Friday's Old Fashioned: Green Ice (1981)

“Green Ice” begins with a gruesome massacre and segues directly into a jaunty meet cute between some sort of vaguely defined idea American man, Joe Wiley (Ryan O’Neal), who ironically has wound up in Mexico for a lack of a better idea and a wealthy American heiress, Lillian Holbrook (Anne Archer), who has also wound up south of the border. It’s evocative of the oddball blend of this 1981 adventure-thriller, one that has a score composed by Rolling Stones bassist Bill Wyman, meaning that at one point we hear “Green Ice’s” attempt at a “Greatest American Hero”-like theme song composed by the man who played bass on “Let It Bleed,” and one in which Joe and Lillian get involved with Colombian revolutionaries while also plotting to steal the emerald diamonds of Lillian’s would-be fiancé Meno Argenti (Omar Sharif) from his ostensibly impenetrable vault. “Green Ice” was directed by Ernest Day, who came to prominence as a cinematographer, which is ironic given how the four-person screenplay based on a novel is overflowing with exposition. Not that I entirely minded. When Argenti explains his security protocols to Joe on a tour of his emerald-holding skyscraper stronghold, Sharif does so with real relish in his words and a gleam in his eye, like he’s daring Joe to try and break in.

Joe does break in, of course, intending to use the loot to help fund the Colombian rebels, and does so via hot air balloon, like “The Wizard of Oz” in reverse, which strangely, no one mentions. If the revolutionary subplot never feels like it has real weight, the heist sequence does via strictly diegetic sound, practical effects, and deliberate shot length. It’s gripping, and even more so when you grade it on a curve in comparison to our over-stimulated modern standards. On the other hand, the central relationship between Joe and Lillian is not just devoid of romance and tension but ultimately comes across a little too much like John Cleese and Jamie Lee Curtis in “A Fish Called Wanda” without noticing. The biggest laugh in the whole movie is when Archer is forced to say her character is falling in love with Joe which merely reminded me of Roger Ebert’s classic line describing Cleese and Curtis’ relationship: “This illustrates a universal law of human nature, which is that every man, no matter how resistible, believes that when a woman in a low-cut dress tells him such things she must certainly be saying the truth.”

Where We Are

In casting Kenneth Colley (1937 - 2025) as Captain cum Admiral Piett in “The Empire Strikes Back,” director Irvin Kershner apparently indicated he wanted someone who could have terrified the F*hrer of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party for the part. But the role didn’t really appear to be written that way and it was not how Colley played it. Colley played him first as an underling eager to make an impression and then as a superior who realizes only too late that he’s stepped in it. It’s in the third movie (Original Trilogy Division), “Return of the Jedi,” however, where Colley really left a mark, playing his first scene as an Imperial middle manager who has become experienced in having to suck it up whenever Lord Vader gets one of his inklings. It’s quite a feat, essentially turning Piett into the Galactic Empire version of the nameless subservient nodding dude in the scene in Mike Judge’s white collar comedy classic “Office Space” where the arrival of the dreaded consultants is announced, and for a moment, effectively turning the baddest man in the galaxy into an imbecilic CEO. The way Colley says “As you wish, my Lord” translates to “This fuckin’ guy.”

This occurred to me on Monday while watching clips of the White House press conference at which King Big Brain I announced the federal government would be taking control of the District of Columbia police in addition to deploying National Guard troops to regulate the nation’s capital which, at least in the pudding of his brain, may as well be the subway car in “Adventures in Babysitting”  24-7. The whole thing was insulting, made up under phony pretenses (like Chicago, where I live, and which was also threatened during this press conference, whatever genuine crime problem DC may or may not have and how to best address it is of no actual interest to the President), echoing his un-American strongman ethos and potentially laying the groundwork for even greater federal abuse, making me want to say to the people who still, even now, a decade into this, spin some version of the “Even I don’t agree with everything the President says or does but...,” in the manner of Jerry on “Seinfeld” consulting with Kramer after the latter has been accused of being The Smog Strangler and doesn’t seem all that bent out of shape: “Do you realize what’s going on here?” But maybe the one moment of the whole grotesque carnival that stood out most was when His Imbecility mentioned all the “bloodthirsty criminals” and “drugged-out maniacs” and “how we’re not going to let it happen anymore.” And then he half-turned to Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel, whose eyes as always made it look like he was watching “The Parallax View” recruitment test, standing directly behind him and rhetorically asked “Right?” Bondi and Patel sort of snapped to attention as if they had not even been paying attention to Dear Leader’s typical mealy mouthed mumbling and as the shit-fed bootlickers they are, nodded right on cue, improbably manifesting in real life Admiral Piett as Nodding Guy in “Office Space.” 

