It sets everything up, it pays everything off

Have you ever seen a movie that doesn't have a single wasted scene -- a single wasted moment?

I have. I saw it for the third time on Sunday night, but the first in about 20 years.

I don't think I thought all that much of The Hand That Rocks the Cradle when I first saw it sometime in the early 1990s, within a year or two of its 1992 release. I didn't dislike it, but it went in one ear and out the other. These sorts of thrillers were pretty commonplace during that period, and this one did nothing to distinguish itself.

Or so I thought.

The occasion to rewatch Curtis Hanson's film came when I was reviewing for AllMovie, and working from a giant list of movies to review in order to initially build up their review database. If I'm being honest, I'll tell you that I wrote many of these 300-word reviews from my memory of the films. It was the only way to review them quickly, something I needed to do because they paid only $20 a pop, and for a short time around 2001 that was my only source of income. My contacts there surely knew I wasn't rewatching all these films, since I would frequently submit 20 reviews a week or thereabouts, but they didn't bat an eyelash.

But some I did rewatch. Not a lot, but The Hand That Rocks the Cradle was one of them. I'm not sure why in this case I felt it would benefit me to watch it again, but boy am I glad I did.

I emerged from that second viewing with a sense that not only was this not a forgettable, interchangeable domestic invasion thriller, but it was almost a perfect example of the craft of screenwriting.

I know over the years I've tended to credit Hanson with what makes the movie so good -- on its own terms (I'm not comparing it to Citizen Kane) -- but on Sunday night I finally learned the name of the person I should be crediting: Amanda Silver.

The lone credited screenwriter of Cradle worked busily, if someone anonymously, in the 1990s, then disappeared until 2010. Without looking it up, I'm suspecting she stopped to have a family. It was what women still did at that time, even in Hollywood.

She's actually had quite the career the past ten years, now (still) working with her husband, Rick Jaffa. They wrote and produced the new Planet of the Apes series, not to mention writing Jurassic World, In the Heart of the Sea and Mulan. I assume they've already submitted their script for Avatar 3 because I think that movie is mostly in the can. Interestingly, I don't find any of those films a superior example of screenwriting. Amanda Silver could have quit when she was ahead in the 1990s, though I imagine she's a lot richer now.

So just why is The Hand That Rocks the Cradle such a good script?

We all know that everything in a script is supposed to matter, is supposed to contribute to advancing the plot or fleshing out a character. But I'm not sure I've ever seen it done in such a streamlined fashion as in The Hand That Rocks the Cradle.

There's simply no waste here. None. Every single story fragment that gets even a whiff of a mention has a bearing on the later plot. Interestingly, though, that doesn't mean the movie has no room to feel natural or to breathe -- an interesting choice of words when the film's protagonist, Claire (Annabella Sciorra), is an asthma sufferer.

No this is just a well-oiled machine, proceeding from point to point to point to create a relentless momentum of savvy exposition and rich character development. You might think that "developing" a character means giving him or her a chance to riff, like a Tarantino character would, but you'd be wrong. You can do this while seamlessly interweaving plot material such that not a single word of dialogue could be sacrificed. 

But just because everything matters doesn't mean that this is a tight 90 minutes, or that we're feeling rushed toward the conclusion. Cradle runs a full 110 minutes, but it doesn't feel like it, because that momentum is strong. The elements introduced are paid off within moments or at worst minutes, or if they take longer to pay off, you realize just how essential those little droplets of information were for believing the moment when they're finally cashed in. The deus ex machina is the enemy of good screenwriting, and a good screenwriter -- like Silver -- does all the work to prevent that crutch from ever being necessary.

I could cite examples, but I'd be here all day. You can't actually cite examples in a script like The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, because you'd literally be citing everything. Each turn of phrase or inserted shot of a seemingly insignificant detail is doing the work of delivering the movie. Any Chekhov's guns here? You better bet they're going to go off by the ending.

I do think, however, that a good exercise in a screenwriting class would be to watch this movie once through, then start it again and pause it frequently to admire Silver's handiwork. If screenwriting classes involve a recitation of do's and don't's, then Cradle is all "do." 

And then, 110 minutes later, when the last little bit of story material has been paid off, you know what happens next?

The credits roll. 

No checking in on the family six months later. No epilogue of any kind. If you've been paying attention, you know that everything is going to be alright from here on out for this family. (Spoiler alert.) You don't need someone's misguided attempt to tie it all up with a bow.

The movie has been tying itself up with a bow for 110 minutes now, so when it gets to the end, it doesn't have to do anything else.

I call that a great script. 

I'll remember the name Amanda Silver now. Heck, maybe she'll even manage to make all 238 minutes of Avatar 3 seem essential.

Probably not, especially given the bloat involved in some of her more recent titles. But I am curious to go back to when she was her peak, if The Hand That Rocks the Cradle is any indication, and watch the two Silver-written films from the 1990s that I haven't seen -- The Relic and Eye for an Eye. I dismissed them at the time because they seemed like generic thrillers.

Be careful what, or who, you dismiss. 

Richard Cheese is having a moment

If you haven't heard of Richard Cheese, then you haven't been listening to parody lounge music.

