The cinematic equivalent of having a Black friend

For my March monthly viewing in Flickcharters Friends Favorites Fiesta, I was assigned Dan O'Bannon's 1985 The Return of the Living Dead, which I did not particularly love. When I wrote up my little blurb in our Facebook group, I felt like I needed to prove that I liked other campy gore effects movies, dropping the names of both Killer Klowns from Outer Space and Dead Alive. To be honest, I don't really remember how gory KKFOS may or may not be.

After the fact, I pondered why I felt like I had to list my bonafides, in order to prove that I wasn't just opposed to this sort of movie.

Surely no one cares whether I do or don't like campy zombie movies. The stakes of this opinion are not very high. Even if there's someone out there who thinks I "didn't get" that it was deliberately bad in some respects, well, so what. I can't usually control what other people think, especially in a group where I've met none of these people in real life.

However, I did continue to have to sort of defend myself by saying things like "it was lacking a certain something" and "it didn't hit my sweet spot." Making sure they knew that I had a sweet spot, and that under the right circumstances this sweet spot could be satisfied by campy zombie movies. 

It made me think a little bit better of people who protest they aren't racist, and to prove it they mention that they have a Black friend. 

Of course, if they are actually racist, well, I don't think better of them on that score. But I do think better of the instinct to prove you like something by talking about a similar kind of thing you like.

Maybe it would be easier to talk about this in terms of movies, while still keeping the racial component. 

Sinners has been an interesting movie to have in the zeitgeist. Because it is so clearly defined as a Black movie, liking it or not liking it could appear to speak volumes about the rest of your preferences, and indeed, about you as a person who either prejudges or does not prejudge people. 

You can be in one of two camps:

1) Liking Sinners, which proves you might like other Black movies and are, in theory, not a racist;

2) Not liking Sinners, which means someone could think you don't like Black people.

I'm in the former category, as you would know from the fact that I ranked Sinners as my #2 movie of 2025. And I do, on some level, feel like that opinion relieves me of the need to defend some of my other choices. My lowest ranked movie of the year, the Ice Cube version of War of the Worlds, obviously stars a Black guy, as well as some of the rest of his Black family members, though the rest of the cast is multi-racial. I thought the director, Rich Lee, was also Black, but I just looked it up and discovered that he is not. In any case, I didn't have to defend myself against hypothetical accusations of racism for hating War of the Worlds because Sinners was propping me up, at least this year.

I've got some other friends here in Australia who are in the other camp, who have lots of things they nitpick about the movie -- which I do acknowledge has some pretty significant pacing problems in its second half. They seem to feel less guilty about potentially being thought of as racist, or rather more secure in their own progressive core, because these guys don't worry too much about talking about all the other Black movies they love. However, I have an American friend who sends out his rankings to a group of people in an email, and this year he said, regarding his middling ranking of Sinners:

"And in 2025 the biggest question that I will get is “What is your goddamn beef with Sinners?  Are you a goddamn racist?”  I assure you that I am not a racist.  I just don’t really like it when actors play more than one role in a film…specifically, I REALLY don’t like it when the same actor play twins (except for The Krays and Dead Ringers)."

In starting off with a discussion of a 40-year-old zombie movie, I've worked myself around to something a bit more interesting here. Why do we worry so much about being misconstrued here? Do we worry that it's actually true?

No I don't think that's it. But it's more like a couple lines of dialogue I always think of from Glengarry Glen Ross, where Ed Harris and Alan Arkin are discussing the fact that Arkin's character, who proclaims his innocence, gets nervous talking to the police. Harris assures him it's not because he's guilty of anything or has anything to hide, in fact, just the opposite: "You know who doesn't get nervous talking to the police?" Harris' Dave Moss asks. "Criminals."

So an actual racist would never talk about his possibly fictitious Black friend, and an actual person who doesn't like campy zombie movies would never pretended he liked them. (Though, I suppose, if the Black friend were actually fictitious, that might say something ... usually in this situation, the person is just exaggerating the closeness of their relationship with some Black guy they know.)

Okay that's about enough of that. 

Ryan Gosling looks like a young Alec Baldwin

You may recall I watched Glengarry Glen Ross last Saturday night in appreciation of Alan Arkin. Well, I had an observation from that viewing that had no place in my remembrance post for Arkin, and then I went out of town and forgot to write it up separately.

And I don't really need to tell you what that observation was because the subject of this post has done it for me. 

I didn't glean a lot from Glengarry that I hadn't on previous viewings, in the movie itself, but I do have a perspective on it that I wouldn't have had, at least not to the same extent, the last time I watched it in 2011.

