Tag: Mig's Reviews

QUIZ SHOW (1994)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Robert Redford
CAST: John Turturro, Rob Morrow, Ralph Fiennes, Paul Scofield, David Paymer, Hank Azaria, Christopher McDonald, Mira Sorvino
MY RATING: 7/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 97% Certified Fresh

PLOT: In the late 1950s, a popular TV quiz show, along with its current champion, falls under federal investigation following allegations of rigging.


I imagine there will be no shortage of people more than willing to tell me how wrong I am, but while Robert Redford’s Quiz Show was well-directed, well-written, and well-acted, I never fell completely under its spell.  For that matter, it never felt like it had the director’s stamp on the material; a lot of it felt like a Ron Howard film.  No doubt the story captured a lot of attention when it happened in the late ‘50s, but it failed to grab mine, at least to that same degree.  It’s too well-made for me to skewer it mercilessly, but neither do I consider it a masterpiece.  It’s…okay.

It’s 1957, and Sputnik captures the world’s attention at (or at least near) the height of the Cold War.  To distract themselves from Sputnik’s implications, Americans tune their TV sets to the most popular game show on the air: Twenty-One, in which competing contestants are asked random trivia questions while isolated from each other.  These questions are something else.  One multi-part question includes: “Who rode with Paul Revere?  Who lent him his horse?  Was it a mare or a stallion?  And what was the horse’s name?”  I mean, really?  The current champion, Herbie Stempel (John Turturro), knows these answers and many others and has become something of a local hero, but he’s not terribly photogenic, with his oversized shoulders, those nerd goggles, and that one rotten bicuspid that you can’t take your eyes off.

Twenty-One’s showrunners decide Stempel’s run has come to an end and hatch a plan to throw the next episode to handsome young Charles van Doren (Ralph Fiennes), a Harvard professor who in real life did not look quite as handsome as Ralph Fiennes, but whatever, this isn’t a documentary.  Both Van Doren and Stempel comply with this plan, but the scenes in which they make their decisions felt contrived, or false, or something.  I was never convinced of their motivations.  Stempel needed the money but was supposedly swayed by the possibility of being awarded his own “panel show.”  Van Doren clearly didn’t need the money and even turns the offer down at first, but then he changes his mind because…I guess he needed a way to live up to his Pulitzer-Prize-winning father?  All the pieces are there, but it’s never fully explained until his final speech in front of a Congressional committee.

The story engine involves a young DC lawyer named Dick Goodwin (Rob Morrow) who gets a whiff of potential scandal and, eager to make a name for himself – as a possible parallel to Van Doren himself – does some independent investigating.  His digging leads inevitably to Stempel, who is more than happy to name names, but whose irascible personality makes him a less than ideal witness.  Things get interesting when he interviews Van Doren.  He is clearly suspicious, but no hard evidence appears…until he watches an old clip of a previous Twenty-One contestant who appears to give an answer the host was not expecting…

I don’t know how relevant this is, but I feel compelled to observe that director Redford seems to have phoned in a lot of favors when it came to casting Quiz Show.  In addition to the fine performances from the leads (Rob Morrow is outgunned by Turturro and Fiennes, but he holds his own), the supporting cast reads like a Woody Allen picture: David Paymer, Hank Azaria, Christopher McDonald (perfectly cast as the smarmy, superficial host of Twenty-One), Mira Sorvino, Martin freaking Scorsese, and walk-ons by Timothy Busfield, Ernie Sabella, Barry Levinson, Mario Cantone, Illeana Douglas, Calista Flockhart, and a blink-and-you’ll-miss-him Ethan Hawke.  Redford clearly wanted to make sure his canvas was deep and well-drawn, and not just with the impeccable period production design.

But to what end?  I went into Quiz Show thinking it would involve a much deeper conspiracy than just two showrunners who, following orders from corporate, simply bribed several contestants to follow a scripted playbook.  About halfway through the movie, I realized there was not going to be much more to that part of the story, and we were going to follow the lawyer on his quest to uncover the truth, and I was like, “…that’s it?”  Does that make me guilty of criticizing the movie that I wanted it to be, instead of criticizing the movie itself?  I’m not sure.  Rightly or wrongly, I felt the movie wanted me to empathize or sympathize, or one of the -izes, with Van Doren.  But I was not moved to goosebumps by Van Doren’s final speech at the end of the film.  I found myself siding more with the committee member who says, “I don’t think an adult of your intelligence ought to be commended for simply, at long last, telling the truth.”

(I suppose a case could be made that the whole film is a parable for Watergate, still several years in the future; Nixon is name-dropped a few times.  The end credits inform us that NBC and Twenty-One’s sponsor, Geritol, were never indicted because their underlings claimed full responsibility for their actions, much like Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and the rest.  Does the buried subtext of America’s lost innocence make Quiz Show a better film?  Maybe a little, but only when you stand back from it, not while you’re watching it.)

ANOTHER WOMAN (1988)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Woody Allen
CAST: Gena Rowlands, Mia Farrow, Ian Holm, Blythe Danner, Betty Buckley, Martha Plimpton, John Houseman, Sandy Dennis, Philip Bosco
MY RATING: 8/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 59%

PLOT: Facing a mid-life crisis, a woman becomes drawn to the plight of a pregnant woman seeking psychiatric help from the shrink next door.


Woody Allen’s Another Woman is the first movie I can remember that compelled me to do a little background research before writing about it.  It is moody, somber, theatrical, and by far the least funny of Allen’s films that I’ve seen (and I’ve seen Blue Jasmine).  It falls in that part of his career when he was delving into more dramatic fare; September had been released the year before, and Crimes and Misdemeanors would come a year later.  There is none of the charm and lightness of his earlier comedies, which may account for why I’ve never seen it mentioned alongside his other films whenever his filmography is discussed.  And yet, I was curiously drawn into this story to such a degree that when two revelations arrive almost on top of each other, I gasped.

Another Woman tells a brief chapter in the life of Marion (Gena Rowlands), a middle-aged woman married to Ken (Ian Holm).  Marion is Ken’s second wife; she was literally the “other woman” that caused Ken to divorce his first wife, Kathy, played by Betty Buckley in a single devastating scene that vividly showcases the guilt that Marion and Ken have both learned to live with in different ways: Ken gently accepts Kathy’s “condemnation”, while Marion buries the guilt deep.

Marion is a professor of philosophy at a local university.  To work quietly on a new book, she rents a small one-bedroom flat nearby and uses it as her office.  However, through a trick of acoustics, she realizes she can hear voices coming from the flat next door through an air vent on the floor.  It’s a psychiatrist’s office, and she is suddenly privy to intensely personal conversations with his patients.  (I was reminded for a minute of Rear Window.)  One such patient is Mia Farrow, playing a character whose name I won’t reveal because it’s barely mentioned in the film for a reason.  She is pregnant, and during her sessions, she reveals doubts about her identity and/or purpose in life.

