Physically, I imagine, getting old is no picnic no matter the era and quality of medicine and medical technology; bodies and minds are always going to break down and deteriorate. But I do wonder if emotionally getting older used to be easier, even just a few decades ago, before everybody in the world knew that when “Cocoon” was released in movie theaters on June 21, 1985, Wilford Brimley, despite playing a senior citizen in a retirement home, was 50 years, 9 months, and 6 days old. Would getting older be easier if I did not know that tomorrow Kristen Wiig (!) was going to cross the so-called Brimley/Cocoon Line, becoming the same age as Brimley when he starred in “Cocoon,” and would getting older be easier if I did not also know that Tempestt Bledsoe, Vanessa freaking Huxtable, passed the Brimley/Cocoon Line a couple weeks ago (!!), both of which make me feel like Private James Francis Ryan morphing from young man to old man in an instant in “Saving Private Ryan,” or elderly Rose Dawson in “Titanic” saying It’s been 84 years,” two images remade into memes for people on social media to express themselves when life seems to have passed them by. So, I try not to think about my life passing me by, but its ever-encroaching impermanence always rears its head in the most unexpected ways.
Dermot Mulroney is an actor I don’t think about all that much. But, you know, I saw him in “Young Guns,” back when I was in fifth grade, and I saw him opposite Julia Roberts and Cameron Diaz in “My Best Friend’s Wedding” in 1997, right before I set off on my star-cross’d journey to college, and I saw him opposite Sarah Jessica Parker and Claire Danes in “The Family Stone” in 2005, not long after I moved to Chicago, the only movie I ever saw at The Esquire, which has now been closed for almost 20 years, and then, holy cow, there was Mulroney in “Anyone but You” (reviewed yesterday) as the dad of Sydney Sweeney, and M. Emmet Walsh, the guy who played Mulroney’s dad in “My Best Friend’s Wedding,” died a couple months ago at the age of 88, and if I had been standing, I would have to sit down, and did you know Dermot Mulroney crossed the Brimley/Cocoon Line ten years ago when I had only known my future wife for five months?
Given the lack of modern romantic comedies, when a semi-high-profile new one is released, it tends to be viewed either as a potential savior or a failed deliverer. Refreshingly, Will Gluck’s “Anyone but You,” released theatrically last December and now on Netflix, lands in-between. If it had been made in the 90s, it would have been a late April release, before the bigger name rom coms of May and June. Indeed, it is not especially fresh nor insightful, and most critically, fails to truly build out its own world. But it is also conveyed and performed with enough energy and enthusiasm to make you enjoy its hoary twists, if not occasionally believe them, and most crucially, swoon over its stars. It even turns the Sydney Opera House into the Eiffel Tower, in a manner of speaking, a landmark of love, which as an Eiffel-Tower-in-Movies enthusiast, warmed my heart.
Those stars are Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell, playing Bea and Ben, respectively, who Meet Cute at a coffee shop by pretending to be husband and wife under semi-convoluted circumstances and functioning as a good indicator of what’s to come. Bea accidentally getting her pants wet from the bathroom sink might be an ancient call from the Rom Com Playbook, but Sweeney sells her character air drying them with such desperately comic vigor that it works in spite of itself. Bea and Ben spend the night together, seeming to fall in love, only to have a misunderstanding turn them into sworn enemies instead. Their hostility turns troublesome when Bea’s sister Halle (Hadley Robinson) becomes engaged to Claudia (Alexandra Shipp), sister of Ben’s best friend Pete (GaTa), meaning these adversaries must try and play nice when they travel to Australia for the wedding, setting in motion all manner of romantic about-faces.
The screenplay by Gluck and Ilana Wolpert is loosely based on Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, meaning various friends and family members try to play matchmaker for Bea and Ben. Eventually, a fed-up Bea and Ben get everyone off their backs by pretending to be in love, a plot detail I appreciated, turning the fake dating trope inside-out, embodying not just how Gluck and Wolpert constantly refresh the plot to keep us engaged but the movie’s overall spirited sensation. That spirit is just as acutely captured in the editing, both moment to moment in the screwball repartee between its leads and overall, ensuring an almost two-hour movie never feels too long. Eh, at least until the requisite downturn, that is, when its lack of world-building finally catches up.