In 2011, Ryan Gosling was still a relatively new presence in our lives. Oh his "breakout" role -- to the extent that you can call such an independent film a breakout -- was ten years earlier in The Believer, after which he started getting roles with some regularity. And I had definitely already seen a half-dozen of his movies by 2011. 

But maybe Ryan Gosling wasn't so ingrained in my head that seeing the merely 34-year-old Alec Baldwin in Glengarry was enough to remind me of him.

That version of Baldwin sure reminded me of Gosling this time, though.

I spent about three agonizing minutes -- and his one outstanding scene isn't much longer than that -- trying to figure out who this version of Baldwin reminded me of. It wouldn't have been an older actor, I figured, and when I realized it was someone younger I landed on Gosling relatively quickly.

Of course, I'm not the only one to make this observation. Although I created the side-by-side images above myself, the internet had some other ones to share as well if I hadn't wanted to do the work, such as this one:

The similarity here might be even more striking, but that's an even younger Baldwin, and besides, I wanted the Baldwin from Glengarry.

It isn't just the appearance, either, but the mannerisms. I could easily see Gosling doing that same bit Baldwin does where he mocks the salesmen, pretending he's them throwing back an invisible drink at a bar, complaining to anyone who would listen about how sales is a "tough racket." Gosling would nail that.

Naturally that got me thinking who else I would select if I were going to recast Glengarry Glen Ross with doppelgangers 30 years later.

Now, finding actual doppelgangers for Jack Lemmon, Al Pacino, Alan Arkin, Ed Harris, Kevin Spacey and Jonathan Pryce isn't going to be a cinch, so I think I'll go easy on myself and choose actors would look sort of similar, but also do similar things with their craft. And so as to not spend too much time on this post I won't agonize over my choices too much. 

I'll start with the easiest:

Ricky Roma - Oscar Isaac has felt like the heir apparent to Al Pacino throughout his career, so I'm not going to look any farther for my new Roma.

Shelley Levene - Possibly the inspiration for Gil the struggling salesman on The Simpsons, Shelley "The Machine" Levene is a little harder to cast because Jack Lemmon was a true original. However, the name that came to mind is Brian Cox. Now, without even seeing Succession I know that Cox has often played men who dominate or are very much self-actualized, which does not describe Shelley. But Cox could do Lemmon's profane rants and is certainly more than capable of playing desperate.

George Aaronow - Here's Arkin's character. I can't help but look for somebody tall and skinny with a bald head, and for some reason Matt Frewer keeps coming to mind. He may not work a ton these days but I think he could do the character's neurotic, doomsday energy.

Dave Moss - I couldn't think of a good match for Ed Harris so I cheated a little bit on this one, googling "Ed Harris lookalike." However, the photo result I got was a false positive that actually led me to my answer.  A photo came up for Harris and Viggo Mortensen appearing at a promotional event for the movie Appaloosa, which I haven't seen. I checked on IMDB and they don't play the same characters at different ages, or even related characters. (And I just realized they are also both in A History of Violence.) But I was surprised at how much alike they looked and I think Mortensen could equal Harris' intensity.

John Williamson - We don't want to spend any time thinking about Kevin Spacey these days, but for this exercise we're going to have to. Who's our best example today of a smarmy, menacing creep? It's probably not Jude Law, but for some reason that's the name I keep coming back to. Law likes to take on challenges and has a sinister quality to him that I think would work. 

James Lingk - The naive, gullible client who probably wanted to be Ricky Roma's best friend more than he wanted to buy real estate from him was played there by Jonathan Pryce. I'm having a real hard time thinking of someone to play this mousy and timid character. However, for some small similarity of appearance and the fact that they are both British, I am going with Jim Sturgess. Why not?

I hope no one makes this movie because it would be terrible.

Oh God, Cliff. No.

I didn't like Alan Arkin the first time I saw him on screen, or at least the first time I remember seeing him.

The Rocketeer (1991) was not my first Arkin movie, since he was in Edward Scissorhands the year before in 1990, and I loved that. But I don't remember him in it. Given the quality of the majority of performances he's given, I'm sure he was good.

But he wasn't good in The Rocketeer. In fact, he was so not good that my friends and I took to quoting a particularly awkward line of his dialogue from the movie, which I still think about almost every time I think about Arkin. 

I haven't seen that movie in the 32 years since, so I couldn't tell you what was actually happening in the plot. But some bit of bad luck, some sort of tragedy, had befallen lead character Cliff, played by Billy Campbell. 

The response of Arkin's character, who was named -- this is true, I just looked it up -- Peevy?