For Marion, who has always been sure about everything and everyone in her life, Farrow’s confession strikes a nerve, and the rest of the film consists of Marion’s struggle to reconcile her perception of herself and her well-constructed life with how everyone else truly sees her.  Throughout the movie, people are telling her how wrong she is about her relationships with her divorced brother, with an old friend, with her own husband, with her best friend, even with the Mia Farrow character.  Has she been deceiving herself her entire life?

Okay, so this subject matter isn’t exactly a barnburner.  But consider how the movie looks and moves, and the performances from Gena Rowlands and her supporting cast (it’s Rowlands’s movie to win or lose).  Look at the warm, yet subdued lighting schemes, shot by Ingmar Bergman’s favorite cinematographer, Sven Nykvist.  (Allen is a huge Bergman fan – indeed, this film is actually a loose reinterpretation of Bergman’s film Wild Strawberries [1957].) Interiors look, not sad, exactly, but…lived in.  Bright sunlight is only ever seen from inside through a window.  Exteriors look as if Allen specifically waited for overcast days to shoot.  Everything matches Marion’s internal gloom as she re-examines her life.

At the center of the film is a dream sequence that feels more like a foreign film than anything I’ve ever seen from an American film.  Marion dreams she is in an old stage theater, where figures from her circle of family and friends are rehearsing a play based on moments in her life.  Is this self-indulgence from Allen?  Maybe.  The dialogue in this sequence is so formal and, I guess, elliptical at times that it almost feels as if it were something translated into English from another language.  Vincent Canby of The New York Times called this out, saying, “The rounded sentences sound as if they’d been written in a French influenced by Flaubert, then translated into English by a lesser student of Constance Garnett.”  I’ll probably understand this criticism more when I learn who Constance Garnett is, but I get his point.  However, while it was noticeable, I did not find it distracting.  I thought it was a fair interpretation of how our dreams rarely follow strict logic.  Marion’s dream is structured, but the content is skewed.  I was fascinated by it.

Do I think this is a movie you need to see?  Who can say.  I’m glad I saw it, at least.  It shows a side of Allen’s directorial psyche I had never seen before, even though I had read about it from many other sources.  And it inspired me to do a little introspection of my own, which is something, I guess.  The movie’s final scene includes a beautifully loaded question: “…I wondered if a memory is something you have or something you’ve lost.”  Marion has been asking herself this question the whole movie without realizing it.  I wonder if my answer would be the same as hers.  Or yours.

THE RULING CLASS (United Kingdom, 1972)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Peter Medak
CAST: Peter O’Toole, Alastair Sim, William Mervyn, Carolyn Seymour, Arthur Lowe
MY RATING: 8/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 77% Fresh

PLOT: A member of the British House of Lords dies, leaving his estate to his son. Unfortunately, his son thinks he is the one true God made flesh.  Murder and mayhem ensue.


Re-watching The Ruling Class for the first time in some fifteen years, I came up with a great but still imperfect way to describe it: Being There directed by Terry Jones and written by Terry Gilliam.  It has more religious blasphemy than Life of Brian – not a great example because Life of Brian is not technically blasphemous, but whatever – and more exuberant overacting than any two Nicolas Cage movies put together.  There’s nudity (but no sex), a little cross-dressing, murder, auto-erotic asphyxiation, impromptu musical numbers, and more jabs at organized religion and class structure than you can poke a burning cross at.  It feels a little too chaotic for its own good at times, but I am willing to forgive those transgressions because I am so grateful for its periodic flights of fancy and for the deliciously hammy performance from Peter O’Toole.  Is it a masterpiece?  Not quite.  But you just can’t turn away from it.

One day, the veddy-veddy proper 13th Earl of Gurney dies after a mishap involving a silken noose, a tutu, and a dislodged stepladder.  His brother, Sir Charles Gurney, is dismayed to learn that the heir to the Gurney fortune and name is none other than Jack (Peter O’Toole), the 14th Earl of Gurney.  We see the reason for Charles’s dismay when we see Jack for the first time…dressed as Jesus Christ, in a brown robe and white rope belt and long golden locks down to his shoulders.  He tells everyone he is God.  Someone asks him, “How do you know you’re God?”  He answers with unassailable logic: “Simple.  When I pray to Him, I find I am talking to myself.”  He also says things like, “For what I am about to receive, may I make myself truly thankful.”

Charles realizes he must have Jack committed to wrest away control of the family fortune, but he cannot do so until Jack has an heir.  But Jack (who insists on being referred to as “J.C.”) refuses to marry because he says he’s already married to the Lady of the Camellias, which everyone knows is the name of a less-famous novel by Alexandre Dumas fils.  To get around this inconvenience, Charles arranges for his own mistress to impersonate the Lady.  Meanwhile, Charles’s wife, Lady Claire, puts the moves on Jack’s psychiatric doctor to distract him because he opposes the marriage, citing Jack’s condition.  And always in the background is Tuck, the family butler, who received 30,000 pounds from the 13th Earl’s will, but stays in service apparently just to blow raspberries and say exactly what’s been on his mind for the last several years.  I would say he’s the comic relief, but he’s more like a demented court jester.

Peter O’Toole’s performance as Jack must be seen to be believed.  Imagine, say, Daniel Day Lewis or a young Robert De Niro, dressing up as Jesus Christ, talking animatedly to flowers, and taking a nap while standing on a life-size crucifix, arms outstretched.  At one point, Jack woos the faux Camille by impersonating a bird, and she follows suit.  You haven’t lived until you’ve seen Peter O’Toole dressed in an impeccable white ensemble, strutting across the lawn, head bobbing like an oversize pigeon, and literally cooing.

The Ruling Class is clearly a jab at its namesake, the upper-class nobs and snobs of England who firmly believe they rule their country simply because they are more suited to it than anyone else.  They never suffer from the same human foibles as the lower classes do, and if they do, it’s never acknowledged, or acknowledged and hushed up, or blamed on someone or something else.  The film is based on a stage play, which explains the occasional fourth-wall breaks and the frequent interruptions for short musical numbers, which further enhances the Python-esque feel of the movie.  I would imagine it was much more notorious upon its release than it might be today, but the message itself hasn’t dated.

That message is especially brought home when Jack is ostensibly cured, after a fantastic sequence involving a second psychotic patient, a lightning storm, and a vision of a gorilla wearing a top-hat and a tux.  However, his “cure” has an unintended side effect.  To everyone else, it looks like he’s back to being himself: Jack, the 14th Earl of Gurney.  But a creepy monologue in the attic reveals his secret.  He no longer believes he’s God, nor does he believe he’s Jack, the 14th Earl.  He believes he’s another historical “Jack,” the one who stalked prostitutes in 19th-century London.  He has visions of old London streets.  In one masterful scene, he is in the sitting room of his country house, and as he crosses the floor, the house magically transforms into an old London cobblestone street at night, in an uncut take with no visual effects.  I can imagine Terry Gilliam nodding approvingly at that absurdist touch.

