsK2BFHVxZTKJR4q/w400-h259/super1.webp" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div><b>Big Trouble in Little China. 1986.</b> The 80s were weird, man, and I like thinking of the people still somewhat sentient after the Chicago Bears’ famous demolition of the New England Patriots, seeing John Carpenter’s (eventual) cult classic, and wondering if they are hallucinating. And if this movie is a little, shall we say, much for broadcast TV, then we will just substitute Willard Hyuck’s “Howard the Duck.”</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAi2dN_QKrR_QnAJnwmwcO7u1-pD12FIb1c8qFPaLCHexBzNYdYcFXhEJf2_V0UakCY61aKvAWXvC0wkSJw6_yiGd0Hias3NmU3AB7dQ7Pko0kCNKj3F_HIP96xaT2UttgO7NUR0vuXOU8BqxfG0m4y24GI6jm2vqEGzcYJVVuz_QE-qqOkKH5/s1920/super2.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1080" data-original-width="1920" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAi2dN_QKrR_QnAJnwmwcO7u1-pD12FIb1c8qFPaLCHexBzNYdYcFXhEJf2_V0UakCY61aKvAWXvC0wkSJw6_yiGd0Hias3NmU3AB7dQ7Pko0kCNKj3F_HIP96xaT2UttgO7NUR0vuXOU8BqxfG0m4y24GI6jm2vqEGzcYJVVuz_QE-qqOkKH5/w400-h225/super2.png" width="400" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div><b>Who’s Harry Crumb? 1989.</b> This was the John Candy Super Bowl, as in, just before San Francisco 49ers quarterback Joe Montana led this team on their exalted game-winning 92-yard drive, he deflated tension in the huddle by pointing out comedy legend John Candy in the stands. But what if Candy being there was not just a coincidence? What if it was a psyop (sorry), foreshadowing NBC airing Candy’s detective comedy at game’s end, maybe giving it the audience it deserved (from a certain point of view) all along?</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkZtGpSlvyTFTnuLqEZMwSsB5uHkdppVCgSJxFikCTx6mbpp8Ol-R5aem6-fmyCKzHFQNhcaA_KdhImadUR4B6Nxf0N_rLwsYgfPBwY8kFUvV-sWp_-DdQtdZwXK0pCbuJILOAcusTyM0erW9R-P2PICiwfX3DLmmfN2PlkNWwdRuEgb3X-XRk/s465/super3.webp" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="279" data-original-width="465" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkZtGpSlvyTFTnuLqEZMwSsB5uHkdppVCgSJxFikCTx6mbpp8Ol-R5aem6-fmyCKzHFQNhcaA_KdhImadUR4B6Nxf0N_rLwsYgfPBwY8kFUvV-sWp_-DdQtdZwXK0pCbuJILOAcusTyM0erW9R-P2PICiwfX3DLmmfN2PlkNWwdRuEgb3X-XRk/w400-h240/super3.webp" width="400" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div><b>The Bonfire of the Vanities. 1990.</b> The San Francisco 49ers beating the Denver Broncos 55-10 remains the biggest blowout in Super Bowl history. Brian De Palma’s notorious bomb from the same year would have been the perfect lead-out, watch 20 minutes and fall asleep, the way it was meant to be seen.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxncFBthFrzH1fC8Lh1RcpqnUxStucDdpSqVnIbzZaM_FRO53xmrkTm53LqzwbY9XDzRCvyOU7W0cFVWrSgqzEvPuxJEwBVWTTNZo6vbG96XmX9xmlfY0IYOrh2YW49eVX031E7hXytm_Sk44hPzKCaB6qSSsMEHuGiy_0CRVbxcX4cTDIFyyp/s600/super4.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="600" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxncFBthFrzH1fC8Lh1RcpqnUxStucDdpSqVnIbzZaM_FRO53xmrkTm53LqzwbY9XDzRCvyOU7W0cFVWrSgqzEvPuxJEwBVWTTNZo6vbG96XmX9xmlfY0IYOrh2YW49eVX031E7hXytm_Sk44hPzKCaB6qSSsMEHuGiy_0CRVbxcX4cTDIFyyp/w400-h200/super4.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div><b>A Night at the Roxbury. 1998.</b> Never mind that Super Bowl XXXII was on NBC and this SNL Studios production could have been an impeccable tie-in, what I’m thinking here is more how the game in which hapless Super Bowl straight man John Elway finally won ended weirdly on an incompletion by Green Bay Packer quarterback Brett Favre that was an injudicious pitch to covered receiver. And how the Butabi brothers dream of a club where the inside is the outside would have fit the mood.</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDqmOTXolwUnluenEA3Ob5lPUwqGwZ6xIJo-ypo6NbJhSuTOQXiAptD5M-CWtN94autW-hEah1ICsNzs0YG1VeMRADB5tZzh1cjkZ2ZGLLPypdb1fxUYGJjHlvbgwSRqwAsoDwjGaz-eijNyXlakU8B3BHlDSCCP6Vx48L0tC19m8fOfTG2ZYR/s800/super5.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="800" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDqmOTXolwUnluenEA3Ob5lPUwqGwZ6xIJo-ypo6NbJhSuTOQXiAptD5M-CWtN94autW-hEah1ICsNzs0YG1VeMRADB5tZzh1cjkZ2ZGLLPypdb1fxUYGJjHlvbgwSRqwAsoDwjGaz-eijNyXlakU8B3BHlDSCCP6Vx48L0tC19m8fOfTG2ZYR/w400-h200/super5.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><b>Jurassic Park 3. 2001. </b>There have been a lot of bad super bowls, but Ravens - 34 Giants - 7 gets my vote for worst. Beyond boring, just awful. And if they had premiered the third “Jurassic Park” right after, it would have looked so good in comparison! It would have been a smash!</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMBxuxQk5GjqZ1XLw6Ma7zDGuFI-ScfpbVJaRlYeR1Wonh_nK4PaUQkTcqRYoKbPAcEBcdCnwYgV0PcfRFvRDcyuXYoSDSy9oD9V4muX9dcKN2PyzGL7UTwcIyDG0G8hyV-54h3QHxd7vU1q34Oq2f2Nvy63ctE6fAxsuSMVBwHFNQrX8vlGPl/s1920/super6.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1040" data-original-width="1920" height="216" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMBxuxQk5GjqZ1XLw6Ma7zDGuFI-ScfpbVJaRlYeR1Wonh_nK4PaUQkTcqRYoKbPAcEBcdCnwYgV0PcfRFvRDcyuXYoSDSy9oD9V4muX9dcKN2PyzGL7UTwcIyDG0G8hyV-54h3QHxd7vU1q34Oq2f2Nvy63ctE6fAxsuSMVBwHFNQrX8vlGPl/w400-h216/super6.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div><b>Along Came Polly. 2004.</b> Only Philip Seymour Hoffman going for broke might have been able to repurpose all that asinine puritanical outrage toward Janet Jackson into after the fact acceptance of the indelicate.</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17951989.post-75229519774847810562024-02-09T06:00:00.001-06:002024-02-09T06:00:00.316-06:00Friday's Old Fashioned: Shadows in Paradise (1986)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgf_aVBBxotIXVdbmLf5_oTbfKDhv_g6W6SZ2VSk1TVybbgBnkA0HF1CYLP0KK5jVyXiHEdIpR2pLn69VNnSqtaVM2ftvA4ARWNqAAoc2B1_EAe2qGpIZWL6Nj8xH2S6U-ddlsGeElu7ZNa0uVLddaOTso8EyiwQeX18jvbTsDD1CBDaTDTtDuz/s800/shadow.webp" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="800" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgf_aVBBxotIXVdbmLf5_oTbfKDhv_g6W6SZ2VSk1TVybbgBnkA0HF1CYLP0KK5jVyXiHEdIpR2pLn69VNnSqtaVM2ftvA4ARWNqAAoc2B1_EAe2qGpIZWL6Nj8xH2S6U-ddlsGeElu7ZNa0uVLddaOTso8EyiwQeX18jvbTsDD1CBDaTDTtDuz/w400-h225/shadow.webp" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div>“I’m not going to die behind the wheel,” declares an unnamed garbageman (Esko Nikkari) as he advises in monosyllabically impassioned terms about starting his own trash collecting company. “Then where?” wonders his younger co-worker Nikander (Matti Pellonpää). The unnamed garbageman replies: “Behind a desk.” Oh Lord, it’s hilarious, in the grimmest possible way, that line of Noah Emmerich’s in “The Truman Show” about how he’d kill for a desk job taken to the most mordant of extremes, like the journey from blue collar to white collar is as epic as crossing the Matterhorn, and evocative of the deadpan humor coursing through “Shadows in Paradise” and how it is firmly entrenched between not knowing whether to laugh or to cry. That’s how Nikander looks, in fact, when his co-worker’s dream of dying behind a desk goes unrealized when he suddenly kicks the bucket, like he’s caught in the purgatory between laughing at the cruelty, or crying from the absurdity, or maybe the other way around. Instead, he gets drunk, gets in a fight, and gets put in jail for the night.</div><div><br /></div><div>
Part one of writer/director Aki Kaurismaki’s so-called Proletariat Trilogy refuses to sentimentalize, low wage work or anything else, for that matter. Like Nikander being denied entry to a fancy restaurant, he understands his place in the world, on the outside looking in, haunting, you might say, the dim shadows of paradise. This could have rendered his character a rebel, and the supermarket checkout clerk, Ilona (Kati Outinen) with whom he meets cute does, in fact, steal a lockbox flush with cash when she is unceremoniously laid off. Yet, if this suggests a crime movie, two lovers on the run, Nikander instead schemes a way to give the money back. He does this as a romantic gesture, though what they have, it really isn’t romantic at all, as she sort of comes to tolerate him more than love him. (For their first date, he takes her to a bingo hall, the G-rated, straight-faced Nordic version of Travis Bickle taking Betsy to the adult movie.) No, Nikander’s emergent friendship with his cellmate (Sakari Kuosmanen) during that night in jail ultimately proves as important as his relationship with Ilona, misfits, all of them, who find some semblance of strength in solidarity against a world that doesn’t necessarily even seem to want them. </div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17951989.post-61916437774885474722024-02-07T06:00:00.277-06:002024-02-07T08:01:31.268-06:00In Memoriam: Carl Weathers<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPTjFb4ArMdJbCgNkVYDBURbaICdQO89IVAI_XiD3CAJiHsdhNzV-PVfXjrzSr0QE5Y-yYYEtRIkaPhU0RdezhjZR2U_8HorgL6BuIEiTaA8n-c-d-IkcsLcDoo5Yvd4b3X-a6szn0xsHPJJ3wuZPvN4g8dYfNMYlZGXMLAJd-nPq4Sk1f_bOZ/s1500/weathers.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="1500" height="268" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPTjFb4ArMdJbCgNkVYDBURbaICdQO89IVAI_XiD3CAJiHsdhNzV-PVfXjrzSr0QE5Y-yYYEtRIkaPhU0RdezhjZR2U_8HorgL6BuIEiTaA8n-c-d-IkcsLcDoo5Yvd4b3X-a6szn0xsHPJJ3wuZPvN4g8dYfNMYlZGXMLAJd-nPq4Sk1f_bOZ/w400-h268/weathers.