Okay, no one's been listening to parody lounge music. But I did listen to it like 20 years ago, when I first discovered Cheese, who is actually a man named Mark Jonathan Davis. His accompanying band, which he does not always play with, has cheese-related names as well -- Bobby Ricotta, Frank Feta and Billy Bleu. But it seems like the whole thing is designed to make us think of a variation on the lead singer's name -- Dick Cheese. Sophomoric, but amusing enough.

In 2000 -- though I think I discovered it three or four years later -- Cheese and company released an album called Lounge Against the Machine, which was comprised of lounge covers of alternative music from that time. I just checked iTunes, and the 11 tracks I have may have been acquired through a music sharing service or something because they contain some of the tracks from Lounge but then some others that are not on there. Anyway, the ones I remember most from my collection are "Suck My Kiss," "Smack My Bitch Up" and "More Human than Human," though the one that gets played the most in the general world is his cover of Disturbed's "Down with the Sickness."

If you can imagine a cheesy (pun intended) lounge singer singing "Change my pitch up, smack my bitch up" in a swing style, with an imaginary martini in his hand (though he usually requires both hands for his piano), you get what Cheese is all about. It's amusing to be sure, but you aren't going to listen to him round the clock or anything. It's not that kind of thing. It's Weird Al adjacent.

"Down With the Sickness" was what appeared in Zack Snyder's 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake. I'd been turned on to Cheese just a year or two before that, so this was not where I discovered the musician. However, I feel like it was one of the most recent times I'd actually been reminded of him. Which is not all that recent. 

Until the past month, when his work has now appeared in two different new movies.

Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar was actually released in February, but I didn't watch it until the last day of April. Here, Cheese appears as a lounge singer in the titular resort that Barb and Star visit, though he's not singing White Zombie covers. The song from this movie that may have crept out into the zeitgeist a bit is called "I Love Boobies," and it's perfectly in keeping with Cheese's puerile sensibilities. One appearance in the film might have served him best, but they go back to him three or four times, with diminishing returns.

Then last night it was Snyder again with Army of the Dead, as both Cheese and Snyder come full circle to the origins of our general awareness of them. Dawn of the Dead, another zombie movie, was the film that introduced most of us to Snyder, before he became a particular type of director with films like 300, Watchmen and all his work for DC. He returns to that realm and brings Cheese with him, as the classic Snyder opening montage -- which was so great in Watchmen -- is accompanied here by Cheese's music. I suppose a White Zombie cover would have been thematically appropriate, but instead it's Cheese's take on "Viva Las Vegas," as the movie is about Vegas getting overrun by zombies and walled off from the rest of the world to contain the infection. 

Snyder is obviously Cheese's biggest fan, as he also used Cheese in Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, the internet now tells me. I must not have noticed or it must not have made an impression on me, because it really had felt like the middle of the aughts since I'd last thought of Cheese.

Who knows if this is the beginning of a Cheese-assaince, or just a director returning to the same well for the third time and one random one-off appearance. But I'm sure Cheese is pretty psyched about it, because if I, one of his "biggest fans," had not had occasion to think about him in 15 years, I doubt many others had either.

Forsaking DVDs again, and Disney's expanded roster

Two posts ago I bemoaned that I had opted to watch one of the DVDs I own on streaming rather than from my collection, though I did offer a glimmer of hope for dying physical media: I had taken out about seven DVDs from the library for the first time since the pandemic started, and expected to dig into them shortly.

A few days later, I doubled that number on another library trip.

A week after that, I had still watched none of them, and had to renew the originals for another three weeks for fearing of butting up against their due dates and getting fined. They still sat there in an untouched stack on top of our overflowing games shelf, to the left of the TV. 

So Thursday night I determined to finally get going. The majority of those I borrowed were ones I hadn't seen, but on Thursday night I opted for an old favorite, Crimson Tide, which I hadn't seen since the late 1990s or early 2000s. 

I did watch Crimson Tide, but somehow again failed to insert the DVD into the player.

See, we had talked about watching Cruella this weekend with the kids. I'd expected to watch this in the theater, where it is playing here in Australia, but we've just started another snap lockdown in response to a flurry of new COVID cases. It's supposed to end a week from now, but the number of new infections from now until then will play a large role in determining whether that actually happens.

So I thought, wanting to review Cruella early next week, I would pay the Disney+ premium rental price for it. A quick search on Disney+ showed me it wouldn't release until the next day, even though it had already released in Australian theaters. (We get a 24-hour jump start on the rest of the world due to the tradition of new movies opening on a Thursday.) I also found that the premium rental price was "only" $21.99, not the $29.99 they had charged for Mulan and others.

However, as I was searching up Cruella, Crimson Tide was also returned in the search results.

That's right, Disney+ is not just for kids anymore, if it ever was.

Seeing Tony Scott's 1995 film, complete with infamous punch-ups from Quentin Tarantino, available on Disney+ made me realize two things:

1) I was going to forsake a DVD for the second time in two weeks. 

2) Disney+ has a lot more stuff on it than I consciously knew.