Ain’t that (present-day) America?

Eddington

“Eddington” begins with a homeless person (Clifton Collins Jr.) wandering down a desolate road at night in New Mexico, shouting into the void. You know, the void, the place where all meaning seemed to go during the COVID-19 pandemic. And that’s the time in which writer/director Ari Aster’s film takes place, the COVID-19 pandemic, late May 2020 when masks and social distancing were foremost topics of concern, and so was defunding the police in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis cop, all of which are injected into a sprawling two-hour plus movie that isn’t so much interested in examining the novel coronavirus, per se, as it in evoking it as a manifestation of the great American divide. If it might be described as a western/noir hybrid, I kept thinking of it more like a Twilight Zone episode written and directed by an edge lord. Do I recommend it? Well, what does that matter? Go see for yourself; do your own research.

When we first meet Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), he is admonished for not wearing a mask, not just immediately transporting us back in time but immediately seeking to instill in the viewer a sense of drawing a line in the sand: who’s side are you on? It’s obvious whose side Aster is on. The mask is presented as a symbol, one worn by Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) as much to signal dreaded virtue as a safety precaution, and one eschewed by Joe to signal individual freedom, betraying the filmmaker’s thumb on the scale from the get-go. The ensuing plot is not even so much a series of events as it is a series of buttons being pushed. If everything in the last 10 years of American life has become politics, then Aster runs with that idea, creating a gallery of characters that are virtually inextricable from their political ideology, whether they realize it or not. 

Joe is at loggerheads with Ted not just over a mask mandate but the possible construction of a data center on the outskirts of town. Eschewing his role to keep the peace, Joe becomes the match that lights the fuse when he all of a sudden decides to run for Mayor against Ted in the upcoming election. As he transforms the two-man police department into a campaign committee, his wife Louise (Emma Stone) disappears down the conspiracy rabbit hole, prodded by Joe’s own mother (Dierdre O’Connell), meeting with and becoming close to some right-wing cult leader, Vernon Jefferson Peak (Austin Butler). Peak does not turn out to be much of a character, mostly existing in opposition to Joe, but Butler’s performance is still a delight of malevolent unctuousness. When Peak invites himself to dinner, watching Phoenix as Joe is watching a man in real-time lose a loved one to unreality.  

Ted’s son Eric (Matt Gomez Hidaka) becomes a BLM activist along with his best friend Brian (Cameron Mann) for no other reason than they both like Sarah (Amélie Hoeferle), a social media influencer cosplaying as a social justice warrior, or so Aster would say. This is a deeply cynical view of the world. Just as the ostensible secret that Louise is harboring becomes campaign fuel for her husband, activism is merely the means to some selfish end. Sarah’s belief in racial justice is dismissed by Joe as something she learned in social studies class, an allegedly trenchant observation peddled by social media reactionaries the world over, equating public education with indoctrination, if not a waste of time altogether. Aster underlines his belief that the kids lack any real beliefs themselves with scenes of them ignoring the vagrant when he is right in their midst. Of course, Aster pays the homeless man as much attention as the kids do, demonstrating how his button-pushing tends to tie itself in knots.

Aster does not really cast about looking for who or what to blame for this state of rampant division and ignorance but rather makes it clear: it’s the phones. On its face, that’s a glib diagnosis, but Aster compellingly renders it, nevertheless. If modern movies often seem hesitant to over-include phones in their narratives, as if it might be cheating, “Eddington” shares no such equivocation. The cooling tower accompanying the potential data center on a hilltop outside town stands like an anti-monolith of “2001.” Characters faces are buried in their handheld screens throughout, a potent juxtaposition to the wide-open southwestern landscapes. It put me in mind of another New Mexico-set movie, “The Vast of Night” (2019), where the wonder was in looking up at the sky. In “Eddington,” on other hand, everyone is forever looking down.  