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div>Carl Weathers was born in New Orleans in 1948 and grew up in the Crescent City before making his way to California, attending Long Beach Poly High, and then Long Beach City College, and then transferring to San Diego State on a football scholarship. His senior year, the team clinched an undefeated season by beating Boston University in what for most of its existence had been known as the Junior Rose Bowl before being rechristened the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasadena_Bowl" target="_blank">Pasadena Bowl</a>. College football bowl games and movies, that’s sort of the unlikely nexus of my oft-incongruous interests, and few people have ever occupied that space more than Carl Weathers. “He was a serious drama student even when he was a football player,” Weathers’s SDSU teammate Donnie Rea told <a href="https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-12-28-sp-1007-story.html" target="_blank">the Los Angeles Times in 1986</a>. “All he did in the shower was recite Shakespeare and sing his next part in the play.” Weathers was drafted by the Oakland Raiders but never made it in the NFL, criticized by his coach John Madden for not being tough enough, maybe because Weathers had a thespian’s sensitivity, or maybe because as Weathers himself <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1979/06/25/carl-weathers-of-rocky-ii-in-search-of-something-cerebral/23cfbd13-1383-444a-a3d0-2257defaa43c/" target="_blank">alluded to</a>, he wasn’t interested in the grind, just didn’t care about football the same way he did about acting. Either way, professional football’s loss was art’s sizable gain. </div><div><br /></div><div><div>
After several appearances in Blaxploitation movies and familiar television shows of the mid-1970s, Weathers received his career-making break in John G. Avildsen’s “Rocky” (1976) by playing heavyweight champion Apollo Creed who gives a Philadelphia underdog Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone) a title shot. And if Rocky made Stallone’s mealy-mouthed mumbling famous, it made Weathers’s charismatic baritone famous too. “Apollo Creed versus the <u>I</u>-talian Stallion,” he says, chuckling to himself as he does, one of those movie lines I sometimes say to myself apropos of nothing. “Now that sounds like a damn monster movie.”</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjerghyphenhyphen-NTveQrJWjrAzzbpBkQzJjcOcAZhlnEVZWAyZ4cOdQWN3i9td8CywckzNvv6wBxClwNaItfBOr-bFopa38tOpn4BM43gPh6oTDJ3PhgEGtKfI5KSq9iK-d6Xt74VoumSQqecI4eLT3i2UUQU2vnkExgMd5_zbccTHcZZNkSJu3VdFt9p/s1000/weathers2.webp" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="1000" height="206" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjerghyphenhyphen-NTveQrJWjrAzzbpBkQzJjcOcAZhlnEVZWAyZ4cOdQWN3i9td8CywckzNvv6wBxClwNaItfBOr-bFopa38tOpn4BM43gPh6oTDJ3PhgEGtKfI5KSq9iK-d6Xt74VoumSQqecI4eLT3i2UUQU2vnkExgMd5_zbccTHcZZNkSJu3VdFt9p/w400-h206/weathers2.webp" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div>The character could merely have been a heel, but Weathers often talked of marrying <a href="https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/culture/article/carl-weathers-interview" target="_blank">the cerebral with the physical</a>, and as Apollo, he saw where the lines between athlete and businessman collided, foreshadowing the eras of Jordan and LeBron. Weathers became as integral to the “Rocky” franchise as Stallone, so much so that in what one might credibly contend is the best movie of the whole series, Ryan Coogler’s <a href="https://www.cinemaromantico.org/2018/12/some-drivel-oncreed.html" target="_blank">“Creed” (2015)</a>, Weathers goes a long way toward making it count by having created such an indelible, authoritative presence that he hovers over the whole movie without appearing once; you hear the name Creed and instinctively, you see Carl Weathers.</div><div><br />
After Apollo was sacrificed in “Rocky IV” (1985) so that Rocky could win the Cold War, Weathers appeared in the box office hit “Predator” (1987), an ostensible Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle that still came across like a true ensemble because of co-stars like Weathers. Their <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_zOpxcxn2Q" target="_blank">handshake turned epic arm-wrestling match</a> turned <a href="https://knowyourmeme.com/editorials/guides/whats-the-predator-handshake-meme-carl-weathers-and-arnold-schwarzeneggers-epic-handshake-meme-explained" target="_blank">modern social media meme</a> worked so well because Weathers could fill the frame as fully and electrically as Arnold. The latter had to win that moment because his name came first on the poster, but the two men emerged from that movie like Creed and Balboa – as equals. Weathers got his own movie the following year in 1988 with “Action Jackson,” though it failed commercially and creatively, and when it did, Hollywood eschewed giving him another title shot. Box office hits, to quote Alec Baldwin, provide “an all-access pass that lasts for five years. And, if the movies you make don’t make money in that period, your pass expires.” Weathers, though, barely even got a year, just one movie, and it does not feel like a stretch to suggest that Weathers being black meant the terms and conditions of his pass were inhibited. </div><div><br /></div><div>Whoever else in Hollywood might have forgotten about him, his “Action Jackson” producer Bernie Brillstein did not, and it was Brillstein who Weathers credited for getting his role in “Happy Gilmore” (1996). Weathers always had comedy chops, as his spot-on Rev Jesse Jackson impression for Saturday Night Live during the 1988 Democratic primaries attested, and in playing the gruff mentor to Adam Sandler’s infantile hockey player turned golfing pro, Weathers bloomed anew in playing funny. He was never funnier, though, than he was <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_9R5vWXjAs" target="_blank">spoofing himself</a> in the cult aughts television show “Arrested Development” as a cheapskate, an actor for whom the greatest thrill in life is not nailing a scene but pocketing his daily per diem, firmly in the pantheon of actors playing themselves. Speaking to Vulture in 2013, show creator Mitch Hurwitz said it was Weathers who proposed this idea, cutting off Hurwitz’s predictable pitches for “Rocky” parodies at the pass, a confession that kind of underlines how the industry never saw Weathers with the same clarity as he saw himself.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLHvZJ0VeYfi_fP6eq6jNkaLvlQVCbJLvHBiiyNtrlIi5D5LwkWU9DX1Eajx4qUUjCpmttuOUO0hPt5NbG1sXr9Gl7pDF00ATwSW21S0RKEDQh1pXIs_yhCq-YJOtFdDUBNCYNPHVRVsHGK83nA98Vuxewb7l73oDP-MAuH94fH9g9AQ0lrFH9/s1916/weathers3.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1080" data-original-width="1916" height="229" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLHvZJ0VeYfi_fP6eq6jNkaLvlQVCbJLvHBiiyNtrlIi5D5LwkWU9DX1Eajx4qUUjCpmttuOUO0hPt5NbG1sXr9Gl7pDF00ATwSW21S0RKEDQh1pXIs_yhCq-YJOtFdDUBNCYNPHVRVsHGK83nA98Vuxewb7l73oDP-MAuH94fH9g9AQ0lrFH9/w400-h229/weathers3.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div>I always hoped Weathers, who died Thursday February 1, 2024, at the age of 76, would star in one last big project, and even cheekily <a href="https://www.cinemaromantico.org/2022/07/pitch-meeting-flagrant-two.html" target="_blank">dreamt one up</a>, though as a few friends reminded me, one-time “Star Wars” fan turned wearied agnostic, he starred in the recent Disney+ TV series “The Mandalorian.” If I grew up knowing Weathers as Apollo Creed, a whole new generation has grown up knowing Weathers as Greef Karga, ultimately making him an actor who left a mark not in one era but two, which I hoped warmed his heart as much as it does mine. </div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17951989.post-87824668627358909832024-02-05T06:00:00.077-06:002024-02-05T07:59:14.031-06:00The Iron ClawOn their first date, Kevin Von Erich (Zac Efron) tells his future wife Pam (Lily James) that he’s not the oldest brother in his semi-famous family of professional wrestlers because his oldest brother died when he was just six, how one day he was there, and the next, he wasn’t. It’s a moment Efron plays to perfection, not still grieving but almost as if he never grieved at all. Initially seeking Kevin out for an autograph, and almost forcing him into the date, you might have your suspicions about Pam, but this is the moment when her true colors show. She gets up and comes around to the other side of the table, sitting down beside him and giving him a hug as the camera switches to a long shot, infusing the whole room with their warmth and cutting straight through to Kevin’s truth: he’s a guy who just needs a hug.<div> <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg15pcPgw32HyfzacDxAlW07nnl-pYg_YfL15zhbMiNUMIyXfLWYJpy62gTIyyAL3yafDbU2mJ1p-ZZTDXiDHGJYsfQz8HiBcMwGmgmeD0GXpPuxFjSL0QrX3lXQ6momsKsH2_nw5NAqGCrBYnL4d3Ul_xOpfXuVsVC4md2qTIgo2lOK31Ks8hb/s980/iron1.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="654" data-original-width="980" height="273" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg15pcPgw32HyfzacDxAlW07nnl-pYg_YfL15zhbMiNUMIyXfLWYJpy62gTIyyAL3yafDbU2mJ1p-ZZTDXiDHGJYsfQz8HiBcMwGmgmeD0GXpPuxFjSL0QrX3lXQ6momsKsH2_nw5NAqGCrBYnL4d3Ul_xOpfXuVsVC4md2qTIgo2lOK31Ks8hb/w400-h273/iron1.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />
He’s not getting a hug from his dad Fritz (Holt McCallany), that’s for sure, a former professional wrestler who never earned the championship belt he felt he deserved, laid out in a prologue filmed in black and white that injects a sense of foreboding from the jump. As both writer and director, Sean Durkin forgoes ever employing the word kayfabe, a pro wrestling term indicating that events in the ring are genuine, not staged, taking it seriously, and Fritz takes it seriously too, overmuch, transferring the burden of winning a title in the ring to his sons, all chips off the old block only in so much as Fritz has molded them to be. Like Kevin, who opens the movie by unsuccessfully attempting to rouse his youngest brother Mike (Stanley Simons) for a morning workout, casting him in the image of a thousand sports movie heroes, that if he puts in the work, he will earn his way to the top. That work, though, comes not just in the ring but outside it through showmanship and theatrics at which his younger brother David (Harris Dickinson) proves more potent, causing Kevin’s place in the pecking order to suffer. And if the belt eventually comes home, tragedy does too, as David and Mike and even second-oldest Kerry (Jeremy Allen White) perish one by one in horrifying ways, leaving only Kevin. It’s so much death that despite their mother Doris’s (Maura Tierney) emphatic belief in God, the Von Erichs become convinced of a family curse.</div><div><br /></div><div>His mother’s religion, though, while cited by Kevin in voiceover as being equally important in their household to feats of strength, never quite feels that way in terms of the movie, coming and going throughout, frequently disappearing altogether, evoking not how “The Iron Claw” bites off more than it can chew but how there is just too much plot to contain in a two hour and twelve-minute movie. Indeed, it was only afterward that I learned there was a whole other Von Erich brother that “The Iron Claw” excises, not wrongly but from dramatic necessity, and explaining why sometimes the brothers can feel more two-dimensional than fully rounded. Then again, Durkin gets around this problem by making Kevin the focal point, the emotional hub, as the introductory scene suggests, and by emphasizing the Brothers Von Erich specifically as a unit. Scenes of them chowing down on fast food in the front seat of a pickup truck while listening to Tom Petty and dancing together at Kevin’s wedding come across as heavenly as “The Iron Claw’s” <i>actual </i>portrayal of the afterlife, the latter so effortlessly true (and without the need for proselytizing) that it feels almost revolutionary for a mainstream movie.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQPadKeNvHNqOTMEIRua7XgF2jarSJ4u-smNpBXy8oEDRidr1ROmLJAsoAvrf3n4Tesoh3KqY_t86cfzNu0ypIQBHJgYpajYjEQ1iqp4pDfBuxsr0ZT-u8tGVOAwLrdLbHeB2W66tbiAVHXQaYyg6SpZZM644uU7lTVpR6qNfUvMG-qTsZXrtW/s1200/iron2.webp" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="1200" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQPadKeNvHNqOTMEIRua7XgF2jarSJ4u-smNpBXy8oEDRidr1ROmLJAsoAvrf3n4Tesoh3KqY_t86cfzNu0ypIQBHJgYpajYjEQ1iqp4pDfBuxsr0ZT-u8tGVOAwLrdLbHeB2W66tbiAVHXQaYyg6SpZZM644uU7lTVpR6qNfUvMG-qTsZXrtW/w400-h266/iron2.webp" width="400" /></a></div><div><br />
That sun-kissed cinematography of those moments winds up cutting both ways, though, something angelic but also ethereal, like all this is fading even as we watch it happening. Because while this moving sense of brotherly love is a counterweight to “The Iron Claw’s” unceasing tragedy, it is also what their father uses to exploit and undermine them. At the dinner table, he literally confesses to ranking his own sons, and because they are his business assets as much as kids, he has no problem utilizing them as such. McCallany’s performance is as deft as it is disturbing in how he never lets his character detect his own complicity. A scene near the end, in which Doris rekindles her own passion for painting, is as bedeviling as it is moving in the way McCallany has Fritz sit there with a vacuous expression, a man next to his wife who is a million miles away, who can’t see what she sees, who can’t see himself the way others do. In truth, “The Iron Claw” doesn’t entirely either, with an epilogue that seems to view Fritz more lovingly than the movie itself. Even so, it does not undermine the overall punch, both Durkin and McCallany suggesting the nominal family curse is not really one at all, merely the logical result of a father’s toxicity, and tellingly, the triumphant conclusion isn’t in the ring but at home, where the son breaks the cycle.</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17951989.post-74337863390999117962024-02-02T06:00:00.001-06:002024-02-02T06:00:00.139-06:00Friday's Old Fashioned: Sneakers (1992)Even if the bad guy of “Sneakers” presciently predicts a future where data and information will be akin to the ultimate currency, the aesthetic and structure of Phil Alden Robinson’s 1992 proves old fashioned in so much as it eschews bold statements on the state of the world to merely engineer some quality entertainment. It stars Robert Redford, after all, co-star of “The Sting,” released in 1973 but set in 1936, and even despite its 1992 setting and release, “Sneakers” could have come straight from 1936 too, a technothriller as caper. It’s made from familiar ingredients, right down to reconfiguring the recording of a voice for a clever purpose. Another 1992 comedy caper throwback, “Manhattan Murder Mystery,” successfully did that too, proving that any conceit, new or ancient, is only as good as you render it. And though “Sneakers” hints at a leftist agenda in its opening and closing, these hints are conveyed, too, as something of a lark.<div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdwFzLiMc3BwZEZTNz4_cRblSgcT1Ze2lvGMi-jTiF_lCOLA665f9YaIjL_J7lVessxpvk2xmOtmY6cCBOE6xP-bl_mlNia2LXNrdhIXXZg38H8gf4EZWGUz7gvov30uyzx9kkI7Pl0cGzMidzfzjdQpwtlCCdWI5qV6IbPBusuwuvrL7Mh7-S/s1296/sneak1.webp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="730" data-original-width="1296" height="229" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdwFzLiMc3BwZEZTNz4_cRblSgcT1Ze2lvGMi-jTiF_lCOLA665f9YaIjL_J7lVessxpvk2xmOtmY6cCBOE6xP-bl_mlNia2LXNrdhIXXZg38H8gf4EZWGUz7gvov30uyzx9kkI7Pl0cGzMidzfzjdQpwtlCCdWI5qV6IbPBusuwuvrL7Mh7-S/w400-h229/sneak1.webp" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div><div>Redford is Martin Brice turned Martin Bishop, a fugitive since his days at Berkeley where he went on the run after deploying his immense skills in the name of semi-political agitation and now the leader of a motley crew of other tech ne’er-do-wells, including ex-CIA agent Donald Crease (Sydney Poitier), that tests bank’s security systems by breaking into them. That is what they’re doing as the movie opens, a deliberate feint underlining the movie’s all for fun ethos. Things get serious, in a manner of speaking, when two NSA agents, one played by Timothy Busfield, a dude born to play a retentive G-man, ask Martin and his team to steal a black box from a mathematician they claim is working for the Russians, reminding us how Russians as villains never really went out of style. That black box, however, proves to be a techno Ark of the Covenant, the ultimate codebreaker, an army that deploys it would be invincible, etc., and oh, those G-Men? <i>Not</i> G-Men, which puts Martin, already on the run, on the run with his whole team.</div><div><br />
“Sneakers” is so committed to fun that even a sober cameo from James Earl Jones at movie’s end gets delightfully turned on its head, leaving him taken aback, sort of stammering, and us laughing. It’s also a moment evocative of the screenplay’s penchant for set-ups and payoffs. There all kinds of the latter built into this thing, none more enjoyable than the blind member of Martin’s team (David Straitharin) ending up at the wheel of the car, which James Horner’s accompanying score renders not as a moment of suspense or comedy but sort of glimmer-eyed triumph. Straithairn is also evidence of how the movie pays attention to its supporting characters, like Liz Ogilvy (Mary McDonnell), who might be Martin’s ex but proves more than that, holding her own and having fun, while Martin’s old pal Cosmo gives Ben Kingsley the opportunity to play a Bond villain. And when the hacking team prevents a call from being traced while using the aforementioned voice recording of another character, it’s a demonstration of both this team as just that and of Alden Robinson’s graceful direction to emphasize it.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgn9hSY9bb0-o8SONe2EZ7vVQ6RgL2RGvR-Nc4L5wUweoXabitBMiKpZVtt82zGyxeVdF3vhzDJUA_nsf_jHctZ-eF3rs6KiCUBwi6q0sMpnjolnBxVde1bFdC6AQnyb2eHCU8WGtcHHH0AUoPlEoWIsrDlQY1_o4TMrv3N2lCnRxHCzyiOjaut/s660/sneak2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="357" data-original-width="660" height="220" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgn9hSY9bb0-o8SONe2EZ7vVQ6RgL2RGvR-Nc4L5wUweoXabitBMiKpZVtt82zGyxeVdF3vhzDJUA_nsf_jHctZ-eF3rs6KiCUBwi6q0sMpnjolnBxVde1bFdC6AQnyb2eHCU8WGtcHHH0AUoPlEoWIsrDlQY1_o4TMrv3N2lCnRxHCzyiOjaut/w400-h220/sneak2.