What will become of the “new” Jack?  Will he remain a member of the ruling class to which he was born, whether he deserves it or not?  Will his former doctor, or his wife, ever learn of Jack’s new persona?  With his newfound purpose, he delivers a speech to the house of lords in favor of capital punishment, quoting no fewer than three verses from the Old Testament.  Their response to his words serves as the macabre capper to the film.

TRUE BELIEVER (1989)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Joseph Ruben
CAST: James Woods, Robert Downey Jr., Margaret Colin, Yuji Okumoto, Kurtwood Smith
MY RATING: 7/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 96% Fresh

PLOT: A cynical former civil liberties attorney, now reduced to “specializing” in defending drug dealers, becomes transformed by an eight-year-old murder case.


I don’t know if True Believer counts as a “forgotten” film in today’s world, but it’s certainly not a movie that I hear mentioned anymore.  Directed by genre-hopping journeyman Joseph Ruben, whose films are more recognizable than he is (Dreamscape, The Stepfather, Sleeping with the Enemy), and anchored by James Woods and Robert Downey Jr., True Believer is a solid entry in the crime/courtroom drama/thriller arena, at least in broad strokes.  However, there are momentary lapses of logic that strain credulity, and despite the momentum of everything around them, they were enough to affect my opinion/impression of the movie.

After a flashback and prologue that introduces us to his future client, we meet Eddie Dodd (James Woods), a fiery former civil liberties attorney who once defended Black Panthers and other social revolutionaries in the 1960s.  Now, at the tail end of the ‘80s, in the waning days of the “Me Generation”, he specializes in defending drug dealers and/or distributors under the guise of painting the government’s use of wiretaps and undercover agents as invasions of privacy…a shabby attempt at investing his sleazy client list with some sort of social nobility.  Into his life comes an aspiring attorney, Roger Baron (future Oscar-winner Robert Downey Jr., looking fresh and innocent during what must have been one of his infamous rough patches).  Roger idolizes the old Eddie Dodd, the idealist, and is severely disillusioned by the current Eddie, the opportunist.

Things change, though, when a Korean mother and daughter track Eddie down and ask him to defend their son and brother, Shu Kai Kim (Yuji Okumoto, The Karate Kid Part II, Better Off Dead), who is eight years into a prison term for a murder they say he didn’t commit.  The daughter says she tracked him down by going to all the courthouses: “They all speak of you, and they all say the same thing…you do cases cheap.”  He dismisses them with a vague promise to “review the material,” but after some predictable prodding from Roger, his new conscience incarnate, he takes the case.

What follows is a well-directed, well-paced mystery-slash-courtroom thriller.  It’s not fancy or especially slick, but it held my interest, which is all I ask of a mystery where I’m expected to keep track of a lot of information.  And there is a lot of information to keep track of.  Eddie and Roger, with the assistance of their P.I., Kitty (the invaluable Margaret Colin), uncover inconsistencies in witness accounts, inconsistencies from their own client, the involvement of the Aryan Army, a bona fide conspiracy theorist who believes the phone company killed Kennedy, and a possible link to an 8-year-old drug bust.  (That’s about all I can say about the plot without ruining the surprises of the evidence chain.)

As I said before, the movie is solid, but they made one major misstep: casting the talented Kurtwood Smith as opposing counsel, D.A. Robert Reynard.  From his first scene, no matter how nicely he smiles or how friendly he seems, he is obviously the bad guy, because it’s Kurtwood Smith.  Because of his mere presence, you know he’s not to be trusted and must be brought low, no matter how logical his courtroom arguments are.  He is clearly the villain, even if he’s not doing anything truly wrong.  So right away, any possible objectivity about who’s right and who’s wrong is skewed.  It would have been more interesting if the ostensible bad guy had been cast by someone who is at least a little ambiguous.  Just my two cents.

There are other issues.  As the investigation progresses, there is an anguished speech from Eddie to Shu Kai Kim that spells out exactly where the title of the movie comes from and ends with some tortured dialogue that must have looked good on the page, but just doesn’t feel right coming out of James Woods’s mouth.   In another scene, Eddie walks away from two armed men who have every reason to shoot him in the back but inexplicably choose not to, presumably due to a sudden attack of conscience.  Given what these two men had done just previously, this inaction seemed wildly improbable.  Then the D.A., whom we have seen is highly intelligent, allows himself to get cornered in the courtroom when he absolutely should not have.  Not the actions of a smart man…but certainly the actions of the clear villain, because it’s Kurtwood Smith.

Because of these inconsistencies, True Believer will probably never be mentioned in the same breath with Jagged Edge or The Verdict or any other great courtroom thriller.  But the performances from the leads are more than adequate (despite James Woods’s incongruous ponytail), and the mystery is fun to unravel, and Joseph Ruben’s direction is competent if not splashy.  In other words, it’s your slightly above-average ‘80s genre movie.  (And I am sometimes a sucker for ‘80s nostalgia, so…there you go.)

TALK RADIO (1988)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Oliver Stone
CAST: Eric Bogosian, Ellen Greene, John C. McGinley, Alec Baldwin, Michael Wincott
MY RATING: 8/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 82% Certified Fresh

PLOT: A rude, contemptuous talk show host becomes overwhelmed by the hatred that surrounds his program just before it goes national.


Oliver Stone’s Talk Radio is entertaining and, at times, mesmerizing without being an altogether enjoyable experience.  I salute the craft of the film and the bravura performance by Eric Bogosian, reprising the role he created on Broadway, but despite my high score, I’m not quite sure to whom I would recommend this film.  I believe it’s an important placeholder in Stone’s filmography, coming as it does after Wall Street and before Born on the Fourth of July.  It shows immense faith in the material and portrays its characters with brutal honesty.  The closest comparison I can make is to the Safdie Brothers film Uncut Gems.  Both films are fraught with tension, featuring unlikable fast-talking main characters who tend to step on or over or around the people closest to them to achieve their goal, or sometimes just to get their own way.  They’re fascinating to watch and listen to, but I would not want to be stuck in an elevator with them.

Talk Radio centers on a Dallas radio shock jock named Barry Champlain.  Bogosian’s look and performance seems so closely modeled on Howard Stern that I’m surprised Stern didn’t sue the filmmakers for not obtaining his permission to do so.  (In fact, the Barry character is modeled after real life talk show host Alan Berg, who was gunned down by an ultra-right-wing group in 1984.)  The whole first “act” of the film takes place in and around the broadcasting booth where Barry holds court, listening to and berating callers from all walks of life on topics ranging from “I Love Lucy” to the war on drugs to Holocaust deniers to one dude who eats dinner with his cat every night.  If nothing else, this sequence boosted my respect for anyone in Barry’s line of work.  To be able to take calls from random folks with random issues, and to somehow spin their questions or problems into a mini-monologue or diatribe that manages to entertain or offend – usually both – the caller or the listening audience – usually both – is a skill I will never possess.  (Bogosian’s voice is tailor-made for the role, a nice sweet-spot baritone that sounds as if he’s been doing radio for years.)