"Oh God, Cliff. No."

Doesn't sound that funny in isolation, but the delivery was botched so completely that the whole room burst out laughing. When five or six 17-year-olds find the exact same line of dialogue so poorly executed that their instant and simultaneous response is to devolve into guffaws, it has to be bad.

I never had that feeling about Alan Arkin again. 

If I had with any sort of regularity, I wouldn't be writing a remembrance piece like this one. But I didn't have it even once.

The next year I saw him in Glengarry Glen Ross, and the rest is history.

Now, sadly, so is Arkin. He died at age 89 on Thursday after years of heart problems -- heart problems which, in retrospect, make it seem unlikely he'd have appeared in both of the first two seasons of The Kominsky Method, and fully explain his absence from the third and final one.

In all I've ended up seeing 26 films in Arkin's illustrious career, which dates all the way back to 1957 -- though only three that were released before Edward Scissorhands (The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Wait Until Dark and The Last Unicorn, in which he provides a voice). The good news is, that means I have a lot more yet to enjoy.

When thinking of Arkin, I naturally think of Glengarry Glen Ross, as it is my favorite film he appeared in, ranked 54th on my Flickchart. (And used to be a lot higher.) But he added a generous helping of the loveable curmudgeon in every film he touched. It won him an Oscar in Little Miss Sunshine. 

But that was not the only version of Arkin we got. It seems hard to imagine that he was considered the right person to play one of the menacing intruders who means Audrey Hepburn harm in Wait Until Dark. And yet I remember him being menacing indeed.

He was the rare actor to really become a household name in his later years. If Glengarry Glen Ross was 31 years ago and we can think of that as a useful jumping off point for when his career started to really take off -- which may be a flawed way of viewing a career I am largely unfamiliar with prior to 1990 -- then he was already 58 in that movie. He had 56 more credits after this.

I have particularly appreciated him in the last decade of his career, when he's played characters whose primary defining feature is that they are old and cantankerous. But they are also simultaneously acerbic and warm, a tricky balance that only someone of Arkin's unique skill set could pull off. I'm thinking of movies like Stand Up Guys and Going In Style -- not great movies by any of stretch of the imagination, but infinitely better than they would have been without him. I feel like he should have been in Last Vegas, but that was his Kominsky Method co-star, Michael Douglas, who is actually 11 years younger. (As are the others in that film, Robert De Niro, Kevin Kline and Morgan Freeman. Actually, Freeman is 86, so I might be writing one of these for him sooner rather than later.)

No one expects an actor to be in only great movies -- I'm sure The Jerky Boys is terrible, and he was in the infamous Rob Reiner flop North. Then of course there was The Rocketeer, which many people like but I think is actively bad.

With the possible exception of that last, though, Alan Arkin made every movie he was in better -- and that is the mark of an actor with true staying power, who was working essentially up until the end.

Which, even at 89 years old, came too soon. 

Last night I watched Glengarry Glen Ross for the first time in 12 years as an appreciation. That acting master class is really the Al Pacino-Jack Lemmon show, with the greatest individual scene belonging to Alec Baldwin.

But guess who plays the only character -- or at least the only salesman -- you actually like?

Rest in peace. 

The album approach to diversity in film

I’m of two minds about representation at the movies.

On the one hand, I’m a liberal and I absolutely believe that racial, sexual and gender minorities should be fully represented both in front of and behind the camera. It would be a great finger in the eye of Trump and his cronies if the new cinematic norm were that these minorities were present in plentiful numbers.

On the other hand, I have a steadfast belief that there is a time and a place for every type of movie you could make, that any type of person might want to see. I don’t want to enter into an era where certain movies just don’t get made because they happen to be about subjects or people that we’ve decided are historically overrepresented.

If only movies could be like albums.

“Photo albums, Vance?”

No, not photo albums, you nitwit. Musical albums. The kind made by musicians, usually containing 10-15 songs.

Most albums, the good ones anyway, feature a multiplicity of moods, speeds and tones. You start off with something hot to bring the crowd in, which builds to its peak moment of excitement. You keep it going in tracks two and three. But by track four it’s time to slow it down a bit and become contemplative for a track or two. Then a couple whimsical songs, another banger or two, and then close with a couple sorrowful or ethereal contemplations on existence and its impermanence.

The point is not how the album flows and is constructed, but that the same artist has made a dozen different songs potentially appealing to a dozen different audiences, appropriate for a dozen different moods. Or if they’re really good, appealing to everybody, because that’s just how masterfully the album has been composed. But definitely taking different approaches to the making of music in each song, and comprising them of dissimilar elements.