Joe is as addicted to his phone as anyone else, curling up with it in bed when Louise turns her back to him, though he is also oldfangled, imploring for community and fellowship. The way Phoenix has him say this, though, I don’t think he could explain what he means by community and fellowship if he tried, and subsequent events suggest Joe’s belief in these ideas might be dubious. The character sports a white hat, yet just as frequently doesn’t, revealing a severe case of hat-hair below, deploying nothing less than hair and makeup (Anji Bemben: hair department dead) to evoke the mess Joe eventually makes of just about everything. When he says COVID is not even present in Eddington, you know it will have arrived by movie’s end, and it does, triggering an over-the-top fever dream climax that comes across like a western-styled showdown between good and evil reconfigured as the fever dream of an aggrieved white man. And even if “Eddington” struggles figuring out how to conclude, the open ending also underlines America’s lack of reckoning with that time, so many sins lying unatoned. 

Friday's Old Fashioned: So Long at the Fair (1950)

“Anything can happen in Paris.” So says Vicky Barton (Jean Simmons) who is arriving in the City of Lights for the first time on the eve of the 1889 World’s Fair in the company of her brother Johnny (David Tomlinson), a bit of a wet blanket, if you ask me, but nice enough, at least, to give her the hotel room with a view of the Eiffel Tower. He winds up in Room 19, a room which vanishes the next morning along with Johnny. Anything, indeed. And when everyone in the hotel claims not to have ever seen Johnny at all, Vicky is forced to find a way to prove his existence, eventually aided by a kindly artist, George Hathaway (Dirk Bogarde), the only person who seems to believe her. “So Long at the Fair” makes great use of the Paris Exposition setting, including a hot air balloon blown to bits over the fairgrounds that is recounted in a long shot underlining Vicky’s stricken helplessness. Simmons is riveting, making the emotional turn from naïve to enraged to steely self-possession look like nothing, frequently holding the camera in the palm of her hand, so to speak, with powerful close-ups that communicate emotion directly to us. She’s so powerful, in fact, that she doesn’t quite match up with Bogarde who plays the whole thing too much like a drawing room mystery lark rather than something grave, diminishing the tension, not to mention their ostensible romance. The concluding twist is definitely grave. It’s grave but it also recalibrates everything in a way that does not make quite as much sense as it thinks, transforming a would-be bombshell into a senseless head-scratcher, a brewing tragedy into a limp whodunit. 

Neighborhood Watch

The “Neighborhood Watch” of director Duncan Skiles’s crime-thriller is comprised of just two men, ostensibly mismatched next-door neighbors Simon McNally (Jack Quaid) and Ed Deerman (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). Suffering from what appears to be schizophrenia, plagued by voices in his head, Simon has been institutionalized for a decade to no real medical or mental breakthrough, and since released. That 10-year gap in his resume means he can’t get a job, like one at a diner, where he bombs an interview as the movie begins, desperate to re-enter a society that won’t have him. His past also means the police brush him off when he comes to them claiming to have seen a woman abducted in van. Ed is ready to brush him off too when Simon seeks his help, having heard that Ed used to be a cop, or something. That something was a campus security guard, a position from which he has reluctantly retired, though in his introductory scene, he is still prowling the university cafeteria for would-be offenders. This is played for broad comedy, though it belies Morgan effecting both an indignant and melancholy air of someone who wanted to be a cop and never was. And though Ed hardly believes Simon any more than the real police, he agrees to help, seemingly as determined to playact his own man in blue fantasy as find this missing mystery woman.

The script for “Neighborhood Watch” is Sean Farley’s first, but it does not always feel that way, fitting exposition into believable exchanges and situations, and crucially never treating Simon’s mental illness with anything other than respect. Oh, Ed makes plenty of cruel jokes at Simon’s expense, but coming from the character as written and played, these jokes make sense, and work to underline the hard time Simon has navigating a society that’s quick to make him a punchline. Farley also utilizes innumerable set-ups and payoffs, some obvious but some unexpectedly enlightening, none more than Ed’s punch card at a diner working his way toward a free dinner. Skiles tends to favor long shots, letting us see the characters inhabit their different spaces, and presenting a world that feels very lower middle class, people struggling to fit in and hang on. And when Ed offers that punch card to a bus driver (Maggie Ballard) when they can’t afford the fare, her eager acceptance feels less like a joke than a quiet evocation of that struggle.