Mixed in with the calls are the ones from clear-cut racists, warning Barry that they know where he lives, that they know “Champlain” is not his real last name, calling him Jew-boy and “f—-t”, sending him packages in the mail and claiming they’re bombs.  One loathsome item is sent to him wrapped in a Nazi flag.  Other callers don’t seem to have any affiliation at all aside from their utter hatred of Barry Champlain.  There’s a scene where Barry has been invited to a public event to introduce someone.  The moment he takes the stage, there are a few cheers that are eventually drowned out by a sea of boos and jeers in concert with a hailstorm of food and garbage thrown by the audience.  Barry has the nerve to look a little shocked.  I remember thinking, “How can you not expect this kind of reception?”

But then I remember thinking, about the audience members this time, “Well, if you hate him so much, why are you listening to his show?”  The movie is making a statement about the bizarre relationship between the general public and entertainment celebrities that they “love to hate.”  It seems to me their lives would be infinitely happier and less angry if they just switched over to NPR or smooth jazz once in a while.  No one forces them, or anyone, to engage with a TV show or movie or radio show or anything else they don’t like.  But with Barry, and presumably many other shock jocks in real life, people seem to need them, to use them as an excuse, I guess, to get riled up, to feel fueled by righteous anger.  The shock jocks are handy targets, especially because the callers can remain anonymous, much like social media.

There is a long rant from Barry himself about this phenomenon late in the film.  There was a plan for his show to go national, but it has been derailed for nebulous reasons, and so a broadcast intended for the entire country is still confined to the Dallas area.  After an ill-advised guest appearance by a stoned idiot (Michael Wincott!) and a couple of calls that go completely off the rails, Barry loses it and tells his listeners:

“You’re happiest when others are in pain.  That’s where I come in, isn’t it?  I’m here to lead you by the hands through the dark forest of your own hatred and anger and humiliation.  I’m providing a public service. … I come in here every night, I tear into you, I abuse you, I insult you, you just keep coming back for more.  What’s wrong with you, why do you keep calling?”

In another movie, that kind of rant might skew towards comedy.  Here, it serves as a painful peek into the psyche of a man who has a job that he’s good at, but there’s a part of him that despises himself for it, and that self-loathing has overflowed the boundaries of his own soul onto and over his listeners.  Even he can’t understand what his audience is thinking. I found myself wondering if any other shock jocks out there might feel this way.  I wonder if this might be one of Howard Stern’s favorite movies, or if it was one of Don Imus’s favorites.  I have never listened to either one of their shows because…well, because that’s my right as a human being.  But I wonder, nevertheless.

As I said before, I admire the craft of the film.  Stone and his collaborators (especially cinematographer Robert Richardson) do a great job with creative camera angles, lighting, and editing for those long stretches of the film where we simply sit and listen to Barry Champlain talking to that endless stream of callers.  Most of those calls end threateningly or are threatening throughout.  This has the effect of creating tension almost out of thin air, a tension that suffuses the entire film.  Are we going to get a maniac who takes Barry hostage on the air?  When Barry unwisely invites a listener to come down to the station and appear on the air, we’re thinking, “You idiot, he’s going to kill you!”  Even if none of that happens, we’re worried about it the entire time.  While this method is an effective use of cinema, as I said before, I cannot honestly say I had a “good time” watching it.  When the ending comes and the final credits roll, I will carefully say that there was a sense of relief, not at how it ended, but just relief that it ended.

Talk Radio is a well-made film featuring a stellar performance from Eric Bogosian.  If you sit down to watch it, I believe you will feel exactly what Oliver Stone meant for you to feel.  Just don’t expect it to tickle.

THE VANISHING (Netherlands, 1988)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: George Sluizer
CAST: Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu, Gene Bervoets, Johanna ter Steege
MY RATING: 9/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 96% Fresh

PLOT: A young couple, Rex and Saskia, stop at a service station during a road trip.  Saskia vanishes without a trace, prompting a years-long search by Rex…while an unassuming family man monitors his progress.


[WARNING: This review contains unavoidable spoilers.  If you have any plans to see this movie, trust me…stop reading now.]

I went into The Vanishing absolutely cold.  I knew nothing about it aside from the name of the director, the bare outlines of the plot (a young woman vanishes while on vacation), and the fact it was a critically acclaimed foreign film, remade in America with Jeff Bridges and Kiefer Sutherland, which I never saw because it was, quote, “laughable, stupid and crude” (Roger Ebert).

With absolutely no gore, no unnecessary side plots, and no clichéd final chase between the killer and the cops where the outcome is a foregone conclusion, director George Sluizer has crafted one of the most compelling, creepiest abduction films I’ve ever seen.  By not showing the actual abduction when it happens, by focusing on the boyfriend’s frantic attempts to track her down immediately afterwards, and by abruptly shifting gears twice in the first hour, the viewer is kept constantly off balance (in a good way).  If she was abducted, how did the kidnapper accomplish his task in broad daylight?  WAS it even an abduction?  We get a good look at the person who most likely committed the crime, but his process looks almost comic…how did he pull it off?

We first meet Rex and Saskia as they’re driving to France to do some cycling.  After Saskia relates a recurring nightmare to Rex (she dreams of being trapped inside a golden egg floating through space), there is an early crisis when their car runs out of gas in the middle of a long tunnel.  We get an early, incisive look at their relationship when Rex elects to walk back for gas, while Saskia stays behind frantically looking for a flashlight she insists they will need.  Later, at a crowded service station, they kiss and make up.

This scene at the service station looks entirely mundane at first, but it is interrupted by a sequence in which we are shown the man who pretty clearly is about to commit a kidnapping.  When we cut back to Rex and Saskia, their interactions become charged with tension.  They talk and tease and kiss, while we are suddenly hyper-aware of their surroundings.  Director Sluizer fills the background with extras, and we start scrutinizing them to see if any of them might be the kidnapper.  Or perhaps there will be a clue later, a Hitchcockian callback which relies on our recall of the crowd scenes.  Rex takes a random Polaroid as a blue semi rolls past the lens, obscuring the front of the store.  Sluizer’s camera lingers on the semi, and we immediately wonder if there is any significance.  (There both is and isn’t.)

The creepy effect of these scenes cannot be overstated.  I can easily imagine some people watching this movie and immediately changing their travel habits.  Never go into a crowded store alone.  Carry mace.  If you must separate, stay in touch with your cellphone until you meet up again.  Stanley Kubrick knew what he was talking about when he told Sluizer that The Vanishing was the most terrifying movie he’d ever seen.

After Saskia’s disappearance, there are the nominal scenes of Rex searching the store and grounds for her, asking if anyone has seen her, giving her description, and so on.  Interestingly, we never get a scene of Rex being interviewed by the police as the day drags on.  Looking back on it now, I get the feeling that Sluizer perhaps thought those scenes would be way too familiar for audiences who have sat through any number of police procedurals in the movies and on TV.  Better to stay with the matter at hand and keep the story moving.