I suppose I knew that Disney+ had other offerings than the obvious ones, like Disney animation, Pixar, Star Wars, Marvel, The Simpsons and the Muppets. But I didn't really know, until Thursday, that they've become the purveyor of just as many random repertory films as other streaming services.

Also uncovered in this search, for example, was The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, that "Cr" abbreviated search yielding up quite a bevy of interesting choices. As I've always really liked this Curtis Hanson thriller but had not seen it turning up anywhere recently, I now think I also have my Friday night viewing picked out.

Who knows what else is on there, but it looks like I've got some exploring to do.

Even the one reason I had regretted not watching my last forsaken DVD -- Vanilla Sky -- on DVD rather than streaming was not present with Crimson Tide.

Although watching Vanilla Sky on Stan had presented me with the convenience of not having to unplug an HDMI cable from one device and into another, it had left me with a lesser viewing experience, as the transfer of Vanilla Sky on Stan was not a great one. It didn't look bad, but it didn't look sharp, and I believe it also failed to preserve the film's original aspect ratio, though that's only occurring to me now as I type this.

There was no such issue with Crimson Tide. It looked goddamned great, certainly DVD quality if not better. I should know that a class operation like Disney would have a good transfer of the film ... one that might have just severed my connection to physical media a little more than it already was.

It was interesting to catch up with this again. I'd always loved the tension Scott and company produce here, and it did not disappoint.

One treat was to note how many familiar faces there were here. I had forgotten that Viggo Mortensen plays a central role here, probably because I wasn't consciously aware of him as an actor until six years later with The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. Others that I certainly didn't know as well at the time, but do now: James Gandolfini, Leland Orser, Steve Zahn and George Dzundza. Then there were those I knew at the time but nowadays haven't seen (or thought of) in ages, like Rocky Carroll. Heck, even Ricky Schroeder is in this movie.

And of course Denzel Washington and Gene Hackman crackled as much as ever, though it was at first funny to see Washington in such a straight, by-the-book role that relies so little on his extended riffing and verbal dexterity. Most Washington characters feature a certain pizzazz, but not this one, which made me appreciate his performance all the more.

So now that I've got Friday's viewing picked out too, maybe, finally, Saturday night will mark my long-awaited return to the DVD. Or Sunday, if we watch Cruella on Saturday.

Or maybe I'll just find another reason to hasten the demise of my personal relationship with physical media. 

Better cut back on the Disney+ searches just in case.

Paper grocery bags live on in the movies

I thought it was appropriate to choose an old-fashioned-looking poster to accompany this post about old-fashioned things.

I was watching the thriller Run on Sunday night -- strong, but flawed in some key ways -- and I noticed something that has become outdated in our real lives, but lives on in the movies: the paper grocery bag.

You know the one I'm talking about. Of course you do. But for formatting reasons, I need to hem and haw for a few more lines here so I can fit it in while not encroaching on the movie poster to your right. 

What shall we talk about? I'll give you a topic: "The Spanish Inquisition was neither Spanish nor an Inquisition. Discuss." (Thank you, Coffee Talk with Paul Baldwin/Linda Richman.)

It's this guy:

It's forever more cinematic than the alternatives we actually use, such as this:

Or in my house, something like this:

It's just one of many ways movies knowingly veer away from what is realistic to what is considered aesthetically rich. Those old paper bags are a delight as part of a set design. They reveal a few goodies bursting forth from the top, they crinkle, and they hold their shape on the counter, as opposed to spilling out their contents like the various and sundry assortment of cloth bags acquired over the years in our real kitchens.

It's just the latest of many chosen elements of a set design I have discussed on this blog, such as "cars that are two decades old look better than new cars," "people don't wear seatbelts and/or helmets in movies" and "flip phones look so much better than smartphones, even if no one has flipped a phone in more than a decade."

Run also uses a classic landline, not with a rotary dialpad at least, but one of those ones shaped like a miniature and slightly deflated loaf of bread, with its spiral cord perfectly spiraling and stretching across a room. All to the good of course.

I thought I might have a little more to say in this post, but in truth, I am preparing for work, and I just thought it was time to end the nine-day drought without a post on this blog. 

Forsaking our DVD collections

There's something sad about the first time you watch a movie you own on DVD, but you can't be bothered to pull out your actual DVD, so you watch it on streaming instead.

I can't say for sure that my Friday night viewing of Vanilla Sky was actually the first time I did that. In fact, I reckon that if I scoured my post history on The Audient, I might find that not only have I done it before, I've written about it before. But since I can't be bothered to do that either, I'll just write it again. 

It was all the more strange that I did it, because one of the things I was actually looking forward to in my first Vanilla Sky viewing in four years was the DVD menu. 

(As a side note, I can't believe I've only written about this movie once before on this blog, considering that I rewatch it at regular intervals -- 2008, 2010, 2014 and 2017 before Friday night.)

Remember how good DVD menus can be? As you contemplate which of your options to select, you may get a little montage of images from the movie, some good music, even an independently conceived interactive experience that builds on the themes of the movie and incorporates the menu options into it.

With the Vanilla Sky DVD menu, the thing I find so compelling is a little melancholic piece of the score that plays on about a 15-second loop, both preparing me for the viewing and amplifying its themes. Even with that four-year gap since my last viewing, I can still remember that music as I sit here typing this.