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div>Indeed, it’s Alden Robinson who stood out to me as much as Redford. Though there are plenty of crisply edited scenes, like the showdown between Martin and Cosmo, so many moments are wonders of fluid camerawork and expert blocking, single takes that aren’t about showy, swooping camerawork but more nimble intimacy. After Martin learns he has been fooled by the G-Men, “Sneakers” cuts to a shot of him looking out a rain-ridden window, itself kind of cheeky, before cutting to a shot inside, looking at Martin looking out the window from afar. Other characters then move to and fro within the shot, speaking, before Martin turns from the window and walks toward the camera and right into a close-up, an impeccable merging of filmmaker and star.</div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17951989.post-69713223300023315142024-01-31T06:00:00.061-06:002024-01-31T08:04:23.019-06:00Afire<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlq_a_CNSkr8-gQcgxBZ4FMbyangxGFsUMVvMbNoe7ZkbmxHDdSne1N_GIzSVw7tJATSeG2wFYna-TYIEPdI2J_BUxwKVrqyycEZ0TtYkJEjXk9pzWoVfl12Xew7_PIV2n3lEvj1VSUQheMh3Mnq4asvwLk7VWbGhj57tR1LR7BAmI2qbGAcli/s1600/afire.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="900" data-original-width="1600" height="232" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlq_a_CNSkr8-gQcgxBZ4FMbyangxGFsUMVvMbNoe7ZkbmxHDdSne1N_GIzSVw7tJATSeG2wFYna-TYIEPdI2J_BUxwKVrqyycEZ0TtYkJEjXk9pzWoVfl12Xew7_PIV2n3lEvj1VSUQheMh3Mnq4asvwLk7VWbGhj57tR1LR7BAmI2qbGAcli/w400-h232/afire.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div>Beware all ye who enter Christian Petzold’s cunning German drama “Afire” in search of a likable protagonist; Leon (Thomas Schubert) is anything but. He’s a novelist, for God’s sake, one trying to put the finishing touches on his second book, a book called “Ham Sandwich,” for God’s sake, and who has tagged along with his friend Felix (Langston Uibel) on a retreat to the country to do just that. As played by Schubert and costumed by Katharina Ost, Leon is a lumpy, grumpy square, walking, talking indigestion, truly bringing the word dyspeptic to life, his resemblance to James Corden turning that try-hard inside-out into a never-really-try-at-all, or something. Mostly, Leon masquerades like he’s working, and gets huffy with Felix when he asks Leon to go along to the beach because it will drag him away from the work he is pretending to do, and gets even huffier with their unexpected third house guest Nadja (Paula Beer) keeping them up all hours of the night because she’s having, shall we say, a bit too much fun in the next room. Rather than confront her, or engage with her, he spies on her, and he then he spies on Felix, too, and an acquaintance (Enno Trebs) with whom Felix makes fast friends, peeping on life, evoked in Petzold’s keen point-of-view shots and underlined in Schubert’s air and expressions of jealousy and petulance. </div><div><br /></div><div>It’s an arty and sometimes electric manifestation of the observation in Neil Simon’s “Biloxi Blues” about existing merely as a witness, standing around watching, refusing to get in the middle of it, and which becomes all the more dire by virtue of a raging forest fire that gradually encircles them; for all intents and purposes, Felix is standing around watching the world burn. Leon, however, almost proves <i>too</i> prickly, making it difficult to believe he and Felix would be friends in the first place, or that Nadja would take such interest in him, flaws that can be written off by the deliberately questionable POV only up to a point. And if the conclusion initially seems to traffic in the perpetual myth that fiction is best culled from real life, ultimately it suggests something closer to a writer writing his way into real life, and which might have resonated with greater depth of feeling had the surrounding characters left a mark. </div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17951989.post-8673815436697571242024-01-29T06:00:00.002-06:002024-01-29T07:58:05.817-06:00Poor Things<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEib3xOFewN2oWRSSY79OciQVUwm75MQE8HZ-WcV_xXW3TJiRHFb1e_E26wNlRRwmETBioUcxsxmnwPUUmwH3_-g6MSTwFHH8I-o_4w6NRcaBtjAarzHn5wv5CoGNJiwo_KisRf0K8xKKb3uunX7FSMTvRdokKriuES4enGBPSM0XE1xfo55P2jK/s2000/things.webp" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1125" data-original-width="2000" height="231" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEib3xOFewN2oWRSSY79OciQVUwm75MQE8HZ-WcV_xXW3TJiRHFb1e_E26wNlRRwmETBioUcxsxmnwPUUmwH3_-g6MSTwFHH8I-o_4w6NRcaBtjAarzHn5wv5CoGNJiwo_KisRf0K8xKKb3uunX7FSMTvRdokKriuES4enGBPSM0XE1xfo55P2jK/w400-h231/things.webp" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div>In writing about “Shakespeare in Love” years ago for Premiere Magazine (in an essay collected in his book The Big Picture), and more specifically, writing about Gwyneth Paltrow’s Oscar-winning turn in the same movie, William Goldman noted that it was a great part: after all, she got to play a girl <i>and</i> a boy. That observation returned to me watching Emma Stone in director Yorgos Lanthimos’s “Poor Things” as a kind of updated version of Frankenstein’s monster, Victoria Blessington turned Bella Baxter, a woman who jumps to her death as the movie opens only to be brought back to life by Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe) who she might call God but who proves less mad than sweetly, paternally eccentric. There is one catch though - Bella is resurrected by way of a brain belonging to an infant, meaning that despite being a grown woman, cognitively she is starting from scratch. That means Stone gets to play an adult <i>and</i> a toddler but all rolled up into one, yielding a feat of oddball physicality, an actor’s dream, a little like Vincent D’Onofrio in “Men in Black” but with the veneer of prestige drama. And though Stone is superb, limbs flailing, arms akimbo, a performance as Elaine Benes’s dance, she’s superb in so far as the role goes, ultimately limited by the movie she’s in.</div><div><br /></div><div><div>Because “Poor Things” also wants to turn its Frankenstein monster story into one of female liberation as Bella eventually leaves her weirdly moving makeshift family behind to see the world with the help of a scurrilous attorney played by Mark Ruffalo with the air of a patrician pirate. If you have seen a previous Yorgo Lanthimos movie, it might not surprise you to learn that this liberation takes a decidedly lewd turn, and why not, that’s all part of it, sexual liberation. But the longer “Poor Things” goes, the clearer it becomes that sexual liberation is virtually all it is interested in, as intellectual and epicurean pursuits are blithely mentioned but never really explored nor followed up on. What’s more, Bella’s interiority winds up feeling all the more superficial contrasted against the vitality of the exterior world rendered by so many grand visual effects and production design. Indeed, Lanthimos’s camera still feels as leering and sneaky as ever, in those patented fisheye shots and voyeuristic angles, constricting the character, compromising her freedom, still just a rat in a director’s cage.</div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17951989.post-50107720858720582752024-01-24T06:00:00.251-06:002024-01-24T09:10:47.338-06:00Some Drivel On...the Oscar Nominations<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjryTzTrA1sYqJSrreEKKJHRxjwvQuW0bSUz1TLvdwAFj1-J3qHbsA4_6wc0QH4PLFzcGWkLg4IGHvPZ4tQlVvx5o1cFc07ZILhjRfjOm04uU7rzK5fbxzNGBH48Ex9eS0pH0Ww1VhFsaZa6dKzZVOaE1p3kmL3JmJexo-NH2DQx9Z6lNJbVwIS/s1022/noms.webp" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="1022" height="204" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjryTzTrA1sYqJSrreEKKJHRxjwvQuW0bSUz1TLvdwAFj1-J3qHbsA4_6wc0QH4PLFzcGWkLg4IGHvPZ4tQlVvx5o1cFc07ZILhjRfjOm04uU7rzK5fbxzNGBH48Ex9eS0pH0Ww1VhFsaZa6dKzZVOaE1p3kmL3JmJexo-NH2DQx9Z6lNJbVwIS/w400-h204/noms.webp" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Oscar nominations, so many ripples in the rain.</i></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><div>So, how’s it going? The new membership of the Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences, I mean, which after deserved blowback in recent years has embraced diversity and youth while still retaining enough outmodedness to make the spirit of the Cocoanut Grove proud: after all, Billie Eilish <i>and</i> Leonard Maltin are Academy members now! And you can see this in the nominations for the 96th Academy Awards, unveiled yesterday, which were as vexing as they were satisfying (<a href="https://www.oscars.org/oscars/ceremonies/2024" target="_blank">and can all be found here</a>), especially where Best Picture was concerned, utilizing all ten slots to encompass a wide spectrum. If there was anything that decidedly <i>wasn’t</i> a surprise, it’s that my Top 5 Favorite Movies of the year earned a total of zero nominations, including “Fallen Leaves,” which I might have thought had a chance, for something, maybe. Eh, whatever. You can stream it on Mubi; watch it anyway; who cares; watch the other Aki Kaurismäki movies on Criterion; watch a middling thriller! </div><br />