It’s strange to say but the most striking evidence of the larger world in “Anyone but You” is when Bea and Ben “do a ‘Titanic’” during a Sydney Harbour pre-wedding cruise by stepping up to the boat’s railing and spreading their arms. This is neither conveyed nor played like mere meta rom com commentary but merely two people who know this movie from pop culture and are having fun with it. Otherwise, who Bea and Ben are as people never comes across. He’s in finance, I guess, conveyed entirely via one brief cutaway to a stock chart on a computer screen, while what defines Bea is not knowing what she wants to be, which ultimately feels less like a character trait than the movie’s own lack of a better idea. All this is amplified by Halle and Claudia’s relationship never becoming the reflection of Bea and Ben’s a great script would have made it while the latter’s emergent exes (Darren Barnet and Charlee Fraser) are just beautiful-looking impediments, all of this causing a lack of genuine drama in the homestretch. I did appreciate Bryan Brown as Claudia’s father in something approximating the Antonio role of Much Ado, playing his part of romantic deception with comic relish, which underlines Sweeney and Powell as “Anyone but You’s” preeminent quality.
The screenplay schemes ways to get them repeatedly into their skivvies, or into nothing at all, allowing us to ogle them but ogle them tastefully, an acknowledgement that more than the striking Australian scenery, this is what we paid (our subscription to Netflix) to see. That is not to sell them short as performers. Powell is better evoking his character’s air despite their being next to nothing on the page, a bro with a big heart, than Sweeney. Indeed, her turn is a little weird, which I mean, mostly, as a compliment. Because if she begins by trying to echo the character as loosely written, cheerily scatterbrained, as the script transitions them to animosity and Bea becomes less and less defined, Sweeney resorts to her innate Sweeney-ness, marked by impeccably withering vocal fry and facial expressions. If that’s a ding on Sydney Sweeney the actor, it’s a compliment to Sydney Sweeney the movie star, and I’m fine with the latter winning out. It provides Bea and Ben a necessarily balanced contrast paving the way for a legitimately enthralling push and pull. You know they’re going to end up together, but when she tempts him with her eyes during their mid-movie dance, you’ll swear, anything might just go.
Nicole Kidman, upon recently receiving the American Film Institute Award for Lifetime Achievement.
A confession: the first time I ever watched a Nicole Kidman movie was because I thought she was cute. The movie was “Billy Bathgate,” and so this was 1991, and so I was 14 years old, and so, please, cut me at least a little slack. I wanted to see Robert Benton’s adaptation of the E.L. Doctorow novel because one year out from “Goodfellas” every idiot 14-year-old boy was obsessed with mob movies, but also because every commercial they ran for “Billy Bathgate” during college football games and primetime television showed Nicole Kidman at least once and, man, was she pretty. My embarrassing shallowness, however, was evocative of the shallow, and dense, way Hollywood promoted Kidman in the 1990s. The industry saw her as a movie star, but never understood what that meant, never determined what persona they were selling, sort of mingling generic beautiful woman with Tom Cruise’s Other Half, emblemized in forgettable projects like “Malice” (1993) and “Days of Thunder” (1990). There was not a persona to sell, however, because even then Kidman was what she is now, an actor, subsuming herself in roles rather than standing apart from them. She carried her half of “Dead Calm” (1989) as capably as Sam Neill carried his, demonstrated her future propensity for total commitment in “To Die For” (1995), and in “Batman Forever” (1995), quite frankly, went above and beyond the call of duty. Well before Christopher Nolan invested his Dark Knight trilogy with seriousness, Kidman was helping her movie earn its PG-13 rating by conveying (earmuffs!) just how seriously her character wanted to fuck Batman.