If only a filmmaker could make ten movies at once that were meant to be received by us as a set. If they could, it would relieve each movie of having to be everything to everyone.

You could have one film where a woman is the hero, and another where she has to get saved by a man. You could have one film where all the races play together nicely, and others where they’re each doing their own things that pertain just to them. You could have one movie full of sassy gay best friends and one that didn’t have any.

But films cannot be interpreted as part of a collection, at least not in the moment of their inception. Each one must stand on its own. Each one must try to pass the Bechdel Test. Each one must have minorities present in a fashion where they aren’t pernicious examples of tokenism. Each one must try to engage in race-blind casting even if it’s not historically accurate. Each one must be sure that the villain is not a member of some group that has been too historically vilified.

I realize a suggestion like this is dangerously close to the “separate but equal” logic that informed the segregationists. But I hope you know I don’t mean it that way. I mean it to allow movies like Glengarry Glen Ross to have a future.

Glengarry Glen Ross is among my top 30 films of all time. It could never be made in 2019. It is a movie made by and starring white guys. The cast is comprised exclusively of white men, it’s written by a white man and it’s directed by a white man. If Glengarry Glen Ross were made today, there would be a movement on Twitter to cancel it.

But if Glengarry Glen Ross were part of an “album of films” released at the same time, it would not prompt outrage. Its white male cast would be balanced out by movie #7, whose cast was comprised of Lebanese lesbians. I’m exaggerating a bit but I think you take my meaning. I think it’s a legitimate cinematic pursuit to want to make a movie where six white guys stab each other in the back in order to win a prize for selling the most real estate and to prevent the loss of their jobs. To that particular filmmaker, it may represent the exact mood, the exact tone, the exact historic or demographic moment they want to explore.

Oddly and perhaps counterintuitively, the end result of this movement toward heterogeneity in each film is a kind of homogeneity – not within each movie itself, but taken in comparison to one another. If all movies have a perfect balance of races, genders and sexual orientations involved in whatever mission the plot takes them on, with predictable results about who is allowed to have a dark side and who is not, the movies will begin losing the element that distinguishes them from one another. They’ll have a utopian quality that reflects the society I want to live in, but they may also stop seeming as true as they could be if they were more thorny, eccentric and specific. What is art if not thorny, eccentric and specific?

Me, I want a world with both Glengarry Glen Ross and the Lebanese lesbians, and without one having to answer to the other if they don’t want to.

Why I love my wife

I have a cough.

It's a pretty shitty cough, one I've had for at least two weeks now ... which is at least two weeks' less time than my kids have had it. I actually kind of feel like they've had it since May. Winter in Melbourne, I tell ya -- it can be a bitch.

So the other night as we were watching our Thursday evening TV, and I coughed, I questioned out loud "Am I going to always be coughing?"

As familiar phrasing is wont to do, this reminded me of a movie quote. So I jumped in with "ABC, Always Be Coughing. ALWAYS ... Be Coughing."

My wife laughed, and without missing a beat she said "Coffee is for coughers."

Much laughter followed.

Nailed it.

A fondness for inept criminals

Each week on the Filmspotting podcast, the hosts (Adam Kempenaar and Josh Larsen) end the show with a top five in some category -- top five movies about redemption, top five movies set in Los Angeles, even top five movie scenes involving bicycles. The top five is usually a tie-in to the new movie they're reviewing that week.

I'm always excited for the top five, but rarely satisfied once I've listened to it. The movies I would choose rarely seem to show up on their lists. Which I don't think is any reflection of my taste in movies vs. theirs. It's just an indication of how many movies there are out there to choose from.

This past week was an exception.

I first heard about it from my friend Don, who texted me on Saturday "Listening to this week's Filmspotting as I tend to laundry, and now I know that you like movies with well-done inept criminals."

The tie-in this week was Killing Them Softly, which I was a mere half hour away from seeing at the time I received the text. As soon as I saw the movie, I'd be free to listen to the podcast, which would reveal to me Adam and Josh's top five inept movie criminals.

And Don sure was right.

For starters, they called this alternately the "H.I. McDunnough Memorial List" and the "I'll Be Taking Those Huggies and Whatever Cash You've Got Memorial List." The purpose of "naming" the list is to acknowledge the one choice they consider most obvious, which they would theoretically both pick as their #1 if they didn't exclude it from consideration. Past examples include "The Overlook Hotel Memorial List" for the top five movies about hotels.

Right off the bat I knew they had "gotten" me, since Raising Arizona is currently listed as my #3 movie on Flickchart. Even though I secretly think it may be my favorite movie of all time.