But Friday night, I just said "To hell with all that."

I had decided to watch Vanilla Sky after contemplating the "sacrifice" Tom Cruise made earlier in the week when he returned his Golden Globes to the HFPA. He didn't win a globe for Vanilla Sky of course -- the film was generally not well received, though Penelope Cruz did get a globe nomination and Paul McCartney's song of the same name got an Oscar nod. But it got me thinking about the "serious" performances Cruise has given, and Vanilla Sky contains one of my favorites.

But instead of going to the trouble of flipping through my DVD folder to find the disc, then making sure there was currently an HDMI cable connecting my TV and the DVD player, I just went hunting for it on my streaming services. And it took until the third service I checked, but indeed, it was playing on Stan. 

Obviously we'll soon reach the point where most people don't even own a DVD player, and another great chapter in media history will close. But until that point, it would seem worthwhile to enjoy our DVDs while we can. Especially when they have lovely mood-setting DVD menus like Vanilla Sky.

All is not lost, friends.

Also within the past week I have made my first proper return trip to the library since the start of the pandemic. We've been returned to full normalcy for quite a while now here in Australia, but the libraries were one of the last institutions to drop their COVID restrictions. I'd tried to go on a couple previous occasions, but had been greeted by security guards and librarians helpfully yet aggressively querying what my business was. At that point, they would go to the shelf for you to look for the thing you wanted, while you waited in the foyer. Until recently, it wasn't an environment that supporting lingering and browsing in any way, shape or form.

But on my day off last Friday, I walked home and swung by the local branch, where all the restrictions had been lifted and they were as happy to have me browse as to go put my head down on a desk for a nap, if that's what I'd wanted to do. 

I came away with a stack of about ten DVDs. The collection did not feel like it had been recently refreshed -- all the titles seemed to be ones I had considered on my last visit, and none were 2020 movies -- but for the time being, they are still offering these, as well as CDs, to a general public still willing to consume them.

So whether it was for Vanilla Sky or not, my DVD player should get some run in the coming weeks.

I'll also say this: Vanilla Sky did not look "just as good" on streaming. I'm not really sure how these things work, but I suspect that Stan did not get a very good transfer of the movie, either because that would have been more expensive, it wasn't available, or they just didn't care. And since a lot of people don't appreciate this movie the way I do, they probably don't care either. The quality of the version on Stan is not making any new converts, in all likelihood.

DVD/BluRay may continue to have the quality advantage, and I'll remember that the next time I'm faced with one of these scenarios. 

Disney princesses as stacks of Legos

I went to a Village Cinemas I'd never been to on Friday, in the city of Knox, about 40 minutes from my house. The reason for choosing this particular theater was it was near the one place in the state of Victoria where there are batting cages, and I visited the cages on my day off with another friend from my baseball team. The movie was Those Who Wish Me Dead. There will be a review linked to the right within a couple days.

Instead of posters for upcoming movies in the hallway between the different screening rooms, there were a lot of abstract interpretations of famous movies, a thing I always like to see. You know, like a big Joker grin hanging out there by itself against a neutral background for The Dark Knight. As is usually the case when they do things like this, I stopped and looked at each one. (In fact, more on that in a minute.)

There was also a series of five other framed pieces of art that I found uniquely compelling -- a series of quiz questions about which Disney princesses were represented by the images in question. I only got two of the five correct, but I liked them so much that I took a picture of each to give you the same opportunity. (Again, more on that in a minute.)

As you are about to see, these were stacks of five colored Lego bricks that were meant as abstract representations of the characters in question. Each asked "Can you name this Disney princess?" The answer appears in small print upside down at the bottom of each piece. 

Interesting right? If a little reductive -- which could also be seen as an issue given that some past Disney princesses have been criticized for their one dimensionality. Don't think that was the intention of the artist, though, and if so, it's never a bad thing for us to be reminded of the less progressive times in Disney's history. 

Anyway, here they are. I'll include answers at the very end of the post.

1.

2. 

3. 

4. 

5. 

As I was wandering up and down the hallway, lingering a bit with these images, an older female theater employee sensed a situation where she needed to intervene. I'm not sure if she were just being a busybody, someone who straddles that line between helping and meddling, or if she legitimately thought I were lost/confused, or if she thought I were trying to sneak into a second movie. 

She asked "Are you a writer?"

Which I thought was a very funny question. I'd had a conversation with the ticket taker about how she thought I must have "the best job in the world" and how it had been her dream to be a movie critic when she were younger. Not sure if she would have shared this interaction with her colleague, or if so, how her colleague would have identified that I'd been the person she'd talked to.

"Yes," I said in a sort of surprised way. 

When it was clear I had misunderstood her question, I sought to clarify: "I thought you asked if I was a writer."

"No, I said 'Are you alright, sir?'" ("A writer"/"alright, sir" do sound very similar.)

I managed to convince her I was not up to any mischief and she allowed me to continue taking my photos. 