2024 was defined in so many ways by the Barbenheimer phenomenon and continued apace in the nominations, though if Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” still leads both the global and domestic box office sweepstakes, Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” won in terms of Academy Award nods with 13 to 8. (Yorgos Lanthimos’s “Poor Things,” in fact, earned 3 more nods than “Barbie,” further evidence of the old William Goldman line about nobody knowing anything.) That baker’s dozen includes not only the big uns like Best Picture and Best Director and Best Actor for Cillian Murphy, but Best Score and Best Sound, where even an “Oppenheimer” agnostic such as me would confess to its excellence. It even dragged Emily Blunt to a Best Supporting Actress nod, an incredible performer for whom this blog has repeatedly stanned, so don’t come for us (me), but who, through no real fault of her own, is an acting non-entity in her nominated role. Penélope Cruz in “Ferrari” would have eaten her lunch.<div><div><br /></div><div><div>
“Barbie’s” haul was mostly down along the production line, which is all richly deserved, even as its unlikely omissions in a couple top line categories will provide unwanted ammunition to the freshmen economics students claiming “Barbie” is doing capitalism rather than being art. What’s more, Ryan Gosling earned a Supporting Actor nod (yay!) while Margot Robbie was, well, let’s avoid the word snubbed, shall we, and say, laughably overlooked, as if the Academy toed the Pop Culture Company line that Gosling stole the movie even while Robbie (her turn in “Barbie” in conjunction with her cameo in “Asteroid City” made her this useless blog’s Performer of the Year) was, in fact, making the whole movie right in front of their face <i>with</i> her face. And though America Ferrera got a Supporting Actress nod, undoubtedly because she recited the Big Monologue, Gerwig herself was left out of the Best Director race, all the more remarkable because she was <i>also</i> left out of the Best Director race for “Little Women” (2019) but <i>wasn’t</i> for “Ladybird” (2015) for which she deserved a Direction nomination least. Sigh. It’s complicated. She knows.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhg0gm2dVyRe9IThx-9fwq-qW9lUhx8zRf09HkX1of976qkOW_oTyaXcbAi9UoaGN5rhM4g7tsxbI8wEyVKKj86v5HTpZ3oRCKLFH4UAinW9FriksxjYBRkp8pap7Y5amhH3FEpsnTZWPE-vFwD_wxrwsd2ybzZ06qRZCen-vyxRdAOMYSjvkhH/s540/america.gif" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="260" data-original-width="540" height="197" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhg0gm2dVyRe9IThx-9fwq-qW9lUhx8zRf09HkX1of976qkOW_oTyaXcbAi9UoaGN5rhM4g7tsxbI8wEyVKKj86v5HTpZ3oRCKLFH4UAinW9FriksxjYBRkp8pap7Y5amhH3FEpsnTZWPE-vFwD_wxrwsd2ybzZ06qRZCen-vyxRdAOMYSjvkhH/w400-h197/america.gif" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div>Though I would have put Sofia Coppola number one on my ballot for “Priscilla,” Gerwig was more deserving than Lanthimos for “Poor Things,” a movie which I will write about, eventually, and where I thought the direction ultimately interfered more than enhanced. As it is, a woman <i>was</i> nominated, Justine Triet for the French drama “Anatomy of a Fall,” and Jonathan Glazer was nominated too, for “The Zone Interest,” and because of that, it’s hard not to be a little happy. These are people, like their fellow nominee Martin Scorsese for “Killers of the Flower Moon,” who try to make films, not movies, to paraphrase Kit Ramsey, whether they work or not, for you, or for me, or for anyone else. Anyway, that category is Christopher Nolan’s to lose, just as “Oppenheimer” is certainly the favorite for Best Picture, leaving me to dream of Oprah returning to present it so she can modify her Golden Globes envelope-opening from “Oppenheimerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!” to “the Father of the Atomic Boooooooooooomb!”) </div><div><br /></div><div>In terms of the acting categories, the biggest news was Lily Gladstone becoming the first woman of Native American descent to be nominated for an Oscar with “Killers of the Flower Moon” and Jeffrey Wright earning his first Oscar nomination as Best Actor in “American Fiction.” Paul Giamatti, meanwhile, earned his first Best Actor nomination in “The Holdovers.” And though I had problems with the latter, I didn’t have a problem with Giamatti, and even if I did, I don’t think I’d care. It should be His Time; his inexorable march to the podium in March would be well deserved and overdue, and he might be Hollywood’s most unwittingly equipped to go through the next six weeks without letting the stress affect him. In fact, in our era, where these races are monitored so closely and dished about so incessantly there are no longer any real surprises, let’s close this recap by ranking the coronation levels for our probable acting winners.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdErq8UHHdewujkpp7QySz-tcHGxGoQrcBfWdw0PPmf9MBZQ7tqPYXXAI6ROeikEP4fjNxXqRIQvld55oNl0_I83CWz7kT7l_FkUFXBs9omgNiFWW2Hs0Bj8hTaAf3vyiSiA4r3gWDvrRIb9vUQLWvqI9cJjEFj2vp5PDtCzTyExj5Qsfo9y3k/s658/down.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="370" data-original-width="658" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdErq8UHHdewujkpp7QySz-tcHGxGoQrcBfWdw0PPmf9MBZQ7tqPYXXAI6ROeikEP4fjNxXqRIQvld55oNl0_I83CWz7kT7l_FkUFXBs9omgNiFWW2Hs0Bj8hTaAf3vyiSiA4r3gWDvrRIb9vUQLWvqI9cJjEFj2vp5PDtCzTyExj5Qsfo9y3k/w400-h225/down.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div><b>1.</b> Robert Downey Jr., Best Supporting Actor for “Oppenheimer.” <b>LEVEL:</b> Reagan over Mondale. </div><div><b>2.</b> Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Best Supporting Actress for “The Holdovers.” <b>LEVEL:</b> LBJ over Goldwater.</div><div><b>3.</b> Lily Gladstone, Best Actress for “Killers of the Flower Moon.” <b>LEVEL:</b> Clinton over Bush.</div><div><b>4.</b> Paul Giamatti, Best Actor for “The Holdovers.” <b>LEVEL:</b> Obama over Romney. </div></div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17951989.post-78065031214913904042024-01-22T06:00:00.036-06:002024-01-22T06:00:00.145-06:00Top 10 Movies of 2023My favorite moment at the recent Emmy Awards was not anything that happened during the Emmy Awards themselves. No, it happened seconds before the Emmy Awards began, in the traditional last-ditch red-carpet interview, in this case with Natasha Lyonne, nominated for Comedy Series Lead Actress for “Poker Face.” The interviewer asked for Lyonne’s favorite television shows to which Lyonne, at the ceremony to honor achievement in television, remember, said she didn’t really watch much TV, preferring old Hollywood movies. Then she looked right into the camera, and as if suddenly being clued into her wavelength, the cameraperson zoomed in on Lyonne, right into her close-up, who then said, simply, “Cinema.” I feel like I often want to cosmically high-five Natasha Lyonne, so let’s say, in that moment I wanted to cosmically <i>double</i> high-five her.<div><br /></div><div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimM9k5oxev1Msz25rAEdp9rvKXGYGMIhdCDrN1A8Cu2TgKY1ntxBS-31KjYAwH7hbE82re9ZYRmHXqjLYpWC7zqAQXRsBTHDISkmJjVzbr09HpDcKUC6Gt5wRPgzM4of1hSktsv1TPOuD2yc5L0gx8fsTV7JXbkKj3bHU_VHff82q50h2J16S6/s845/bowfinger.png" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="464" data-original-width="845" height="228" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimM9k5oxev1Msz25rAEdp9rvKXGYGMIhdCDrN1A8Cu2TgKY1ntxBS-31KjYAwH7hbE82re9ZYRmHXqjLYpWC7zqAQXRsBTHDISkmJjVzbr09HpDcKUC6Gt5wRPgzM4of1hSktsv1TPOuD2yc5L0gx8fsTV7JXbkKj3bHU_VHff82q50h2J16S6/w400-h228/bowfinger.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Cinema.</i></td></tr></tbody></table><br />For several months I had planned, I really had, to include the <a href="https://www.cinemaromantico.org/2023/08/fishes.html?m=0" target="_blank">“Fishes” episode</a> of the comedy-drama Hulu television series “The Bear” in my Top 10 movies of the year. Not just to stir the pot but because it was really that high in quality, and because in running six minutes over an hour, coming across self-contained, and playing like the unofficial sequel to “The House of Yes” (1997) it felt akin to a movie. In recent years, it would have made the cut. In this one, it didn’t. I had to sacrifice the bit. <br /><br />
The last proper year-end Top 10 on Cinema Romantico was 2019, before the world partially ended. I concocted a year-end <a href="https://www.cinemaromantico.org/2020/12/top-10-movies-of-2020-specifically-2020.html" target="_blank">Top 10 in 2020</a>, but that was a list tailored emphatically to 2020, untraditional, anything goes; more than half the ten weren’t even from 2020. The last two years, in 2021 and 2022, by the close of December, I felt mentally bankrupt, unable, or maybe just unwilling, to go through the exercise of the Top 10, although that also partially stemmed from feeling like I just hadn’t seen enough movies, and that not enough movies were worthy of a year-end list. In 2023, though, I did, both see enough movies and think enough worthy of a list, meaning one was in order. <br /><br />