It’s at this point that the movie makes its first abrupt shift in tone and focus.  With no warning, we suddenly spend a good 20-30 minutes, not with Rex’s search, but with the apparently happy family life of the man we got a good look at earlier in the film, the man who appeared to be prepping for a crime.  These scenes are even creepier than the earlier scenes at the service station because we are pretty sure this is the kidnapper, but his home life seems stable: a wife, two daughters, a well-paying job as a chemistry teacher, and the financial wherewithal to buy a large farmhouse in the country…where we discover, in an INTENSELY creepy moment, that no neighbors will hear any screaming.

The decision to focus on this man was jarring and disturbing to me, but in that good way achieved only by the best crime thrillers.  We get more details about his life and his “preparations” that I won’t spoil here.  The film almost seems to have forgotten all about Rex and Saskia; this man is now the primary character.  (In fact, this actor gets top billing in the credits).  He has the kind of forgettable face and unimposing persona that would fly under anyone’s radar.  By showing us the fact that he has two sides to his personality, we come to the uneasy realization that evil could easily lurk behind the cheerful facades of just about anyone we meet.  This concept is far more terrifying to me than a slasher wearing a mask.

But The Vanishing has two more tricks up its sleeve.  It takes yet another dramatic shift when we abruptly jump forward three years.  Saskia is still missing.  Rex has a new girlfriend, but he still posts flyers asking for any information on Saskia.  He makes appearances on local news programs, pleading for the perpetrator to step forward, promising not to press charges; he just has to know whether Saskia is alive or dead.  He craves closure more than anything else.  It has consumed him.  And…he has received several anonymous postcards from the kidnapper asking to meet in a public place, but whenever Rex arrives, the kidnapper has never shown himself.

This creeped me out even more than I had already been.  But the screws get tighter still.  At one point, the kidnapper offers Rex a choice: turn me in, in which case you’ll never find out what happened to Saskia, or I show you what happened to her…by going through the same ordeal she did.

This has all SORTS of psychological implications that I don’t feel fully qualified to sort out.  I have to wonder about those families and friends who have suffered through the disappearance of a loved one.  (I looked up the statistics on missing persons on a whim…they are horribly depressing.)  I can only imagine what those people would do to finally get closure on what happened.  Would they accept this kidnapper’s offer?  Even if it means they might possibly die?  What price would they be willing to pay to finally get an answer after years of searching?

I hope I never have to answer that question.  Rex goes back and forth in agony before finally making his choice.  His decision leads to an ending that was probably inevitable, but which still took me by surprise.

In an interview with the actress who played Saskia (Johanna ter Steege), she states that when the movie was finally released, she was deeply disturbed.  She went to George Sluizer and asked him, “What is the point of this movie?  What do you achieve by telling this kind of disturbing story?  What are you trying to tell the audience?”  If I had to answer that question, I would say that the first motive was to make an entertaining crime thriller, which it is.  But perhaps there’s also a deeper statement about the banality of evil.  One does not have to wear a black hat and twirl his mustache to be the bad guy.  Sometimes you just have to blend into the background.  The film opens and closes with shots that include a praying mantis, a creature that relies on stealth and speed to capture its prey.  The kidnapper in The Vanishing has learned that lesson in spades.

GUNFIGHT AT THE O.K. CORRAL (1957)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: John Sturges
CAST: Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Jo Van Fleet, John Ireland, DeForest Kelley, and a young bit player named Dennis Hopper
MY RATING: 8/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 87% Fresh

PLOT: Lawman Wyatt Earp and outlaw Doc Holliday form an unlikely alliance which culminates in their participation in the legendary Gunfight at the O.K. Corral.


In real life, the legendary gunfight at the O.K Corral in the frontier town of Tombstone lasted thirty seconds, but what kind of movie would that be?  (Kill Bill: Vol. 2 springs to mind…)  A 1950’s Western requires a long-to-medium shot of the good guys – Wyatt Earp, his brothers, and Doc Holliday – striding down the street to meet the challenge of the dastardly Clantons, who had gunned down Wyatt’s youngest brother in cold blood.  We need a gunfight, not too long, but longer than 30 seconds.  And we need to make sure the ratio of surviving bad guys to good guys is just right: 0 to all.

John Sturges’ Gunfight at the O.K. Corral delivers the goods in a remarkably mature film for its time, free (for the most part) of cheap sentimentality and distractions from the main plot.  That’s a double-edged sword, though: we rarely leave the side of either Wyatt Earp or Doc Holliday, but the result is we get little to no information about Earp’s brothers until the final reel, nor do we get many details about Earp’s romance with the lovely Laura Denbow, a high-class gambler who knows enough about cards to beat the men at their own game.  We only find out they’re engaged as an afterthought, it seems.

As for Doc Holliday’s relationship with Kate Fisher (Oscar winner Jo Van Fleet), the word “dysfunctional” is woefully inadequate.  Loosely based on Holliday’s real mistress, referred to only as “Big Nose Kate” on Wikipedia, she seems to exist only to serve as Holliday’s psychological punching bag when required.  Her emotional yo-yoing gave me whiplash: she pledges her unending devotion in one scene, tries to stab him in another, helps him escape a lynch mob, takes up with the loathsome Johnny Ringo after yet another fight, begs to be taken back, and eventually tells him, “I’ll see you dead!”  With friends like these…

But even that kind of sordid melodrama is not enough to derail the throughline of the film, which is focused intently on establishing the rocky relationship between the morally good Wyatt Earp (Burt Lancaster) – who nevertheless wears a black hat the entire film – and the morally chaotic Doc Holliday (Kirk Douglas), a professional gambler who leaves a string of dead bodies behind him, all killed in self-defense, of course.  Earp also helps get Holliday out of town before a mob can lynch him, so Holliday decides to stick around until the debt is paid.

I think the essence of their relationship is summed up in a scene where Earp is forced to deputize Holliday when no other options are available.  Earp reluctantly walks up to Doc, tells him to raise his right hand, and says, “Do you solemnly swear to uphold…oh, this is ridiculous.  You’re deputized.”  Doc: “Wait a minute, don’t I get to wear a tin star?”  Earp: “Not on your life!”  Both men are torn between their philosophy and their sense of honor.  Holliday is no hero, but he’ll help Wyatt until his debt is paid.  Earp despises Holliday’s moral code, but he’s the best gunslinger in town.  What can you do?

All of this is handled in dialogue that seems mostly uncluttered by the hokey clichés I’ve heard in so many other films of the 1950s, even some of the great ones.  This may perhaps be due to the fact the screenplay was written by Leon Uris, a novelist who would eventually go on to write, among many others, Exodus, Topaz, and QB VII.  Listening to the characters talk, it was interesting to hear how natural they sounded, compared to the overblown melodrama of so many other westerns and dramas of that era.  The dialogue was clearly written by someone with a writer’s ear, who wants to get to the point of every scene with a minimum of fuss or flowery exposition.