Okay, here are those answers:

1. Ariel (The Little Mermaid)
2. Moana (Moana)
3. Elsa (Frozen)
4. Merida (Brave)
5. Rapunzel (Tangled)

Incidentally, it was only the last two that I got correct -- I should hope so on the final one -- without peeking at the answer, though I must admit, I didn't try very hard on the other ones. I hope I would have gotten them all correct if I'd been on a game show or something, and would have won my $5,000.

Soliciting premature evaluations

In case you're wondering about the answer to the question posed by this screen shot of my TV, yes, I was enjoying -- and did enjoy -- Alexandra Aja's new French language film Oxygen. I highly recommend it, though will not tell you too much about it so you go in without any preconceived notions.

But the question itself should never have been asked.

I don't know if you've noticed -- I first noticed within the past couple months -- that when you pause a movie on Netflix, it asks you straight away if you are enjoying what you're watching. Like, even if you pause it one minute in. 

This is just dumb.

Netflix should not be feeding data into its algorithm about user preferences if the user has not fully consumed the content. Yeah sure, maybe most of us aren't rating movies after we finish them, and Netflix is grumpy about that, but rating it during the movie? What if it doesn't get good until the second act?

Either answer could be misleading. What if -- and this is really a more likely scenario -- the movie (or TV show, or comedy special) starts out like gangbusters, but then peters out, or worse, ends on something so patently offensive that you wouldn't recommend the movie (or TV show, or comedy special) to your worst enemy? 

You won't know that until that moment comes, but if Netflix has their way, you'll have already blindly endorsed it based on a few clever sequences and a general sense of optimism.

The truth is, probably most people are eager to say they are enjoying something -- it's a kind of confirmation bias, where you want to convince yourself you made the right selection for your Thursday night viewing.

So what are a bunch of false positives or false negatives doing for Netflix?

It's hard to say. But any meaningful algorithm changes or programming decisions based on partial information are inherently flawed. 

Imagine someone was pitching an idea to you and they wanted some venture capital for it, and you controlled that venture capital. Imagine that the product sounded so great, and answered so many of society's needs, and was so destined to be the Next Big Thing that you greenlit it before the presentation ended? Before the person doing the pitch got a chance to tell you about its horrible environmental effects and the fact that it would cost $10 billion to launch?

You get the idea.

Of course, we'll never actually know how any of this affects the way Netflix does business because Netflix keeps that information closely guarded.

But since I did finish, I can again say: See Oxygen. 

Let my complete set of data inform your personal algorithm. 

I'm Thinking of Kaufman Things: Confessions of a Dangerous Mind

This is my third bi-monthly revisitation of the films of Charlie Kaufman in 2021.

Confessions of a Dangerous Mind is the Charlie Kaufman film I always forget about. I'm not sure if that's because I didn't think of it as a Kaufman film at the time, though I probably would have not yet fully developed my definition of a "Charlie Kaufman film" in 2002, so I suspect I sort of forget about it in retrospect. And it's easy to do so because I've never felt the desire to revisit it.

After a second viewing, I can say almost certainly that there will never be a third.

I don't dislike this movie, but it doesn't do a lot for me, to be honest. I remember being puzzled, back in 2002, about which parts of it were real and which parts were not. That wouldn't be a problem for me today, as I appreciate a lot more the creative license that might be taken with the lives of real people. I mean, this is a post Inglourious Basterds and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter world. But back then, it stuck in my craw and never dislodged.

I think I knew any material related to Chuck Barris being a spy was not real, as the whole idea for the movie came from Barris' autobiography, in which he claimed he had been a spy. (If he did work for the CIA, I seriously doubt it was in the form of assassinating people.) He later admitted it was made up, but then subsequent comments suggested a caginess about the whole thing, like if he had been a spy of course he would have had to say he hadn't been. Whatever. He wasn't.

But the parts I struggled with -- that's perhaps an exaggerated way to describe it -- were the events depicted on the game shows he was involved with, such as The Dating Game. There's a sequence in this film where contestants on the show give increasingly vulgar answers to questions, those that definitely would have violated censorship laws, and I remember that it troubled me, in 2002, to try to figure out if these things had actually happened. I now understand it as Kaufman's exaggeration of an underlying truth about the show -- that it fed people's more prurient natures -- and I "struggle" with it less now.

I think some of the things I don't love about Confessions are the things George Clooney brings to it as director. Although the period design is generally done well, Clooney tries to augment that with the use of various filters that I just find distracting. I also think the entire existence of Julia Roberts' character (and to a lesser extent, Clooney's own character) places this too much in an Ocean's Eleven world, a world that does not seem to speak particularly to Kaufman's sensibilities. We also know that Clooney has gotten significant influences from Joel and Ethan Coen, and while they have made some of my favorite films of all time, I don't think them particularly to be a match for Kaufman either. (Though it's closer.) I think specifically of the scene where Chuck's CIA compatriot strangles a cross country skier in Europe, and you can see the man's skis flailing about, sticking out of the back seat of the car, as he expires. That's such a Coen moment. 

But to say this film is absent the themes of Kaufman's work would be dead wrong. Again, they are all over the place here.