If there was a single moment when the broader populace truly became aware of Kidman’s immense ability it was when she donned a prosthetic nose to play Virginia Wolff in “The Hours” (2002), underlined in her winning the Oscar for Best Actress. Kidman is almost always a transformative actor, whether she is changing her appearance or not, but transformation is so much more conspicuous when it’s literal. It was more than that, though, as the invaluable culture writer Anne Helen Petersen wrote in 2017 when assessing Kidman’s career; in playing the part, Kidman “got ugly...Her performance of dowdiness, in other words, is made remarkable by just how unnatural it must have been.” By not being beautiful, Kidman was “proving” she could act for the doofs who somehow did not already realize she could. “With ‘The Hours’ (Kidman) takes another step away from her movie-star persona and firmly becomes an actor playing a role,” Andrew O’Hehir wrote for Salon, proving Petersen’s point even as he gives Kidman a rave, “rather than a celebrity playing herself under a different name.” He continued: “For an actress to give up her face -- her most marketable commodity -- even for one role, is a startling decision.”
In essence, O’Hehir was writing that Kidman had assumed a mask, but the truth was, Kidman had been donning masks her whole career. Emily Nussbaum noted as much for The New Yorker in 2017, writing that Kidman offered not “transparency, (but) a different gift: she can wear a mask and simultaneously let you feel what it’s like to hide behind it.” Though she infuses roles with a sense of her own individual ideas about the person she is playing, like essentially imagining Lucille Ball in “Being the Ricardos” as Michael Jordan of “The Last Dance,” Kidman is not playing herself, the crucial delineation. Rather, she conceals herself, a kind of Kidman Kabuki, and like that ancient school of Japanese art, she uses such artifice to transmit emotions of who she is playing directly to the audience.
Yet, in the last few years, a curious thing has happened. In our strange present, where the very idea of what constitutes a movie has become muddled, and big screens and small screens and all the screens in-between have figuratively blurred to the point where it can be difficult to tell them apart, few have managed to carve out a distinct presence across all these spectrums like Kidman. Not just in movies and TV, but social media too, and not just by starting her own Instagram account, but in how her work has been harvested for TikTok and memes. This includes clips of her past roles, of course, like her time-stopping close-up in “The Stepford Wives,” and even her various reactions on talk shows and at awards shows, but I’m thinking even more specifically. I’m thinking, of course, about the AMC Theatres commercial in which Kidman was enlisted in 2021 as an ambassador for the movie multiplex chain to help implore the public to return to movie theaters after the pre-vaccine days of the COVID-19 pandemic.
This commercial has been parodied endlessly, from Olivia Rodrigo on TikTok to Jimmy Kimmel at the Oscars to Morgan Freeman at Kidman’s recent AFI Lifetime Achievement Award ceremony. Crucially, though, Kidman herself is not resorting to self-parody. She is Pure Camp, in the way that Susan Sontag famously saw it, exaggerated, fantastic, passionate, and naive, so deadly serious in effusing such religious grandiosity over the act of going to the movies that it is impossible take seriously. But it’s more. Because she is not playing a character, she is playing herself, except in quotation marks. “It’s not a lamp, but a ‘lamp’; not a woman, but a ‘woman,’” Sontag wrote. And it is not Kidman, but “Kidman.” It is Nicole Kidman finally becoming a movie star by creating her own persona without, still, having to give her real self away.
In the year 2000, Bruce Springsteen appeared briefly in the Stephen Frears-directed adaptation of Nick Hornby’s novel “High Fidelity” not so much as himself as a vision of the main character (John Cusack). And as much as I enjoyed “Blinded by the Light” (2019), and the 2013 fan service documentary “Springsteen & I” too, Planet Earth Poet Laureate’s cameo in “High Fidelity” essentially summarized in less than 60 seconds what both those movies took their entire run times to say, that for Springsteen fans, he exists as a spiritual sherpa. And though I’m biased as a longtime resident of E Street, it has always seemed to me that’s all we ever really needed of Bruce on the big screen. He, himself, saw the speciousness of the whole potential exercise back in 1983 when he recorded the cheeky rockabilly “Born in the U.S.A.” outtake “TV Movie.” What, did we really want him to get “Rocketman-ed,” or “Bohemian Rhapsody-ed,” or “Walk the Line-d?” “You might get to thinking you’re ahead of the game / but when you break it all down / it all comes out the same,” sang James McMurtry in “Painting by Numbers,” essentially describing the majority of musician biopics, mere vessels for their actors to get Academy Award nominations, sticking to a formula so rote that “Walk Hard: the Dewey Cox Story” took it apart element by element.