As I mentioned, however, this quest for directness means we spend all our time with Earp and Holliday and almost no time at all with the Clantons or Earp’s brothers or anyone else.  By the time we hear Wyatt’s brother, Virgil, is in trouble, we’ve almost forgotten he HAS brothers.  As far as the Clantons go, we hear everything about them secondhand until we finally meet them in Tombstone.  We never even see Wyatt propose to Laura; we barely even see them courting (their courtship appears to consist of one false arrest and one kiss in the moonlight).

And I would be remiss if I did not mention…that song.  I learn from IMDb that the song, “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral,” that plays over the opening and closing credits, and which also plays over any transitional scene as Earp moves from one town to the next, was one of the inspirations for the theme song for Mel Brooks’s parody Blazing Saddles.  Brooks even got the original artist, Frankie Laine, to sing for his own movie.  It is so corny and earnest, juxtaposed against the gritty characters and scenery, that any sequence featuring that song loses all credibility.  If the filmmakers had just ditched that song, I might consider this one of the greatest Westerns of all time.  (see also Rio Bravo with Ricky Nelson’s crooning.)

But…having said all that, I must report that Gunfight at the O.K. Corral was entertaining from start to finish.  By avoiding the temptations to give in to melodrama and hokeyness, we are presented with a surprisingly solid Western drama that culminates in a decent (for the late ‘50s) gun battle.  It’s not as flashy as anything from one of Eastwood’s spaghetti westerns, and it’s not quite as thrilling as the one at the end of 1993’s Tombstone, but it’s satisfying, nevertheless.

(And for the record, when it comes to memorable lines, against Val Kilmer’s immortal “I’m your huckleberry”, I would gladly put Kirk Douglas’s venomous, “You slut!” …you have to see it in context, trust me.)

CALL ME BY YOUR NAME (Italy, 2017)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Luca Guadagnino
CAST: Armie Hammer, Timothée Chalamet, Michael Stuhlbarg
MY RATING: 10/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 94% Certified Fresh

PLOT: In 1980s Italy, romance blossoms between a seventeen-year-old student and the older man hired as his father’s research assistant.


Call Me by Your Name is remarkable because it tells a heartbreaking first-love story that could have easily devolved into cheap melodrama.  I mean, look at the plot description above.  It has “soap opera” written all over it.  But because director Luca Guadagnino (Bones and All, the 2018 remake of Suspiria) applies restraint, and because the screenplay by James Ivory (of Merchant Ivory fame) sticks to realism as opposed to predictable scripted nonsense, and because of the fearlessness of the film’s two leads, Call Me by Your Name becomes one of the best films about the thrill and heartbreak of first love I’ve ever seen.

The story takes place in the summer of 1983, in Italy.  The Perlmans are on vacation at their villa in the Italian countryside.  Mr. Perlman (Michael Stuhlbarg) has hired an American, Oliver (Armie Hammer), to assist him with research over the holiday.  Elio (Timothée Chalamet), Mr. Perlman’s 17-year-old son, appears to take an instant dislike to Oliver, but we later see this is a maneuver designed to disguise his real, and scary, crush on Oliver.

…but I don’t want to write a full synopsis of the story, because I guarantee it would read like someone’s Twilight fan-fiction or something similar.  What happens is reasonably predictable and has been seen in countless movies from Douglas Sirk to Nora Ephron.  What makes this movie special is how it happens.

There is not a single scene or shot in the movie that feels routine.  Or, not “routine”, that’s not the right word.  The whole movie feels authentic.  Nobody talks in screenplay-ese (except for a sensational speech from Mr. Perlman near the end, which I will forgive because it works).  Whatever happens, whenever it happens, feels spontaneous and precisely observed.

Here is at least one moment that captures what I mean.  Elio’s crush on Oliver has gotten deeper, but he’s kept it to himself.  One night, the two of them and a bunch of Elio’s friends visit a local bar with an outdoor dance floor.  Oliver starts dancing with a pretty girl.  Elio’s friends get up to dance, but Elio stays behind, eyeing Oliver and the girl, and you can almost hear the gears turning over in Elio’s head.  He finally does get up to dance, but watch his movements carefully: he starts dancing with a girl, but surreptitiously moves closer to Oliver for a moment.  Oliver turns to Elio, and Elio abruptly turns away and pulls a little move and slide, pretending not to notice Oliver while also trying to impress him a little.  Elio turns back, sees that Oliver is no longer looking, and quickly moves back towards him.  This kind of behavior is so specific, and yet universally recognizable.  There was no dialogue, but I knew everything going through Elio’s head in every second of that scene.

I also admired the scene, done in one take, where Elio finally reveals his feelings to Oliver, but it’s all done in this marvelous code, where Elio never actually says precisely what he’s talking about, but Oliver is smart enough to decipher the code.  (“Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”)  I’ve seen so many films where the Oliver character is written as an otherwise adult person but has to be incredibly dumb in order to prolong the “idiot plot.”  How refreshing to be confronted with characters with working brains.

Guadagnino also appears to be a great fan of Japanese films, particularly those of Yasujiro Ozu.  Throughout the movie, there are many scenes that are divided, almost like chapter headings, by a series of stationary shots, held for several seconds, of ordinary items: a window, or a staircase, or the still waters of a lake, or an apricot tree.  Ozu was known for doing the same thing in his films; they were called “pillow shots,” because Japanese poetry utilizes the same device, using words instead of shots, to separate thoughts or ideas.  These “pillow shots” lend a sense of poetry or…I don’t know what, exactly, to the film.  It may look (and sound) a little pretentious, but trust me, it works.  It made the movie feel as if there were great currents of significance rumbling below the surface.

Alert readers may notice I haven’t even mentioned the sex scenes yet.  Going into this movie, I remembered that there was some hoopla about the graphic nature of those scenes, but I get the feeling they’re like the ear scene in Reservoir Dogs: everyone thinks they remember seeing the ear actually getting cut off, but we don’t.  Tarantino tactfully moves the camera up and away and leaves the dismemberment off-camera.  Same thing here.  Guadagnino leaves no doubt as to what is about to happen, but then moves the camera away, or cuts to the next scene, or expertly positions the camera so the naughtiest actions are never actually seen.

This is shrewd filmmaking.  If the film had been filled with NC-17-worthy content, the message would have been lost.  It would have become a movie about the sex instead of being about the turmoil and ecstasy of being in love with someone who loves you back, even if it’s only for a short time.

I should also mention the roles of Elio’s parents.  I can see how some people might watch the movie and imagine that his parents are far too forgiving, especially given their religious upbringing.  However, this was another welcome departure from the realms of unnecessary melodrama.  Instead of scenes where the furious parents make unreasonable demands or deliver intolerant lectures, we are given a father and mother who know enough about parenting, and about their son, to realize when it’s time to lecture and when it’s time to just let things happen.  I’m not suggesting they would ever willingly allow their son to go into harm’s way.  But they’re smart enough to know how important it is that Oliver and Elio take a little sabbatical together before Oliver’s final departure.