While Barris himself is not a close match for a typical Kaufman hero -- he's got a lot more confidence, for starters -- the way Sam Rockwell looks at certain points of this movie are Kaufman all over. At certain junctures he sports a kind of Kaufman afro that make him a dead ringer for the writer and future director. And since a lot of Kaufman's work involves fantasizing about being a different, more capable version of himself, Barris fits that description to a T. Barris' whole story is a fantasy that has come from a screenwriter's mind, even if that fantasy was inspired by a fantasy that came from Barris' own mind. (In my notes I also noted that Rockwell looked, at certain parts, a bit like Nicolas Cage -- which is appropriate since Cage plays Kaufman in July's film, Adaptation, which was released contemporaneously with Confessions.) It seems appropriate, though undoubtedly coincidental, that both Barris and Kaufman have the same first name, "Chuck" and "Charlie" both being nicknames for Charles.

Then the actual narrative structure is familiar from Kaufman's work, as it uses two strategies he used in Human Nature: a recurring interview format, as well as narration from at least one of the characters. Clooney chooses to make those interviews in a more explicitly documentary style format than they were in Human Nature, in part to lead us up to an actual "interview" with the real-world Barris at the end. 

Then there are some of the recognizable Kaufman thematic concerns, which are probably almost worth just bullet-pointing:

- There's a line of dialogue about Chuck being raised as a girl. As we saw in Being John Malkovich and will see later in I'm Thinking of Ending Things, Kaufman is interested in characters who cross the gender divide.

- Drew Barrymore's Penny tells Chuck of a dream she had where she was talking to an ape. Again, this seems to be bleeding through from Human Nature.

- Penny also gives Chuck a reason why he likes her, which is that she's "nothing like your mother." Chuck responds angrily to this and wonders where it was coming from. Again we see Kaufman grappling with mother issues. That character otherwise does not appear in the story, so it's out-of-nowhere reference is significant in terms of his obvious preoccupation.

- Then the coup de grace: "I hate myself," Chuck says at one point. "Goddamn do I hate myself."

In July I will watch both of Kaufman's next two films, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which are also his best two films. Since I've seen both at least four times, I figure I'll have less new to say about each, and can cram in them both, in order to keep us on track for Synecdoche, New York in September and Anomalisa in November to close the series. 

Tom Cruise is doing things I like

It doesn't feel like that long ago that we all wanted to write off Tom Cruise for his couch jumping and his Scientology and his other personality deficits that made him a creepy weirdo.

Since then, his PR team has been working subtly, quietly, to restore his good name as a fine and upstanding celebrity.

First they re-introduced Cruise's cool factor, reminding us that he does all his own stunts, and reminding us exactly how ridiculous those stunts are in a succession of Mission: Impossible movies. Impossible mission indeed. "Did you hear Tom Cruise held his breath underwater for 13 minutes for the latest Mission: Impossible?" I believe it.

But lately, improbably, Cruise has impressed for something that I never considered much of his makeup as a public figure: his conscience. 

First there was the tirade that was captured on audio against his crew for Mission: Impossible 9, or whatever number we're up to, who were shirking their COVID responsibilities and endangering the production. It was like Christian Bale but for altruistic reasons. 

And yeah, if you want to be cynical, you'd say he didn't care about the health of the people involved, only about the health of the production and how it contributed to his bottom line or his star wattage. (Because he can't make these movies forever, even if the evidence suggests that he might.) But I didn't hear a lot of people saying that. I heard a lot of people saying "Good for him."

But I don't think you can be cynical about the news this week, where Cruise put the physical symbols of his accomplishments as a Real Actor on the line for something he believed in. Unless you just want to be cynical about everything any celebrity does, which I think is a fruitless and unfair exercise. 

That's right, if you haven't read about it yet, Cruise returned the three Golden Globes he's won as a means of protesting the lack of diversity in the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.

That's not nothing. Not for Cruise. We may turn our nose up at the Globes for being so much less prestigious than the Oscars, but for a guy who is probably never going to win an Oscar, this may be as good as it gets.

And he threw it back in their faces.

Celebrities often don't have to put their money where their mouth is, but Tom Cruise just did. 

He's probably still a creepy weirdo, but he makes damn entertaining movies, and we now know -- almost for sure -- he really cares about people other than himself. 

That's good enough for me.

That time Paul Thomas Anderson made a Charlie Kaufman movie

Two thousand two was the rare year where there were two films released featuring the writing of the never-very-prolific Charlie Kaufman. As I am revisiting Kaufman's works for my bi-monthly series I'm Thinking About Kaufman Things, I'm just about to consider both of them. This month I'll be watching Confessions of a Dangerous Mind -- possibly as soon as tonight -- and Adaptation awaits me in July.

On Friday night, I revisited what easily could have been a third.

Paul Thomas Anderson is also not very prolific, sometimes making us wait a Kaufmanian five years between projects, and like Kaufman, he has established his own signature style. While the content of his films changes from outing to outing, he has a proclivity for epics painted on big canvases. These are as likely to have big casts (Boogie Nights, Magnolia) as smaller ones (There Will Be Blood, Phantom Thread), but they have been without exception feasts for the eyes with long running times and a distinct sense of the grandiose.

Well, almost without exception.