And then:

Josh's top 5:

5. Jasper and Horace, 101 Dalmatians
4. Jacob, A Simple Plan
3. Professor Marcus, The Ladykillers
2. Jerry Lundegaard, Fargo
1. Dignan, Bottle Rocket

Adam's top 5:

5. Sam and Eddie, Safe Men
4. Holland and Pendlebury, The Lavender Hill Mob
3. Virgil Starkwell, Take the Money and Run
2. Ken Pile, A Fish Called Wanda
1. Jerry Lundegaard, Fargo

Of the nine different movies mentioned here (Fargo was mentioned by both), I've seen six. Of those six, four are among my top 300 movies of all time (A Fish Called Wanda, Fargo, A Simple Plan and Bottle Rocket), three in my top 100 (Plan, Fargo and Wanda) and two (Fargo and Wanda) in my top ten.

So yeah, I'd say I was pretty satisfied by this week's top five.

But as these things do, it also got me thinking: Am I drawn to movies about inept criminals?

If you had asked me that question without providing any of the evidence why you were asking, I'd have said "No, I don't think so. No more than anyone else, that's for sure."

But I wonder. Because those aren't the only favorites of mine that feature hapless hoods.

(And watch out for spoilers. If you see a name of a movie you haven't seen in bold, skip on to the next -- I may be spoiling something about it.)

Looking only at my current Flickchart top 20, you could make arguments for the following:

Pulp Fiction (#4). The guys eating their Big Kahuna burgers are pretty inept, considering that they got caught with their pants down, gunned down while eating burgers for breakfast. But then there's also the ineptitude of Vincent Vega blowing off Marvin's head because of a pothole -- this after he and his friend Jules forgot to check the back room for a gunman who should have killed them. And never mind the singular bone-headedness of Butch, whose unusual plan to screw over and subsequently escape the mob involves returning to his house when they're looking for him.

Glengarry Glen Ross (#11). When their priggish boss denies them the new Glengarry leads, Dave and Shelly decide to knock over their own office to steal them, planning to sell them to the competition. That plan is destined to fail in numerous ways, even if you remove the last part about selling the spoils of your theft in the same small industry where you already work -- where the police are most likely to look for it. 

Goodfellas (#12). Although you can't be inept and last in the mafia very long, in the end, everyone has a slip-up that results in their eventual whacking. Particular to this movie, however, most of the crew that pulled off the Lufthansa robbery gets whacked because they can't follow the simple instruction not to spend their newfound wealthy in showy ways that will attract attention.

Run Lola Run (#16). Mani blows an otherwise smooth and simple job to transport a bag of money when he leaves it on the subway, obeying an instinctive reaction to elude a pair of cops who aren't even looking for him. Later he walks into a grocery store to rob it without wearing anything that would conceal his identity. Meanwhile, Lola tries to rob a bank by holding her own father at gunpoint.

Unforgiven (#20). An old gunslinger goes on a mission to claim a bounty on a pair of thugs who beat and cut up a couple of prostitutes, but nearly dies from the flu because he got wet in the rain (and then beaten by the sheriff, but you kind of feel like the rain is what did him in). One of the two thugs is then shot to death on the toilet, a pathetic way to go even if it might not have been helped.

You could even argue that #19 The Shawshank Redemption contains a hapless criminal, because the actual killer of Andy Dufresne's wife boastfully confesses to the crime while in prison.

I guess you could say that almost any movie that has an element of crime in it has someone who isn't that good at it. So I don't want to stretch this too far.

But I can't help but notice all the titles of movies featuring hapless criminals as you continue down my list. Time Bandits (#21) might qualify. The Bicycle Thief (#26) definitely does. Though it does drop off after that. Maybe that's because #27 is Bound, and Bound contains a group of the smartest criminal types you've ever seen in a movie.

What to make of this concentration near the top of my list of movies about backfired criminal exploits?

I don't really know. Though it could mean I have a fascination with the best laid plans gone awry. Or maybe I just like watching people who have truly made a mess, comical or otherwise, of their lives, to remind myself that I needn't get too down on myself just because I don't know where I want to be in my career in ten years.

I'll have to think on it some more.

But this realization does partly explain why I'm so in love with Killing Them Softly, a film I seem to like more than anyone else on the planet other than Entertainment Weekly's Owen Gleiberman (who also rhapsodized over it). More than the criminal ineptitude that inspired this week's top five, though, Softly really demonstrates how all crime is destined to have consequences, even if the criminals carry it off with a decent amount of panache.

That and a bunch of stuff about Obama and the financial crisis, but we won't get into that right now.