The Gin Blue Line

If you’re a regular reader, you know that I typically write about one of three types of movies.  Hidden gems that you may have missed, recent movies that are new to streaming that you probably have heard of and maybe haven’t gotten to yet and should, or more recent movies you should skip.  But today, I want to bring you a movie you’ve definitely heard of and even if you haven’t seen it, you’re sure to recognize parts of it because it’s been such a big part of popular culture for the last 80 years.  This movie was used as an example in one of my psychology classes and was one of the first I watched in film class.  Considering it’s one of the most famous movies of all time, I won’t spend too much time introducing the plot and I’m not going to be too careful about spoilers; it has been the better part of a century, I think the embargo is off.  Pour yourself a French 75 and get comfortable, let’s talk about Casablanca.

You probably know the story already. Expat Rick Blaine, played by Humphrey Bogart (The Big Sleep, The Maltese Falcon), owns the nightclub Rick’s Cafe Américain in French Morocco, under the Vichy government of occupied France in 1941.  Rick’s pure Switzerland; surrounded by refugees escaping the growing Nazi regime in Europe, a corrupt police force, the rich and unaffected, and, ever increasingly, a Nazi presence.  But all are welcome at the Cafe Américain.  Enter Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid), a key figure in the underground, wanted by the Nazis for publishing an antifascist newspaper.  They threw him in a concentration camp, more than once, but he escaped and being taken into custody in Casablanca is complicated for the Nazis.  Two things of note here; for many, Casablanca is the last stop before taking a plane to Lisbon and from there to the United States, where they’d be free and safe.  Second, Laszlo is considered to dangerous to the Nazis because he has an idea they can’t kill, no matter how many people they do.  And to the Nazis, anyone who can inspire people to stand up against them rather than fear them is extremely dangerous.  Along with Laszlo is his wife, Ilsa Lund, played by Ingrid Bergman (Gaslight, Murder on the Orient Express), with whom Rick had a brief, but passionate love affair in Paris before the Nazis marched in and Rick had to flee because of his past. Ilsa was meant to follow him, but she didn’t make their rendezvous, and he rebuilt his life in Casablanca, heartbroken and cold.  You know the rest, a few “here’s looking at you, kid”s and “I don’t stick my neck out for nobody”s later, we have a handful of dead Nazis and Laszlo and Ilsa get on a plane to safety.

Casablanca is widely considered one of the most romantic movies and one of the best movies of all time, ranking #1 as a love story and the #2 American movie by the AFI; and dear reader, I am not here to contradict either of those claims.  80 years later and the movie most definitely holds up, even nearly 20 years after I saw it for the first time, it’s still such a fantastic movie.  The moviemaking techniques may be dated, but the story and the acting most certainly are not.  Bogart is predictably excellent, but what I’d forgotten is just how funny he is.  Obviously, he’s as charismatic as just about anyone who’s ever graced the silver screen, but his comedic timing is excellent and I found myself laughing out loud more often that I expected.  But I’m not here to talk about romance (that’s next month, we’ll get to it).  I’m here to talk about resisting fascism.  Because as much as this is a devastatingly romantic film (I love it when the leads don’t get together at the end; I don’t know what that says about me), it’s also one of the most effective antifascist films ever made.  This is a a beautiful tale of heartbreak and heartache, but it’s the bigger picture I’m concerned with today.  If you haven’t seen it yet, watch it.  I have no equivocations, no qualifiers.  Casablanca is one of the best films in existence; it’s streaming on HBO and it’s 1 hour, 43 minutes that you will not regret.

It’s important to understand the context around Casablanca; coming out in 1942, just after Pearl Harbor and a couple of years before D-Day, Rick isn’t just American, he’s America.  A seemingly amoral isolationist who is just as happy to sling booze to Nazis as he is refugees, the Cafe Américain is a neutral place.  And when a pair of unimpeachable travel documents fall into his lap after the killing of two Nazi couriers, Rick is in the perfect position to get Laszlo and Ilsa out of Casablanca and on their way to safety in the US, even if he’s unwilling.  You see, back in the 1940s, the United States was a relatively free and safe nation (if you were white), far from the chokehold of fascism.  In Casablanca, the corrupt police rounded up the “usual suspects” for any crime committed; as one resident explains, the usual suspects consist of “refugees, liberals, and, of course, beautiful young girls” for the police captain.  In 80 years, some things change, some things don’t.  Try to evade the police and get shot down in the street.  Comply and you might get shot anyway.

When Ugarte, played by Peter Lorre (The Maltese Falcon), who killed the couriers and entrusted the papers to Rick, is caught in a raid at the Cafe Américain, he goes to Rick for help, but Rick being Rick, pulls a full on pre-Uncle Ben Spider-Man and stands by as the Nazis and Vichy police arrest him.  Ugarte doesn’t make it; as police captain Louis Renault explains to Laszlo, Ugarte died in custody, but they haven’t decided whether it was a suicide or he was killed trying to escape.  State-owned truth, deciding what happened to people they hold in custody.  It’s not just their fate they hold in their hands, but their memory.  The lies they tell to shift the narrative to serve them not only kill a person, but erase them.  Some things really never change.