(They also know when a small lie is sometimes necessary at the appropriate moment.  After Mr. Perlman’s wonderful speech at the end of the film, Elio asks him, “Does mother know?”  Mr. Perlman hesitates, then delivers a very tactful answer.  To me, this was his way of protecting his son at a time when he desperately needed comfort.  I suppose it could be interpreted either way, but since Mr. Perlman knows his wife, I believe it was a perfectly timed lie.  Just a small one.  It’s a magnificent button to the scene.)

Call Me by Your Name deservedly won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay that year.  It’s a masterpiece of storytelling by osmosis, without using signal flags or hokey dialogue.  It recalls with perfect precision how it feels to be uplifted and crushed emotionally, and how one must decide how to deal with those feelings.  I was never the 17-year-old son of a professor with romantic feelings for his assistant, but I understood and identified with Elio nearly every step of the way during the movie.  I would imagine many others can, too.

MARCEL THE SHELL WITH SHOES ON (2021)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Dean Fleischer Camp
CAST: Jenny Slate, Dean Fleischer Camp, Isabella Rossellini
MY RATING: 9/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 98% Fresh

PLOT: Marcel, a tiny talking seashell with big shoes and one googly eye, becomes the subject of a documentary.


Years ago, I went to see Happy Feet.  The premise was absurd – singing penguins, give me a break – but as soon as Nicole Kidman’s character sang the first words of Prince’s Kiss, I remember thinking, “Okay, this movie is only going to work if I just give in to the concept.”  I did, and it did (for the most part).  Some movies are like that.  If you’re the kind of person who brings too much logic to the movie theater, who’s always wondering, when a movie character just orders “a beer” at a bar, how does the bartender know what to bring him…if you’re that kind of person, then Marcel the Shell with Shoes On is not for you.  Trust me.  I’m trying to give a public service message here.  If you watch a James Bond movie and sit there the whole time going, “That couldn’t happen…that couldn’t happen”…then skip Marcel and go find a Werner Herzog documentary.  Cave of Forgotten Dreams is excellent.

However, if you enjoy flights of fancy, fits of whimsy, and a gently aggressive cuteness factor balanced nicely by, not one, but two potentially tear-jerking plot developments – all centered on a talking seashell – then have I got a movie for you.

The story: A down-on-his-luck documentary filmmaker (Dean Fleischer Camp) moves into an Airbnb with his dog.  After following some odd clues around the house, he discovers his diminutive roommate: Marcel (voiced by Jenny Slate), a pebble-sized seashell with one eye – a googly eye – and tiny shoes, with a voice that sounds like your favorite childhood puppy was granted the gift of speech.  Dean discovers that Marcel has lived in this house for some time with his grandmother, Connie (voiced by Isabella Rossellini!).  There used to be an entire community, including many of Marcel’s family members, but they all vanished one traumatic night when the couple that used to live in the Airbnb got into an argument and the man stormed off with his luggage…carrying some unwitting passengers.

Now Marcel fends for himself, while Nana Connie helps in the garden.  Dean, the filmmaker, asks some excellent questions.  How does Marcel get around the house?  Why, by traveling inside a tennis ball using it like a tiny hamster ball; it’s okay as long as you don’t mind knocking some things over every once in a while.  What does he eat?  Mostly fruit from the tree growing outside.  How does Marcel get it out of the tree all by himself?  Using the mixer in the kitchen and a long length of rope, of course.  I could explain it, but it’s funnier if you find out for yourself how that works.  How does Marcel reach high places in the house?  Well, if he can’t jump it, there’s plenty of honey in the house, and honey is sticky, and that’s why there are sometimes little footprints all over the walls.  (Marcel asks Dean his own important questions: “Have you ever eaten a raspberry?  Um, and what was that like?”)

This is all unbearably cute.  I’m still not sure why I responded to it so strongly.  This is not normally my kind of material.  But the sight of this little seashell with one eye plopping down in front of the TV to watch 60 Minutes with his Nana just brought a smile to my face.  (Marcel explains, “We just call it ‘the show.’  That’s how much we love it.”)

One of the most charming elements of this movie is how it trucks along giving us one cuteness blast after another, and then it blindsides you with sentiments that are so simple and direct that they hit you in the feels before you even realize what’s happened.  As Marcel recounts the story of his family’s disappearance that fateful night, he sheds a tear or two.  Then he says:

“And then the next day, there was a really sunny day with a good breeze.  And I just remember thinking, if I was somebody else, I would really be enjoying this.”

I don’t know about you, but that statement really hits home with me, for all sorts of reasons that I won’t bore you with.  There are several moments like that in the film.  Here’s another one:

“Have you ever done that before, like, when there’s a party in your house?  Sometimes it’s easiest to rest when you go off by yourself and you can still hear the noise of the party, and you feel safe knowing that so many people are around, that you can have a rest?”

I identified with that so strongly that I can point to events in my life when I did exactly that, literally.  Hearing those words spoken in Marcel’s guileless, childlike tones almost felt…I might be overstating this a little…therapeutic.  It was a mildly bizarre experience for me.

Meanwhile, in events that uncannily mirror exactly what happened with the original Marcel shorts in real life, Dean posts his videos online and starts getting a phenomenal response.  He suggests that Marcel post a plea online to see if the online community can help track down his family.  This leads to some rather unfortunate attention-seekers, but it does provide a motivation for Marcel to take his first trip to the outside world, riding on the dashboard of Dean’s car.  If the idea of a teeny tiny seashell getting carsick and vomiting a teeny tiny little bit and apologizing every time…if you don’t find that even a little cute, I pity you.

Events progress rapidly (the movie is just over 90 minutes long).  There is an incident involving Nana Connie and some hooligans who break into the Airbnb.  The producers of 60 Minutes reach out to Dean and Marcel and ask if Lesley Stahl can come to the house and interview them.  Marcel says no, not until Nana Connie is better.  …and what happens after that I will not reveal, because it involves some of the most heartfelt passages of the film as the depth of Marcel’s relationship with his grandmother is tested, and the grandmother displays the kind of wisdom and sacrifice that would feel at home in an O. Henry story.

When so many films out there celebrate cynicism and snark, what a treat it is to find one that just wants to make you feel a little better.  I could not put it any better than Marcel himself:

“Guess why I smile a lot.  Uh, ‘cause it’s worth it.”

THE PURPLE ROSE OF CAIRO (1985)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Woody Allen
CAST: Mia Farrow, Jeff Daniels, Danny Aiello, Dianne Wiest, and…Jeff Daniels
MY RATING: 10/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 93% Fresh

PLOT: In 1935 New Jersey, a movie character walks off the screen and into the real-world life of a lonely, unhappily married woman.


I can imagine that it would be absurdly easy to poke holes in The Purple Rose of Cairo.  The premise is outlandish, taking place in the real world but firmly in the realm of fantasy.  It stretches the suspension of disbelief to the breaking point, then goes a little further.  It asks the audience member to forget cynicism and snark for eighty-two minutes and give in to the kind of hopeless romanticism that exists only on the movie screen.  And then, amid all that glorious make-believe, it abruptly confronts you with the knowledge that, yes, this kind of thing really does only happen in the movies, and the real world can be messy and unforgiving and sad.  Yes…but at our lowest points, we can always turn to Fred and Ginger, and Bogey and Bacall, and Luke and Leia, and Gene Kelly, and Hogwarts and the Emerald City.  The Purple Rose of Cairo reminds us that the movies allow us to escape reality for an hour or three.  Sign me up.