In 2017, there was some vague news about a movie called “Asbury Park,” set in the Jersey beach town and around its preeminent rock club, the Stone Pony, where Springsteen got his start that, back then at least, seemed to suggest Springsteen would play a supporting role. That was intriguing, not only not making a Springsteen biopic but in a movie about Springsteen’s old stomping ground, keeping him to the side, maybe like a Wolfman Jack in “American Graffiti,” looming large without being the star of the show. As stated, though, that was 2017, and in visiting that prospective film’s entry on IMDb, one discovers that it remains “In Development,” left, perhaps, to hike the streets up in the sky*. (*Obscure Springsteen reference.) If, however, “Asbury Park” is not the answer to our unconventional Springsteen biopic dreams, then perhaps “Deliver Me from Nowhere” is.
I only just learned that Scott Cooper, who wrote and directed Jeff Bridges in “Crazy Heart,” is slated to helm a Bruce Springsteen movie with “The Bear’s” Jeremy Allen White reportedly in talks to star as The Boss himself. Forget whether White may or may not make a credible Bruce (can he do a hoarse laugh?). That’s of less interest to me than the idea supporting the movie and the idea, thankfully, does not appear to be a biopic, or at least, not a traditional biopic, based as it is on Warren Zanes’s book of the same title about Springsteen recording his sixth studio album “Nebraska,” the one he recorded entirely on a 4-track recorder in his New Jersey bedroom, and that also, more or less, is when he conceived of the ensuing “Born in the U.S.A.” too. This is an idea that gives the potential movie crucial focus and real potential. (It is also possible, I concede, that this movie begins with Bruce sitting down at the 4-track recorder in his New Jersey bedroom, triggering the first flashback of many, a la aforementioned Dewey Cox, who “has to think about his entire life before he plays.”)
The involvement of Springsteen himself and his longtime manager Jon Landau might be cause for concern, at least in terms of Cooper having the room to honest and unmerciful, but maybe their involvement is just to ensure Cooper has full access to the singer’s catalogue, so “Atlantic City” doesn’t have to be translated into “Ocean City” like “Piece of My Heart” into “Chunk of My Lung.” But overall, I find myself encouraged. It has the potential to function as a companion piece to “Air” (2023), which claimed in words to know what “Born in the U.S.A.” was about even as the movie itself suggested otherwise, just as “Nebraska” and “Born in the U.S.A.” “were two sides of the same coin,” to quote the rock critic Elizabeth Nelson. “The umbrage-filled bluster of one and the quiet violence of the other taken together are a prophetic nightmare vision of a contemporary America, which can’t tell the difference between an execution and a compliment.”
Nelson saw further than that, even, to “a relationship between Springsteen and his audience (that) is as moving and unhealthy as rock has ever had on offer,” noting that “‘Nebraska’ was a low confidence vote in a country that simultaneously made him rich and made him doubt everything.” It’s mere wishcasting, especially in a genre where affirmations tend to be what general audiences want more than provocations or questions, but I like imagining a Bruce biopic that rather than reconsecrating the fan relationship one more time might have the guts to hold it up to the light.
The title of Carlson Young’s Amazon Prime rom com literally refers to its aspirant art dealer Ana (Camila Mendes) being upgraded from lowly coach to highfalutin first-class on a flight for a London work trip. Figuratively, though, this upgrade evokes how in the course of the flight she also manages to upgrade her life, telling her handsome fellow first-class passenger William (Archine Renaux) with whom she meets cute that she’s a director rather than mere intern at the renowned New York auction house where she works. Given his mother Catherine (Lena Olin) is an affluent art collector, this unexpected connection causes Ana’s her nascent career to skyrocket in just a few days even as her ruse threatens to cause her nascent career to come crashing down. The studious website Wikipedia deems “Upgraded” a modern retelling of the classic Cinderella story, which, sure, I guess, though given Ana’s deception and her demanding boss Claire (Marisa Tomei), it comes across more like a melding of “The Secret of My Success” (1987) and “The Devil Wears Prada” (2006). The former was a Michael J. Fox 80s comedy that glossed over its own ruthlessness, and though sometimes “Upgraded” does not feel entirely clued in to its own innate critique, that critique becomes visible, nonetheless.