True, the industry is still in a state of flux, and still in the middle of shaping itself, I think, into something we will not be sure of until it’s already here, and the effects of the necessary SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes are still waiting to be felt where release dates are concerned. But if nothing else, where the movies themselves, and only the movies themselves, were concerned, 2023 was alright. (Click on the title to read the full review.)</div><div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b><u>Top 10 Movies of 2023</u></b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjS3SbcEQxfWypBP12gbaR95SJEQBnjyKyZPk6B839Ymw2HiV-eSQgfqxVx_8X1pj87Vb5IrPTFhtLa5IKcx8blYvLSL1r-WSj4ag4q4Y48HwywHUL4H4A3Zx7zrKDhFO0rpdzuHGAWtc4fin8-LfD6n7s5ECLnsan7ycA96zOfVyR2S1wzAKyz/s1024/top10.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="520" data-original-width="1024" height="204" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjS3SbcEQxfWypBP12gbaR95SJEQBnjyKyZPk6B839Ymw2HiV-eSQgfqxVx_8X1pj87Vb5IrPTFhtLa5IKcx8blYvLSL1r-WSj4ag4q4Y48HwywHUL4H4A3Zx7zrKDhFO0rpdzuHGAWtc4fin8-LfD6n7s5ECLnsan7ycA96zOfVyR2S1wzAKyz/w400-h204/top10.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b><i>10. <a href="https://www.cinemaromantico.org/2023/10/the-adults.html" target="_blank">The Adults</a>, Dustin Guy Defa</i></b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">All the world’s a stage, with an indie bent.</div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgehdLCUSC6A9pri12tuVA_fUXv-90cSRbQdFj-ljoi-FWeIvZU4sd0T1VAGjzDpmT-5q9NWN5Aa2kEwSFFD7pacKEojfkg5f1fyXWD3kBwL2UsWDAHSbYvHeylKyfExjAVvdLGdKWii_EvYfJ-hd9mrm1DXCHO426Ja4qozj-NGcG0A3wc0AW5/s1920/top9.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1080" data-original-width="1920" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgehdLCUSC6A9pri12tuVA_fUXv-90cSRbQdFj-ljoi-FWeIvZU4sd0T1VAGjzDpmT-5q9NWN5Aa2kEwSFFD7pacKEojfkg5f1fyXWD3kBwL2UsWDAHSbYvHeylKyfExjAVvdLGdKWii_EvYfJ-hd9mrm1DXCHO426Ja4qozj-NGcG0A3wc0AW5/w400-h225/top9.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i><b>9. <a href="https://www.cinemaromantico.org/2024/01/killers-of-flower-moon.html" target="_blank">Killers of the Flower Moon</a>, Martin Scorsese</b></i></div><div><br /></div><div>America as a mafia state. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDLTHCCTZEvJnX5Mjoq-Dc0lWUDaj5fAhaUdCq6rnpC8VAcDZioAcRyOWoytbHh7ZQiYOHvINMz8hbVOIac97Tj7wjdWSEWZ6MPdeoh-wk0Zm_-lMqgJRUx9Z68M2FCRM_CCTeaAEsn-FDnQ0BCqO8dLah__l6dmSFTLHWY1jc8XMGjsJ0OpsB/s3000/top7.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1687" data-original-width="3000" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDLTHCCTZEvJnX5Mjoq-Dc0lWUDaj5fAhaUdCq6rnpC8VAcDZioAcRyOWoytbHh7ZQiYOHvINMz8hbVOIac97Tj7wjdWSEWZ6MPdeoh-wk0Zm_-lMqgJRUx9Z68M2FCRM_CCTeaAEsn-FDnQ0BCqO8dLah__l6dmSFTLHWY1jc8XMGjsJ0OpsB/w400-h225/top7.jpg" width="400" /></a></div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><b>8. <a href="https://www.cinemaromantico.org/2023/06/showing-up.html" target="_blank">Showing Up</a>, Kelly Reichardt</b></i></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">An indelible, and thorny, ode to the struggle of making art.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEil4jljANEmZnrsP7x-kkviqnqGSICt-7S09SA8TLdtvyn-ICLKpf5NQELNNj7S6oLxq9b2Upks6IuMyfBql3bwb47klikWRrSMMvFhHqq_1XA2_pv6JIZtdY0AI8iV320kkC8xywzmTuQxsMgmo0FJxwOKffsmS-6bEYlhW6-95AVW0xQjobij/s3738/top6.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2103" data-original-width="3738" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEil4jljANEmZnrsP7x-kkviqnqGSICt-7S09SA8TLdtvyn-ICLKpf5NQELNNj7S6oLxq9b2Upks6IuMyfBql3bwb47klikWRrSMMvFhHqq_1XA2_pv6JIZtdY0AI8iV320kkC8xywzmTuQxsMgmo0FJxwOKffsmS-6bEYlhW6-95AVW0xQjobij/w400-h225/top6.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i><b>7. <a href="https://www.cinemaromantico.org/2023/08/barbie.html" target="_blank">Barbie</a>, Greta Gerwig</b></i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Would that all blockbusters were this creative, and this joyful, and this alive. </div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg609nP5isfG6N2d_z5SRZu2aGWUHnLmRzR2SMvhmmQCJ77zTxFre19hP_mBFzhCePijAOcB5-fxj73ZqzJTsvG5Q8dInB3UNyF8YXQqvXuBJtbwAA-RHjQGriqDIhomx6LJhOIs3cA29Fm8ZMoQqt48R-aRbzraNeTIBVRRhygcK6hqkIu8KvA/s3000/top8.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1257" data-original-width="3000" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg609nP5isfG6N2d_z5SRZu2aGWUHnLmRzR2SMvhmmQCJ77zTxFre19hP_mBFzhCePijAOcB5-fxj73ZqzJTsvG5Q8dInB3UNyF8YXQqvXuBJtbwAA-RHjQGriqDIhomx6LJhOIs3cA29Fm8ZMoQqt48R-aRbzraNeTIBVRRhygcK6hqkIu8KvA/w400-h179/top8.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i><b>6. <a href="https://www.cinemaromantico.org/2023/07/asteroid-city.html" target="_blank">Asteroid City</a>, Wes Anderson</b></i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Artifice and emotion, indivisible. </div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVsCbZRJRLB58l7y962TxeZa3hKo23VK3E3WZHZr-jbs03JsCeMbfQXlHr0ngDRoDGXMW0FqLSixqKDIinAs2teonKngdAY7TUvbmzFJs9TRalu2VAlPKxUep2cfIc58aRXjEuzXcPY0XBQJJ_v-DGNP0YWE0hPUwprTGCBZXHsVH6SZ33RCw2/s3000/top5.webp" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2000" data-original-width="3000" height="259" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVsCbZRJRLB58l7y962TxeZa3hKo23VK3E3WZHZr-jbs03JsCeMbfQXlHr0ngDRoDGXMW0FqLSixqKDIinAs2teonKngdAY7TUvbmzFJs9TRalu2VAlPKxUep2cfIc58aRXjEuzXcPY0XBQJJ_v-DGNP0YWE0hPUwprTGCBZXHsVH6SZ33RCw2/w400-h259/top5.webp" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b><i>5. <a href="https://www.cinemaromantico.org/2024/01/ferrari.html" target="_blank">Ferrari</a>, Michael Mann</i></b></div><div><br /></div><div>“The Ballad of Ricky Bobby” for the Antonioni crowd, or something.</div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqv5O_kDyR__V1eXb_G0Gwmzm-mc0bmkh8puhmWe3wSW8IAeGqmsskPZPWjjtFN0SwYkut7UrG1hoVQzSTusr6nHWaDSGbCaKS1hW3cmiDnL_OQ41Raxnc2Ln6kXXax_DDoRXeEpJ988l9saZi6mJSm2GcMnlhyphenhyphenCFLeZrkCjJjVEuM8WKs95v1/s1400/top4.webp" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="700" data-original-width="1400" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqv5O_kDyR__V1eXb_G0Gwmzm-mc0bmkh8puhmWe3wSW8IAeGqmsskPZPWjjtFN0SwYkut7UrG1hoVQzSTusr6nHWaDSGbCaKS1hW3cmiDnL_OQ41Raxnc2Ln6kXXax_DDoRXeEpJ988l9saZi6mJSm2GcMnlhyphenhyphenCFLeZrkCjJjVEuM8WKs95v1/w400-h200/top4.webp" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b><i>4. <a href="https://www.cinemaromantico.org/2023/12/priscilla.html" target="_blank">Priscilla</a>, Sofia Coppola</i></b></div><div><br /></div><div>A 60s love song gone wrong. </div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgctC8_5P45edSU8fEdMj8rpXbxhpLdtpd5HMdsDR3NM6ganVl_EXW2tXVpU-MfopeyT9RVK5wsweX44HLVLKICwYw2ecT1ehPUayFLVig0yUozEegs3Iz-wgEvvQA7DZMk6Ml2GKIfDYYmkBRf_QZh1d7OEPOaXiSGwkZ-w0-_c0BuO8phoNIV/s1296/top3.webp" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="730" data-original-width="1296" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgctC8_5P45edSU8fEdMj8rpXbxhpLdtpd5HMdsDR3NM6ganVl_EXW2tXVpU-MfopeyT9RVK5wsweX44HLVLKICwYw2ecT1ehPUayFLVig0yUozEegs3Iz-wgEvvQA7DZMk6Ml2GKIfDYYmkBRf_QZh1d7OEPOaXiSGwkZ-w0-_c0BuO8phoNIV/w400-h225/top3.webp" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b><i>3. <a href="https://www.cinemaromantico.org/2023/07/reality.html" target="_blank">Reality</a>, Tina Satter</i></b></div><div><br /></div><div>It not only bends reality, ahem, back in on itself by literally transcribing it (the movie is culled entirely from the interrogation transcript of Reality Winner), it is a formal triumph, visually invigorating despite the limited location, and with two turns by Sydney Sweeney and Josh Hamilton that deserve to be mentioned among the best of the year.</div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNcZizE2OaKQO1tvwWJUQqQirw20DojrPuRjRcX9NxL9EJZQhjjGVT_vVZFEczZhsNaGSsNhJUJ52TshYJRB-Nn4MO8oZWpLcpuxPPAHXIEWieiuvaK58aoAF46iMvm9vJ4PfdgvsenH2lKAopepQBxJVocIaTrt7OKrhwJoFHM0C8ff3iZvU6/s800/TOP.webp" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="457" data-original-width="800" height="229" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNcZizE2OaKQO1tvwWJUQqQirw20DojrPuRjRcX9NxL9EJZQhjjGVT_vVZFEczZhsNaGSsNhJUJ52TshYJRB-Nn4MO8oZWpLcpuxPPAHXIEWieiuvaK58aoAF46iMvm9vJ4PfdgvsenH2lKAopepQBxJVocIaTrt7OKrhwJoFHM0C8ff3iZvU6/w400-h229/TOP.webp" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i><b>2. <a href="https://www.cinemaromantico.org/2023/03/full-time.html" target="_blank">Full Time</a>, Éric Gravel </b></i></div><div><br /></div><div>In which the ingredients of everyday life are all you need for a, quote-unquote, pulse-pounding thriller.</div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6srM1jeM8Zs_PS2PgxqycC98ShVUWmw4gQL-P9rRHj4fNrL8rKcz4sXQYO6yo5DPdvAG058bAVvneVQaQfHrM2ZK646pzXFFdsYd8hvENKRVE-WS3P6EsSo-OnvEqqVQaRkkYDc1iVFKIViT85KP2oqqxlLO1mkZM67wPB_sAtucVLMZ-8PYN/s465/top1.webp" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="279" data-original-width="465" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6srM1jeM8Zs_PS2PgxqycC98ShVUWmw4gQL-P9rRHj4fNrL8rKcz4sXQYO6yo5DPdvAG058bAVvneVQaQfHrM2ZK646pzXFFdsYd8hvENKRVE-WS3P6EsSo-OnvEqqVQaRkkYDc1iVFKIViT85KP2oqqxlLO1mkZM67wPB_sAtucVLMZ-8PYN/w400-h240/top1.webp" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b><i>1. <a href="https://www.cinemaromantico.org/2023/12/fallen-leaves.html" target="_blank">Fallen Leaves</a>, Aki Kaurismäki </i></b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Transcribing the human condition to screen. Perhaps it’s dangerous, or just foolish, to deem any work of art as perfect, so I dunno, let’s just say this one never seems to step wrong.</div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17951989.post-47752415215615333592024-01-19T06:00:00.053-06:002024-01-19T08:00:19.921-06:002023 Random Awards<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5PEtH32e0E87oHrkiHhs3hIx0XEv_15irhh7zK4GyPxyRU9MIrWmrL4WlrtR8uViy5zWJl3H2AylBgo_scAeBOMaJy2jo5gwKUhgIT-VF-SmiaPZZcAOtu7sK9YlqHvompgvrl9u19Df5S5kqD_KsMhkhMZmtS1hzWidKPxadMRgIDHDxhmXT/s400/random.