This movie’s plot is the embodiment of the “high-concept pitch.”  What if a movie character walked off the movie screen and tried to live in the real world?  I don’t have any statistics to support this, but I’m pretty sure there are at least 18,337 other films with variations of this fish-out-of-water scenario, most memorably Splash, Last Action Hero, and Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

In this version, Mia Farrow plays Cecilia, a semi-depressed housewife in 1935 New Jersey, living in a small town still in the grips of the Great Depression.  Her husband, Monk (Danny Aiello), claims he’s looking for work, but we only ever see him pitching pennies with his buddies or making life miserable for Cecilia at home.  Her wages from her waitressing job go directly to rent and groceries, and anything left over goes to Monk.  Amid this bleakness, Cecilia goes to see the new film opening at the local theater, The Purple Rose of Cairo, starring a dashingly handsome actor named Gil Shepherd in the supporting role of archaeologist Tom Baxter (both roles played by a young Jeff Daniels).  She is swept away by the glitter, glamour, and romance of the film.

Imagine her surprise when, during one of the many screenings she attends, Tom Baxter abruptly stops mid-sentence, breaks the fourth wall, and speaks directly to Cecilia from up on the screen.  “My God, you must really love this picture…I gotta speak to you.”  And he simply walks off the screen, much to the consternation of the movie audience, and walks out of the theater, arm in arm with Cecilia.  The wit with which Woody Allen handles the reactions of the audience AND the movie characters Tom leaves behind is priceless.  The characters and the real people react with perfect logic, so the effect is not one of slapstick (I can see an Adam Sandler version of this movie beating the joke to death), but one of a strange mixture of high and low comedy.  To relate the scenes here word for word would ruin the magic.  (An African-American maid steals every scene she’s in.)  Tom and Cecilia go off together, and the rest of the film is, from a plot perspective, fairly predictable.

What makes this movie unique is how it tells the story.  Tom knows what an amusement park is, but he has no clue what popcorn tastes like.  (“Been watching people eat it for all those performances.  When they rattle those bags, though, that’s annoying.”)  He has fallen instantly in love with Cecilia…love at first sight.  Tom hides in the city, and Cecilia lies to Monk to go back and see Tom the next night.  A nice touch comes when calls start coming in to RKO that the Tom Baxter character in prints being shown in other cities is also trying to escape his gilded silver-screen cage.  (“He almost made it in Detroit.”)  There’s the inevitable showdown between Tom and Monk.  Tom only knows the moves he uses on film, but Monk fights dirty.  However, the fight still doesn’t end quite as I expected…another nice touch.

The real crisis occurs when the studio calls in Gil Shepherd, the actor who PLAYS Tom Baxter, to New Jersey so he can try to wrangle his creation back into the movie where he belongs.  There is the expected confusion when Cecilia bumps into Gil, mistaking him for Tom.  The plot thickens even more when Gil starts falling in love with Cecilia herself, and she finds herself in a pickle.  She tells Gil, “I just met a wonderful new man.  He’s fictional, but you can’t have everything.”

The commentary being made here regarding our fascination with movie characters (and the movies themselves) as opposed to the actors who play them seems simple, but in trying to analyze it like a “real” critic, I feel helpless in the face of the ingenuity of the situation.  My words aren’t doing justice to the almost poetic elegance on display.  The more you love movies, the more you’ll appreciate what I’m desperately trying to convey.

There are two moments/sequences that elevate The Purple Rose of Cairo from a dramatic exercise into the realm of genuine movie magic.  One is when Tom wants to show Cecilia a night on the town, but they have no money (Cecilia is broke, and all of Tom’s movie money is fake).  But he remembers that, in the “fake” Purple Rose movie, the scene coming up after the one he abandoned takes all the characters to the Copacabana.  It’s here that the viewer simply must suspend what little disbelief remains and give in to the simple but grand gesture of watching Cecilia herself appear on the black-and-white screen with all of the people she’s been watching night after night.  They go to the Copa, and after watching the singer who’s supposed to be Tom Baxter’s love interest, Tom and Cecilia head out for a night on the town, as only 1930’s movies could provide.  (The maître d’ provides one of the movies biggest laughs when he suddenly realizes he can do whatever he wants…and does.)

But the greatest moment is the very ending, which I will try desperately not to spoil here.  It’s here where we get to the heart of what Woody Allen is really trying to say: The movies are here and real life is there, and never the twain shall meet.  Is this a depressing point of view?  Well, I mean…yeah, a little.  But it’s also indisputably true.  If we walked around like we were actually in a movie, we’d never lock our doors behind us when we walked into our apartment.  Everyone’s phone numbers would begin with “555”.  We’d turn on the light when answering the phone at night (who does that, really?).  But in the real world, none of that is true.  In the real world, hearts get broken, sometimes for good.  We get fired.  People die.  WE die.  Love the movies, Allen is saying, but never forget that you’re flesh and bone, and that actions have consequences.  I’m reminded of a good line from Ready Player One: “As terrifying and painful as reality can be, it’s also the only place that you can get a decent meal.”

The final shot of the movie, of Cecilia smiling through her tears, moved me like I’ve rarely been moved before.  It reminded me, perversely, of some of the worst times in my life because it was at those dark times that the movies came to my aid.  I went through a fair episode of depression in my twenties; a friend showed me Harold and Maude, and it literally changed my life.  During the Covid lockdown, I was furloughed, and the maddening Florida unemployment website sapped my will to live, figuratively speaking; my best friend, out of the blue, bought me a copy of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker just to cheer me up…and it did.  During that same period, several different films were in constant rotation in my movie room, all of which provided spectacular ways of escaping real life: Blade Runner 2049, Prometheus, The Martian, Interstellar, Gravity, and Sunshine [2007].  Not all laugh riots, to be sure, but they were excellent tonics against the constant worry of unemployment and disease.

And in 2017, Hurricane Irma threatened Florida.  For the first time, I was genuinely frightened that we would finally see real danger from a hurricane.  Miraculously, a local multiplex chose to stay open until almost the eleventh hour, and to get our minds off the approaching storm, I took my girlfriend to see the new remake of Stephen King’s It.  For two hours, we got scared out of our wits in the best way possible.  We escaped reality, and collectively we had our real-world fears literally exorcised.  I cannot tell you how grateful we were to have that brief respite from our troubles.

Those are the memories that came back to me in the final sequence of The Purple Rose of Cairo.  Yes, the real world is still the only place to get a decent meal, and it remains imperfect and sometimes painful.  But the movies are as close as a button click or a car ride.  They’re implausible and sometimes unrealistic and not always perfectly written.  But The Purple Rose of Cairo just wants to remind us of their power to cheer us up and transport us.