Ana loves art, as the opening sequence in which she describes the dualities of a Hilma af Clint reprint on her wall evokes, but she is stuck trying to find some way to make an impression on Claire who does not receive such impressions easily. The character of Claire is clearly channeling Meryl Streep channeling Anna Wintour, but Tomei effectively creates her own brand of hauteur, nevertheless. Sizing up her charges in her introductory scene, each double take and observation side-splitting, and Tomei has adopted some sort of French accent that jibes with her last name yet sounds almost Lady Edith Greensly-like, a possible put-on that “Upgraded” never resolves yet informs the movie’s overriding sense of faking it ’til you make it. Ana catches her break by correcting a mistake in the middle of an auction, winning Claire’s approval and the trip to London, though hanging a hapless young colleague out to dry. Mendes plays this with nary a hint of regret, and the movie would have been wise to latch on to that trait rather than the script talking up her character’s insecurity which ultimately comes through less than her ambition. It would have been almost cutthroat, but the movie softens that edge, never daring to push Ana too far toward unlikable.
The most significant issue, however, is that Mendes and Renaux do not have chemistry comparable to Mendes and Olin. And yet, if that causes all the scenes between Ana and William to fall flat, those between Ana and Catherine still sing, a little like a mother and a daughter, or maybe more like a protégé and a mentor, or perhaps more in the vein of two women helping out one another rather than trying to tear one another down, the yang to the yin. And even when Ana’s ruse is mandatorily uncovered, it might make William mad, but not Catherine, respecting the player, if not also the game, epitomizing a movie that essentially argues meritocracy is for suckers with a something like a “Hey, how about that?” smile on its face.
Stephen Sommers of “The Mummy” (1999) has not directed a movie since 2013’s trouble-laden Dean Koontz adaptation “Odd Thomas,” possibly bookending a career that also began with some production difficulties. Not to be confused with Steven Spielberg’s 2002 “Catch Me If You Can, 1989’s “Catch Me If You Can” was Sommers’s directorial debut, made for just $800,000 and screened at Cannes where it was apparently snatched up by a studio that contemporary accounts indicate went belly up, leaving the movie orphaned and ultimately released straight to video. A cruel fate, I understand, though given its street racing subject matter, it feels appropriate for a B movie, and I’m honestly disappointed I didn’t discover it years ago as one of those movies our local Fox affiliate would screen on winter Saturday afternoons as counterprogramming to Big Ten basketball games. Speaking of the Big Ten, “Catch Me If You Can” (Stephen’s Version) was filmed in his native Minnesota, in and around St. Cloud. It shows in the vibrant autumn colors and the familiar geography of my many trips to my dad’s Minnesota hometown about two hours southeast of the state’s 12th most populous city. Despite this, and despite filming parts of the movie in Sommers’s actual St. Cloud high school, the setting, it turns out, is not really Minnesota at all.
It has been chronicled ad nauseam that 1980s America was infused with a nostalgia for 1950s America, a nostalgia famously lived out in “Back to the Future” (1985) by having its protagonist literally time travel to the Age of Eisenhower. There is no time travel in “Catch Me If You Can,” but it’s like the 1950s never left, or as if the fetish for them is so extravagant an entire community has agreed to act as if the 1950s never left. Sommers may have deployed a Tangerine Dream score, but the soundtrack is infused with 1950s hits and the Principal (Geoffrey Lewis) has a precious jukebox inside his office on which he plays oldies but goodies over the school PA system, functioning as much like a dee jay as an administrative head, Wolfman Jack as Principal Strickland. Costuming feels like an amalgamation of the two decades, epitomized in semi-bad boy Dylan (Matt Lattanzi), dressed like a 1950s greaser, that aesthetic emphasized in the character’s love of illegal street racing upon which the story turns. Struggling to save her high school from being closed with standard candy bar sales, Class President Melissa (Loryn Locklin) turns to Dylan instead, wagering money from the school treasury on Dylan’s races and winning big, until they cross street racing kingpin Johnny Phatmun (M. Emmet Walsh), and it all goes wrong.