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="266" data-original-width="400" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5PEtH32e0E87oHrkiHhs3hIx0XEv_15irhh7zK4GyPxyRU9MIrWmrL4WlrtR8uViy5zWJl3H2AylBgo_scAeBOMaJy2jo5gwKUhgIT-VF-SmiaPZZcAOtu7sK9YlqHvompgvrl9u19Df5S5kqD_KsMhkhMZmtS1hzWidKPxadMRgIDHDxhmXT/w400-h266/random.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>As always, her eminence Nicole Kidman is here to present Cinema Romantico's annual awards of cinematic randomness.</i></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><div><b>Line of the Year: “I don’t play him as an alien, actually. I play him as a metaphor. That’s my interpretation.” - Jeff Goldblum, “Asteroid City”</b></div><div><br /></div><div><b>Best Terminology of the Year: Mojo Dojo Casa House, “Barbie” </b></div><div><br /></div><div><div><b>Best Monologue of the Year: Ayo Edebiri, Bottoms. </b>As a high school senior unlucky in love, Edebiri brings the house down in a wild, wandering, sixty-second monologue comically embodying that singular sense of teenage defeatism in which she envisions her whole life as being over before it has even truly begun. </div><div><br /></div><div><b>Best Dog: Fallen Leaves.</b> A canine that is not a plot device, nor one to engender cheap sentimentality, but a manifestation of the idea that dogs are balms for our broken spirits. (Honorable Mention: the dog in “Showing Up” demonstrating how dogs always manage to lie down in exactly the wrong spot, and how we don’t really mind.)</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgusviF16l1GW2biu6VS9RDcGaF0jp7VpgIy-VxVc868oowR9VYj-tzhSYNkXu_hLEuoOempz-Z_lbX1u0P3cWdT1bjT1MAF9-0oa_EVIuTCjVgkBZKt_2ckYt1Mq0skFhKhBUTlBpIFMv_lYvJDW5e-M8OV3VAwN4bxSr7K8c53MjXktIBQZxx/s1200/shot.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="1200" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgusviF16l1GW2biu6VS9RDcGaF0jp7VpgIy-VxVc868oowR9VYj-tzhSYNkXu_hLEuoOempz-Z_lbX1u0P3cWdT1bjT1MAF9-0oa_EVIuTCjVgkBZKt_2ckYt1Mq0skFhKhBUTlBpIFMv_lYvJDW5e-M8OV3VAwN4bxSr7K8c53MjXktIBQZxx/w400-h266/shot.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div><b>Best Shot: Priscilla.</b> I can’t seem to source the full image, which is unfortunate, but even half the image will do, with Elvis Presley (Jacob Elordi) himself leaning over the teenage Priscilla (Cailee Spaeny) with one arm pressed up against the wall, like the wall is her high school locker, and transforming a kind of model image of youthful romantic reverie into a brewing nightmare. </div><div><br /></div><div><div><b>The Annual Ruffalo Award (presented to the best unnoticed performance in a movie): Summer Joy Campbell, Bottoms.</b> Ayo Edebiri is hilarious, so is Rachel Sennott, and Ruby Cruz steals the movie, really, but it is Joy Campbell who best harnesses director Emma Seligman’s penchant for eye-level shots by rendering them a window into her scorned soul. (Honorable Mention: Indira Varma & Charles Parnell turning information drops in “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning” into gleeful art.)</div></div><div><br /></div><div><b>The Annual Elevator Killer Award (presented to the best cameo in a movie): Margot Robbie, Asteroid City.</b> The most gasp-inducing moment in a movie that is a play as a television documentary is when all three of these layers suddenly give way to a fourth layer, a scene on a balcony, or two balconies, that is, one of which Robbie’s character steps out onto as she becomes nothing less than the living, breathing embodiment of the old writerly adage to Kill Your Darlings. </div><div><br /></div><div><b>The Annual Yosemite Sam Award (presented to the best Looney Tune in a movie): Margot Robbie, Barbie.</b> Emma Stone is garnering considerable acclaim for the physical expressiveness of her turn in “Poor Things,” and it’s well deserved, but Robbie’s physical expressiveness as the living fashion doll was equally exemplary, never more than the scene when her character is fleeing the Mattel Execs. Even now I feel as if I can’t hope to express what Robbie does except to say that without the aid of effects, she seems to animate herself, her arms and legs moving with an exaggerated fluidity that improbably comes across independent of her own body. </div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3J5AH84OjSGjv2AshkBUkw9Pz6HDe6SR5rhClbERxHirY6GgsPBszM5LJKAfD3_t_MZ8HSDlPMURI2NFsvcUC-5DwidREjRuQYQ_2PsOrKGc-iifz2PkE5gPO00izNAwpC2lsFnwC42QmZMJ9qdK5pUB3sFtOa-NcdTGbmUhyphenhyphenxtWBGXYw9TyO/s2730/expression.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1482" data-original-width="2730" height="217" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3J5AH84OjSGjv2AshkBUkw9Pz6HDe6SR5rhClbERxHirY6GgsPBszM5LJKAfD3_t_MZ8HSDlPMURI2NFsvcUC-5DwidREjRuQYQ_2PsOrKGc-iifz2PkE5gPO00izNAwpC2lsFnwC42QmZMJ9qdK5pUB3sFtOa-NcdTGbmUhyphenhyphenxtWBGXYw9TyO/w400-h217/expression.png" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div><b>The Annual Buck C. Turgidson Award (presented to the best facial expressions in a movie): Michelle Williams, Showing Up.</b> It’s not just one facial expression, even if a few of the withering glares she affixes Maryann Plunkett, playing her character’s mother slash boss, because who wants to work with their parental figure, are side-splitting, but <i>all</i> the facial expressions. Because this performance - this movie - is made from Williams’s facial expressions, a working, or maybe just struggling, artist appraising life all around her. </div><br /><div><b>The Annual <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qgsst15iI2k" target="_blank">When Strangers Do Meet in Far Off Lands</a> Award (presented to the best Meet Cute in a movie): Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning.</b> Reminding us why writer/director Christopher McQuarrie is the master of working around Tom Cruise’s inherent sexlessness, he turns the airport hunt for a MacGuffin into a frisky, unofficial first date between his leading man’s IMF agent and Haley Atwell’s pickpocket. </div><div><br /></div><b>The Annual <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dl6FLfHTC68" target="_blank">“Isn’t This a Lovely Day (To Be Caught in the Rain)”</a> Award (presented to the best dance in a movie): The Adults.</b> True, the dance in “Poor Things” is also great, but that dance feels like a lateral move, in a manner of speaking, from the 2018 “Isn’t This a Lovely Day (To Be Caught in The Rain)” award winning dance in “The Favourite.” What’s more, the “Poor Things” dance just sort of exists unto itself whereas the dance of three siblings in “The Adults” not only quotes <a href="https://www.cinemaromantico.org/2022/08/my-favorite-movie-dance-sequence.html" target="_blank">my favorite movie dance</a>, but it also joyfully encapsulates and puts a button on a movie exploring the nature of performance. </div><div><br /></div><div><b>The Annual Ruby Slippers Award (presented to the best prop in a movie): Minifridge, Barbie.</b> One quick image in the movie’s remarkable “Parallax View”-like montage of the patriarchy (<b>Montage of the Year</b>) in which a minifridge door is thrust open, functions like a wormhole, the Tannhauser Gate from a dude’s tailgate cosmically tunneling back to his college dorm. </div><div><br /></div><div><b>The Annual Penélope Cruz Award (presented to the best hair in a movie): Adam Driver, Ferrari.</b> It’s more than a little ironic that the Annual Penélope Cruz Award goes to someone <i>in</i> a Penélope Cruz-starring movie that is <i>not</i> Penélope Cruz. But then, “Ferrari” is a Michael Mann movie, and if there is one thing we know about a Michael Mann protagonist, even if his life is falling down all around him, his hair will still look good. </div><div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvUYyxTMbWWfBsQ2SHtpacissWKTPrCYK-fI-8X4qkaDkHukF1Zeq2HtMdhz3dj3zuxkeormGMyrLPD6m-jkFspyRLHNvZP_gdpUGBNyvOeF-iq9FvW7cA-vkNxDZewiWGKg9e9JLHA1LCGHl_s6oA-nK5aOx2lOAI0Rz3agEcg9MGkEBNo_xL/s2870/shirt.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1418" data-original-width="2870" height="203" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvUYyxTMbWWfBsQ2SHtpacissWKTPrCYK-fI-8X4qkaDkHukF1Zeq2HtMdhz3dj3zuxkeormGMyrLPD6m-jkFspyRLHNvZP_gdpUGBNyvOeF-iq9FvW7cA-vkNxDZewiWGKg9e9JLHA1LCGHl_s6oA-nK5aOx2lOAI0Rz3agEcg9MGkEBNo_xL/w400-h203/shirt.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div><b>The Annual Keira Knightley Green Dress Award (presented to the best costume in a movie): Josh Hamilton, Reality.</b> Sometimes the grim reaper comes dressed not in a black cloak but an unflattering short-sleeved shirt straight off the clearance rack at Kohl’s.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>The Annual Cinema Paradiso Award (presented to the best cinema scene in a movie): Fallen Leaves.</b> The deadpan Scandinavian version of the “Platoon” scene in “The Naked Gun.” </div><div><br /></div><div><b>The <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQV6CijIzrc" target="_blank">“Now We Can Eat”</a> Award (presented to the best meal in a movie): The Iron Claw.