The 96-minute Punch-Drunk Love, released in the aforementioned 2002, broke the mold Anderson had recently established with Boogie Nights and Magnolia. Or, you could characterize it as a return to the more intimate character drama he started out with, Hard Eight. But Punch-Drunk was quirky enough, especially next to the comparatively straightforward Hard Eight, that it clearly feels like its own distinct thing.

And kind of like a Kaufman thing, which I'm "thinking about" this year.

Adam Sandler's Barry Egan is a Kaufman protagonist if ever there was one. He's socially awkward almost to the point of pathology. He particularly doesn't know how to behave around women, despite growing up with seven sisters -- he doesn't know how to behave around women who are romantic prospects, anyway. In fact, except for the fact that this is a romantic fantasy, his behavior would certainly be interpreted by most women as that of a stalker, as he's flown to Hawaii just to meet up with Emily Watson's Lena Leonard -- even though they both live in the same city. His scheme to exploit the inefficiencies of a Healthy Choice frequent flier miles promotion is just the kind of obsessive task that would occupy a Kaufman protagonist, and most Kaufman protagonists have an anger bubbling beneath the surface, even if they don't act on it the way Barry does.

It's not just the oddball themes and design of Punch-Drunk Love that feel reminiscent of Kaufman, but also the casting choices -- even if only in retrospect. See, Kaufman worked with two of the stars of this movie, even if Anderson got to them first. Philip Seymour Hoffman and Emily Watson would both appear in Synecdoche, New York, still six years on the horizon at this point. Of course, this was already the fourth time Hoffman and Anderson had worked together. So should we say that maybe Kaufman made an Anderson movie with Synecdoche? Probably not, though we can leave these chicken-or-egg debates to the philosophers.

In regards to who imitated who, though, this does remind us of a criticism that dogged Anderson in his early days. Before Anderson's genius paved its way into a style that was not directly indebted to any other auteur, he was thought to be making homages to his favorite directors. It was easy to see Scorsese in Boogie Nights, Altman in Magnolia. PTA's fourth feature had always felt like something wholly original that was not in direct conversation with any other director's work, but now I'm starting to wonder.

However, in making these types of determinations, it is again important to remember the chronology here. When Punch-Drunk Love debuted at Cannes in May of 2002, there were only two Kaufman films in the world: Being John Malkovich and Human Nature. PDL is not a close thematic match to either of those films, so I think we can really only see this as a Kaufman-style film in retrospect. In fact, if PTA had continued in this vein rather than making There Will Be Blood, he and Kaufman might have ended up with equal claim to making "Charlie Kaufman films."

Closing my eyes was enough

I went to see Mortal Kombat today as part of a day off to use up some comp time. It being my first blockbuster in the theater in about six weeks (since Godzilla vs. Kong), I was exposed to a lot of trailers I hadn't seen before. (The movie itself was not terrible, but I was a bit bored by it, despite some enjoyable gore and f-bombs.)

Now, you may remember that I don't like to watch trailers nowadays. They give away too much. It doesn't matter so much if I don't care about the movie, but it's a tricky proposition, because sometimes you'll start watching a trailer without knowing what the movie is, and whether its images are something you'll want to avoid. You have to tread carefully.

It was that scenario that exposed me to a good deal of the Dune trailer in the lobby. I didn't even realize it was the trailer for Dune until I'd been watching it for about 20 seconds and Timothee Chalamet finally came on screen. I averted my eyes before the big final shot of the trailer, most likely the worm bursting out of the ground, as I could hear the way it shattered the earth around it.

Once I was seated, it was decision time again. I could tell straight away that the trailer for the next Fast and the Furious movie was coming on. Since I'm not a devotee of the series (though I've seen them all) and since I was kind of starved for the theatrical trailer experience, I made the decision to watch the whole trailer. By the end, I wished I hadn't.

So when the trailer for A Quiet Place Part II came on, I decided to go for my old standby behavior when I'm trying to block out all the information from a particular trailer: Close my eyes, cover my ears, and even making a loud murmuring sound so I don't hear the dialogue. (Not loud loud, but loud enough so I can't hear anything else myself.) 

It's a tedious endeavor, and I'm sure a ridiculous display to others sitting around me. Fortunately, there are not generally others sitting around me these days. Especially at 12:15 on a Friday, where the 500-seat theater had only about five other people in it. 

In this case, though, closing my eyes was enough. 

I realized straight away that the unique thing about A Quiet Place Part II was that the trailer would be almost entirely visual, because the movie is all about keeping your mouth shut. Oh, there were a couple lines of dialogue in the trailer, but it was almost a sort of zen experience having only my eyes closed and knowing that no further meaningful information would be imparted to me.

It had a funny conclusion though. I suddenly started hearing a lot of laid back voices that sounded like they were really having fun. Because I had no real audio queues to let me know the trailer was ending, I assumed it was still going on. My first thought was "Oh great, now I know our main characters are able to find some kind of safe haven where they can laugh and splash around in a pool." The spoilers had gotten past my defenses after all.

Of course, I opened my eyes and found that I was now watching a mobile phone ad.

Knowing Noir: The Hitch-Hiker

This is the fifth in my 2021 noir series.