In fact, “Neighborhood Watch” does a better job of this innate world building than it does in conveying the seedy underworld where Simon and Ed’s investigation ultimately leads them. That lack of detail holds the movie back to some degree but also puts into perspective how the real throughline is Ed and Simon unwittingly developing a support system. Crucially, Farley’s script does not overdo that idea, the resolution of the case not magically yielding a resolution of their emotional, mental, and physical problems. Those will still have to be dealt with long after the credits roll. Instead, the final moments movingly suggest nothing more than the thrill of being able to matter.

Deep Cover

In “Deep Cover,” three improvisational comedians are recruited by Detective Sergeant Billings (Sean Bean) of London’s Metropolitan Police to run a sting operation by utilizing the number one rule of improv – “Always say yes” – to improbably penetrate the deepest reaches of the criminal underworld. Sort of suggesting an inverted version of Bill Murray’s “The Man Who Knew Too Little,” director Tom Kingsley’s straight-to-Amazon-Prime action-comedy sounds like such a can’t miss idea that I’m surprised it hasn’t already been done. But even if in blending occasionally gruesome black comedy with a true heart of gold, “Deep Cover” is often fun and funny, it also skims along in one gear, never quite blooming into something that feels truly outrageous and alive to its own enticing possibilities.

The unlikely undercover team is commanded by Kat (Bryce Dallas Howard), a struggling stand-up comic rendered insecure by her more successful friends, and improv teacher, a living manifestation of a version of that Liz Lemon line from “30 Rock” about where she sees herself in five years: “Teaching improv on cruise ships.” She is joined by Marlon (Orlando Bloom), a commercial actor yearning to go Method, and IT worker Hugh (Nick Mohammed) who signs up for the class in effort to gain some confidence. And though the four-person screenplay affords them little dimension beyond these set-ups, their distinct comic traits work well together, as do the actors, impeccably harmonizing with their roles. Bloom is over the top; Mohammed is deadpan; Howard is the glue melding them together. In the end, though, no one, perhaps, is more important than Bean. If the plot strains credulity, he credibly effects the air of someone who would send three amateurs into harm’s way.

Less successful is Kingsley’s decision to recount the action scenes in that familiar Hollywood house style of shaky camerawork and herky jerky editing. I suspect the intention was to underline the characters’ out of place sensation by plunking them down in a real action movie, which I kind of admire, even if only winds up undercutting the comedy and creating a tonal imbalance. It’s bolder, at least, then a script filled with quasi-outrageous reversals tracking to a predictable conclusion. Predictability is not inherently a bad thing, but in the case of “Deep Cover,” it counteracts the whole notion of these improv comedians responding to one another in the moment. Rather than seeming to make it all up as they go, they follow the outline to the end.

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Big Night (1951)

“The Big Night” giving Joseph Losey’s 1951 film its title is the 17th birthday of George, nay, Georgie La Main (John Barrymore, Jr.). One minute he’s being bullied by some peers for refusing their dare to kiss a girl and the next he’s watching a man bully and beat his father Andy (Preston Foster) to a bloody pulp. His reaction: to slip on his father’s jacket and hat, both a little too big for him, like he’s merely some out-of-his-element mini-me, grab his father’s gun, and set off on a rash quest for vengeance. That quest becomes a coming-of-age checklist as he attends a boxing match, gets scammed, goes to a club, has a drink, falls in love, discovers his father isn’t quite who he thought he was and that the world doesn’t work quite the way he thought it did. That suggests noir, and “The Big Night” has the look and feel of one, though Barrymore, Jr.’s overwrought performance feels cut and pasted from a melodrama. That’s not necessarily a bad thing as it unexpectedly reinforces the feeling of someone thrust into a world where he doesn’t belong. And though “The Big Night” can sometimes lay things on thick, like the birthday candle on Georgie’s cake that ominously fails to extinguish, it also has moments of searing truth. After being smitten by a black jazz singer’s (Mauri Leighton) performance, he compliments her, only to make such a casual and clueless racist remark in doing so that he doesn’t even seem to realize his own inherent prejudice until he’s cruelly spoken it into the world.