At first, this bizarre mélange feels agreeably surreal. When one student is asked how he earned detention, he replies “Killing a freshman,” and given the prevailing mood, you’re libel to believe him, as if “Catch Me If You Can” has fused like the heightened tone of “Bottoms” with the noir-inflected high school movie “Brick” but if “Brick” had foregone noir for 1950s hot rod movies. Yet, the longer “Catch Me If You Can” goes, the more disappointingly conventional it becomes. It was a debut made for relative peanuts and it’s harsh to be harsh, but it screams of a movie that needed better editing, both moment-to-moment and in the long run, as the pace slackens both ways as it moves along. And as that hour and forty-five minutes gets longer, the movie loses its sense of playfulness and wittiness, taking its clichés with far too straight a face, unable to skewer them, or transcend them, or really make them sing, as a movie having fun with B movies just sort of becomes a B movie.
Rather than watch 1965’s “The Greatest Story Ever Told” on Easter Sunday, I watched “The Greatest Night Pop,” along with My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife, and a few Friends of the Blog. Our viewing choice was hardly any less apropos if you believe, as some culture writers would, that celebrities are the morally bankrupt modern world’s true religious icons. After all, the title of Bao Nguyen’s Netflix documentary refers to the one-night recording of the famous, partially infamous “We Are the World” charity single of 1985 in which scores of celebrated musical recording artists gathered in Los Angeles to record a track drawing attention to the famine crippling Africa, which is why they christened their uber-supergroup, of sorts, as USA for Africa. Whether “We Are the World” made it good on its benevolent intentions is a question I cannot really answer in this review not least because the movie itself barely mounts a case as the song being a genuine force for good, just proffering a few broad statistics, boilerplate observations, and perhaps most revealingly, Kenny Loggins noting that he “wasn’t that aware of what was going on in Africa, but, at that time, whatever Michael (Jackson) did turned to gold.” No, given that Lionel Richie, the song’s co-writer along with Jackson, and driving force in its recording, functions as executive producer, “The Greatest Night in Pop” becomes a victory lap. And yet, if that slanted perspective naturally call this whole enterprise into question, the peek behind the curtain is so good, that it’s difficult not to come away entertained, if not also a little in awe that the whole thing happened in the first place.
For starters, did you know that “We Are the World” was recorded the same night as the 1985 American Music Awards? The same American Music Awards where Lionel Richie not only won seven times but hosted? Hosting an awards show is an exhausting process in and of itself and then afterwards Richie, exhausted, went to a recording studio and exhausted himself all over again by wrangling 50 of the biggest egos on the planet. That’s insanity. That’s like if after hosting the Academy Awards, Jimmy Kimmel went and tried to herd 50 standup comedians into recording a standup record to benefit [insert your preferred current global crisis here]. Maybe even more impressive than that, though, is how the song that Richie and Jackson wrote, and that crucially, Quincy Jones produced, never became a muddled mess but found a way to incorporate all those voices by utilizing their strengths in all the right places, effectively transforming pop music’s best and brightest into a genuine choir, and dispensing a compelling argument that made me reconsider my longtime blithe dismissal of the track.
Above all, “The Greatest Night in Pop” is a treasure trove of behind-the-scenes footage and more often than not, Nguyen makes the most of it. Not just in granting a figurative backstage pass with intimate glimpses of so many pop superstars just sort of milling around like hesitant kids on the first day of camp, but in demonstrating how “We Are the World” was much less lightning in a bottle than into the wee hours of the morning blood, sweat and tears. Bob Dylan, reduced to so many severe, sweaty close-ups, virtually drowns amongst his peers before rising to the occasion for his solo and the hero’s journey of Huey Lewis, to quote My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife, when he is asked to pinch-hit as one part of a three-part melody for no-show Prince and becomes to this doc what Elaine Stritch was in trying to nail “The Ladies Who Lunch” in D.A. Pennebaker’s “Original Cast Album: Company” (1970). That direct cinema documentary utilized Pennebaker’s preferred fly on the wall approach, one that Nguyen rejects, preferring to interject all manner of talking head interviews, repeatedly yanking us back into the present. It’s not a wrong approach, really, frequently enjoyable, even insightful. And yet, it also comes to feel like something is being left on the table, layering an unmistakable sense of post factum varnish epitomizing “The Greatest Night in Pop” as a final accounting for the historical record rather than a living, breathing document of history as it is being written.
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