There are a number of things I'm learning about film noir as this series goes on, and one of them is that noir encompasses quite a wide range of films -- and in fact, more and more feels like a time period in which a certain type of film was made than a genre unto itself. (Or possibly that people misapply the label.)

I was looking for something short to watch on Monday night after returning from a day trip for work that required driving an hour and 20 minutes in each direction, and again I slept poorly the night before. (If this seems like deja vu, I wrote about these same conditions last week when I talked about this year's Oscars, having done a similar day trip.) So I pulled up the Kanopy app on AppleTV and came across The Hitch-Hiker, which barely cracked 70 minutes.

Of course, the length was not the first thing that drew me to it. Rather, I'd heard it discussed on Filmspotting last year when they were doing an overlooked auteurs marathon focusing on mid-century female directors, Ida Lupino being one of those. They discussed this film, and though I don't remember a word they said about it -- I like to "listen loosely" when a film I haven't seen is being discussed -- I did remember that they liked it.

But the third factor that really helped me choose it for Monday night is that it was listed as a film noir in the brief summary on Kanopy. I have plenty of candidates for this series and was only a few days into the new month, so I could have waited, but a bird in the hand beats two in the bush.

If asked to place The Hitch-Hiker in a genre myself, I probably would have chosen the generic designation "crime film." In fact, so ahead of its time was Lupino's film that I think of it almost as a New Hollywood creation or even an independent film from the 1980s or 1990s, except that of course the look of the actors and certain design details tie it to the year it was made: 1953. But it occurred to me that the terms "film noir" and crime film" could be used interchangeably, as almost every noir would feature the commission of some sort of crime, and the related unsavory characters. I certainly think noir has elements that give it its own distinctive feel, but maybe narrowing the definition to only movies with femme fatales and detectives (or characters who function as detectives, narratively speaking) does the whole term a disservice.

One element I would have previously considered noir-disqualifying is that most of this film takes place during the day. It's the story of two men who are traveling from California to Mexico on a fishing trip, who make the ill-fated decision to pick up a hitchhiker (or "hitch-hiker," as the term was apparently known at the time). The hitchhiker in question happens to be on a killing spree. I wondered if they'd never seen a movie that made them aware of the dangers of picking up strangers by the side of the road, but maybe that wasn't actually a thing back then. Maybe this is the movie other people watched as a cautionary tale.

Another non-noir detail is that there is no femme fatale -- in fact, there's nary a woman in the entire film, if memory serves. That seems especially interesting since the film is directed by a woman, but she is content to step entirely out of her own perspective here -- if only because maybe that was the only way she would have been allowed to make the movie at the time.

The men are played by Edmond O'Brien and Frank Lovejoy, and though they seemed familiar to me, I didn't realize until after the film that O'Brien should be quite familiar to me -- as the star of the last movie I watched for this series. That's right, O'Brien was the lead in my April movie, D.O.A., which I didn't like half as much as I liked this. The interesting thing was that as I was watching him, I thought he actually sort of reminded me of the inspiration for this series: Humphrey Bogart. As a measure of how my appreciation for Bogart has yet to grow during this series (having still only watched one of his films in this series, In a Lonely Place), I think I actually prefer O'Brien.

While those two give sort of interchangeable performances -- not in a bad way -- the real standout here is William Talman as the sadistic hitchhiker. He's a real menace, though I appreciated how his character was, generally speaking, not merely nasty for the sake of it. I guess that comment requires some clarifying, as I just called him "sadistic." He can be mean for sure, and mess with people for sport -- there's a scene where he makes one of the two men, who is an excellent shot, shoot a beer can out of the other's hand in a William Tell situation. (That's right, William Talman doing William Tell.) But there are any number of situations where the men try to escape or otherwise contradict his wishes, and he doesn't punish them. That could be because he needs them, or believes he does, on his escape attempt into Mexico. But I also just think it's because he's a human being and he doesn't need to do the worst possible thing in every scenario for us to loathe him. The loathing he earns from us is more human-sized.

There isn't really a lot to the story and the movie itself is quite brief, only 71 minutes. So why did I like it so much? Hard to say. I really respect the filmmaking as Lupino brings quite a sense of distinction and sense of precision to it. As I alluded to earlier, it contains nary a feminine element to it. I mention that not because it is "better" for her to have made a movie that would most likely be mistaken for the work of a man, but just because I find it interesting. According to Wikipedia, she was the first woman ever to direct a film noir. (Which lends a second opinion to this film's correct categorization as noir.) She was also an actress, and you can tell when you see her photo:

Again, judging only the book by its cover, this does not at all conform to my expectations of how a person who makes a gritty crime thriller should look. I don't know, maybe I expected her to look more like this:

The Hitch-Hiker is basically a B movie elevated by its superior elements. Maybe because of its Mexican setting or maybe because of the dynamic between the characters, I was actually sort of reminded of my favorite Bogart film, which is decidedly not noir: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. It's a story of what men do when they don't trust each other and are caught in a scenario that exacerbates that distrust. And it's a damn fine one.

Because this is another deviation from the "traditional noir" I had hoped to focus on, I'll get back into more expected territory in June with something like Kiss Me Deadly or Kansas City Confidential.