</b> Three brothers shoved into the front seat of pickup truck, tooling down the road, blasting Tom Petty, shoving fast food into their mouths, it’s the happiest moment, really, in a sad, sad movie. Youth has rarely seemed so ravishingly wasted on the young. </div><div><br /></div><div><b>The Annual <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPiSB8fSviE" target="_blank">“Then He Kissed Me”</a> Award (presented to the best use of pop music in a movie): <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVKEkszWP1I" target="_blank">Crimson and Clover</a> by Tommy James & The Shondells in Priscilla</b>. That eternal tremolo guitar has never sounded so foreboding.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>The Annual <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSLG5irtz64" target="_blank">“Best of My Love”</a> Award (presented to the second-best use of pop music in a movie): <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Hcm5mjIbbE" target="_blank">Don’t Do Me Like That</a> by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers in The Iron Claw.</b> See Also: Best Meal.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>The Annual Tour Eiffel Award (presented to the best image of The Eiffel Tower in a movie): Full Time. </b>When a single mother forced to spend the night in a seedy motel in Paris because she can’t get back to her home in the faraway suburbs due to a transit strike wakes up to see motel art of the famous open-lattice iron structure perched along the Seine and then goes to the window to see the city waking up in the alley below, it’s a pertinent reminder of how the City of Light looks to everybody else. </div><div><br /></div><div><b>Best Movie Tweet:</b> See Below. For the “Michael Clayton” hive. If you know, you know. RIP Tom Wilkinson. </div></div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPWbOFe7BNyPN-6CM0nkO8PquUhJqmG0PTYs4j2xwQDYHZGIxOmWuAzIrxZ5b9wmkTPOwsQM1_11veaWqiZ__G8OkylYMHLNMfIZKlHB9Dlhn3lSnOjrWK8BWQ0NpitcNF7MItzC_KBWEF7Rllx4-7qvvh194822EFWx2jBw3IziMbLgSvn_vz/s716/tweet.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="716" data-original-width="716" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPWbOFe7BNyPN-6CM0nkO8PquUhJqmG0PTYs4j2xwQDYHZGIxOmWuAzIrxZ5b9wmkTPOwsQM1_11veaWqiZ__G8OkylYMHLNMfIZKlHB9Dlhn3lSnOjrWK8BWQ0NpitcNF7MItzC_KBWEF7Rllx4-7qvvh194822EFWx2jBw3IziMbLgSvn_vz/w400-h400/tweet.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div><br /></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17951989.post-56174961708510153622024-01-18T06:00:00.122-06:002024-01-18T06:00:00.134-06:00FerrariThe life of Enzo Ferrari spanned 90 years, rich enough to fill an almost 500-page book by Brock Yates. But in bringing “Enzo Ferrari: The Man, The Cars, The Races, The Machine” to the big screen, director Michael Mann, working from a long-gestating script by the late Troy Kennedy Martin, eschews an overarching account of Italy’s most famous racing and sports car entrepreneur with big slabs of critical Life Details to instead convey one year in Enzo’s life, 1957, full of personal and professional tribulation and culminating in a tragic Mille Miglia, the once-famed open-road motorsport endurance race. Mann has always favored exerting extreme pressure on his characters to see how they respond, and by narrowing his focus in “Ferrari,” his aim is not to summarize Enzo’s life but more specific, to get under the man’s hood, so to speak, and see what makes him tick.<div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEguQoz-GGebm-WQjU3PV92VjymcEmjxA3XNH2sGh0Li8oXFCow6hFy7PMhsrx2J7iMMh2UoQLlYO1HSjVfzmAOI4r4IOy3UZ-ODBgssOT5_xYxcmSvXqZCsuRQ4q2aUlxW0_GCkZQl2IIrZub1L8lTSDdjIugG-A7rMWurgF6vbBkVLt18VnCKP/s1000/ferrari1.webp" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="563" data-original-width="1000" height="231" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEguQoz-GGebm-WQjU3PV92VjymcEmjxA3XNH2sGh0Li8oXFCow6hFy7PMhsrx2J7iMMh2UoQLlYO1HSjVfzmAOI4r4IOy3UZ-ODBgssOT5_xYxcmSvXqZCsuRQ4q2aUlxW0_GCkZQl2IIrZub1L8lTSDdjIugG-A7rMWurgF6vbBkVLt18VnCKP/w400-h231/ferrari1.webp" width="400" /></a></div><br />“Ferrari” is not a heist movie but sort of opens in the vein of one with Enzo lighting out from the Modena countryside home he keeps with his mistress Lina (Shailene Woodley) by giving his car a running start, hopping behind the wheel, letting it coast along, and then, finally, starting the engine. He needs to make it back to Bologna in time to have morning coffee with his wife Laura (Penélope Cruz), who knows of Lina, and who demands this ritual to maintain appearances. Putting up such fronts is essentially the crux of “Ferrari’s” drama. Bologna reveres Enzo, which is demonstrated in an early scene at a barbershop where he entertains the regulars with comic witticisms while literally maintaining his appearance by getting a shave. Indeed, Driver <i>wears</i> his suits, <i>wears</i> his hair, and like in a brief scene of his character on the road in which rapid-fire cuts capture him coolly shifting gears, he exudes an air of control at all times, indifferent to the swirling chaos, unaware it’s threatening to consume him.</div><div><br />
“Two objects,” Enzo explains at one point, “cannot occupy the same point in space at the same moment in time.” He’s referring to cars on a racetrack, but he may as well be highlighting the impossible dualities of his own life. Indeed, an early scene of Enzo attending Mass does not so much juxtapose the ovular communion wafers with the image of so many ovular stopwatches as Ferrari’s rival Maserati breaks a record on the track as link them together, racing inextricable from life itself. This idea is literalized in Enzo’s relationship with Laura given that she owns half his Ferrari business, and because the company is verging on bankruptcy, and Enzo is told he needs complete control for the necessary steps to keep it afloat, he must convince his relatively estranged wife to sign over her half to him, a volatile seesaw. In their frequent spats, and occasional eruptions of sex, they are at once made for each other and utterly incompatible, manifesting “a terrible joy and deadly passion.” That’s Enzo again, talking about his own life talking about racing. </div><div><br />
Their scenes together are as ferocious as any on the track, and on full display in their introductory quarrel when Laura pulls a pistol, takes deliberately bad aim at her exasperating man, and shoots, leaving a hole in the wall not far from Enzo’s head. It’s Chekov’s Gun, in other words, but going off <i>already</i>, in a manner of speaking, which not only immediately establishes the combustible nature of their relationship, but how death permeates “Ferrari” from the figurative waving of the flag. Mother and father still grieve for their son Dino, having died only a year earlier from muscular dystrophy, making daily visits to his grave. Dino’s presences hovers over everything and is complicated by Enzo’s son Piero (Giuseppe Festinese) with Lina, of whose existence Laura is unaware, though comes to suspect, as if the 12-year-old’s illegitimacy is preventing cauterization of the gaping emotional wound. </div><div><br />
The serene countryside scenes in Modena contrast against the more frenzied nature of Enzo’s life in Bologna, but too often, that’s all they are, symbols, not least because Woodley lacks the same pulse as Cruz. The latter seems to receive cues from the opera sequence midway through, virtually transmitting emotions directly to us as a soloist might with an aria. And though Lina is a calmer character, she is meant to instill a passion of her own, that she won’t just sit around in the shadows, and Woodley struggles to effuse the humanity and electricity of that struggle. I will not comment on the quality of the accent, <a href="https://www.cinemaromantico.org/2022/01/accents-n-stuff.html?m=0" target="_blank">because that’s out of my jurisdiction</a>, but I was also left wondering if Woodley was mistakenly charged by Mann with focusing so much on the accent, she forgot to give a performance.</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKnJy7Ixh8ZBtvYfsPUE08rQzLi0DnMsC5BrU4ByVfK3wa3i9tum9wU4hPj5oycoE5_6mVbXKPSReisgYyZZSOAlQCTf96PAFUoP5gTEXf-JUIgOpsR4q8hdKefFr487sxsrDt8snSmLHQPl6uM2i4d_uScsQ-JwLEOw2giYCFY_She0nObPUp/s2000/ferrari2.webp" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1333" data-original-width="2000" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKnJy7Ixh8ZBtvYfsPUE08rQzLi0DnMsC5BrU4ByVfK3wa3i9tum9wU4hPj5oycoE5_6mVbXKPSReisgYyZZSOAlQCTf96PAFUoP5gTEXf-JUIgOpsR4q8hdKefFr487sxsrDt8snSmLHQPl6uM2i4d_uScsQ-JwLEOw2giYCFY_She0nObPUp/w400-h266/ferrari2.webp" width="400" /></a></div><br />Just as Enzo struggles to compartmentalize these separate lives, he struggles to compartmentalize the racetrack from his home life too. The opening images of a young Enzo in a race car inform the movie to come, one in which no longer fit to race, he is left to issue demands and instructions to his drivers, transforming them into avatars, an extension of his ego, and of his obsession. The racing scenes are themselves further extensions of that obsession. Thrilling isn’t the right word, they are more intense than that, no, more visceral, even elegiac, as conveyed in a sequence where Ferrari drivers compose letters to their loved ones before going off to the Mille Miglia. One of Enzo’s cars might win, but victory is compromised by death, a scene so unsentimentally gruesome as to take your breath away, a man at the wheel who is confident, and in control, until suddenly, he is not, wreckage strewn behind him.</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0