Throughout the film, we’re shown that despite Rick’s outward isolationism, there’s something still beating in the chest of the former revolutionary (albeit as a mercenary, he would only work for the side he considered morally right).  He turns away a Deustche Bank executive from the private gambling room because he didn’t want one of the men bankrolling the Third Reich in there.  He rigs his own game to give away thousands of francs to a young couple to help them secure exit visas without the young wife being sexually exploited by Captain Renault.  But he still let Ugarte get caught and eventually killed.  The man’s no saint, that’s for sure, but he echoes America’s sentiments pre-Pearl Harbor.  His heart turned cold and he turned his back on the world, finding it easier to let the world burn rather than step in.  He’s the guy who doesn’t care what flag flies over his head as long as he doesn’t look up.  When Laszlo comes to him for the transport papers, he refuses; partly because of the risk, partly because he can’t stand to help Ilsa leave with her husband when he still loves her.  He asks Laszlo if it’s even worth fighting and, well, Laszlo speaks plainly.  “If we stop breathing, we’ll die.  If we stop fighting our enemies, the world will die”.  The line cuts deep; it’s so easy to be overwhelmed by the scope of the evil in front of you and accept it as an inevitability.  And that’s where Rick is, when he responds “Well, what of it?  It’ll be out of its misery”.  All he can see, all he can feel is misery.

All that time as a merc on the losing side because it was the right side to be on.  Then the woman he falls in love with (something he’d never allow himself to do again) pulls a disappearing act after he’s forced out of Paris by Nazis.  Now he has to glad-hand the ones responsible for one of the most inhuman atrocities in the history of the world.  Rick’s got a right to be bitter.  But at the end, Rick, like America after Pearl Harbor, realizes that the world is far bigger than his petty grievances, even if those grievances include an irreparably broken heart.  Because there are things that are larger than our particular hill of beans and the rising tide of fascism is one of those things.

So yes, while Casablanca is a fantastic tragic romance that has taken its rightful place in the upper echelon of filmmaking, it’s the sadly still necessary anti-fascist message that makes it so important even more than 80 years later.  It shows how important it is to stand for what’s right, no matter how hard it may be.  And it also leaves room for different kinds of resistance.  Laszlo isn’t feared by the Nazis because he’s a ferocious fighter, highly skilled operator, or military tactician.  No, they fear him because he represents an idea and inspires people to try to attain it.  There’s a moment, one of the most powerful perhaps in cinema history, when the Nazi officers start singing “Die Wacht am Rhein”, an anti-French German war song about defending the fatherland (which usually doesn’t entail ethnic cleansing, genocide, and an attempt at world domination, but what do I know?), Laszlo goes to the band and tries to get them to play “La Marseillaise”, the French national anthem.  Rick allows it, sure, but it’s Laszlo that leads the band—and the clientele of the Cafe Américain—in drowning out the Nazi voices.  And never more than in that moment are the Germans more afraid of Laszlo.  You can see it in their faces.  A nightclub full of downtrodden refugees fleeing their oppression are buoyed enough by Laszlo’s presence that they silenced their oppressors with nothing but the sound of their voices.  Sometimes surviving is an act of resistance.  Sometimes so is singing.  And what makes this scene particularly powerful is that it was so very, very real.  Most of the people in this scene weren’t actors.  They were actual refugees who escaped the Nazis, singing their hearts out for their home under the thumb of the evil regime.  It is an incredibly powerful and moving scene that I will never look at the same way after learning that.

It’s only by rejecting cynicism and embracing idealism, the idealism of people like Victor Laszlo that we can ever hope to stand against such reckless hate and enduring evil.  There’s a generational theory that posits some sort of societal cataclysm every 85 years or so.  I try not to buy into these things too heavily because past correlation isn’t always indicative of future events, nor am I naive to the fact that the technology we have now is unimaginable to the people who were alive 85 years ago.  So it’s possible that we can change the cycle and this doesn’t have to be like when the Reapers show up in Mass Effect.  But, it is chilling to watch the news and remember that Pearl Harbor was attacked in 1941, which happens to be exactly 85 years ago.  Casablanca is set in 1941 as well, before the attack on Pearl Harbor.  And 85 years ago, at the start of this film, an unarmed man is shot in the back and killed by police for fleeing when he didn’t have his papers.  A few days ago, a man was shot to death in the street by ICE after being disarmed and held down.  He was a nurse trying to render care to a woman.  His name was Alex Pretti.  Days before that, a woman was shot in the head by ICE at point blank range after thanking the ICE agent.  She was trying to go home.  Her name was Renee Good.  These are not the only two people who have become memories for their loved ones to cling to.  Not the only two who their killers have tried to erase by controlling how they’re remembered.  I don’t know how many.  85 years ago, that was the norm in Nazi-occupied territory.  In Casablanca, those people wanted to flee to America.  85 years later, it’s happening here.

I’ve joked before that this blog isn’t about politics, but it was always said with tongue firmly in cheek.  You cannot talk about art, any art, without talking about politics.  Film especially.  Do you think a movie like the Oscar-nominated One Battle After Another comes out in 2012?  The Running Man doesn’t get a new adaptation if a story about a dystopian near-future (technically last year) America isn’t relevant to present-day America.  We don’t get Oppenheimer unless we fear a repeat.  I drew my first breath on this land and now I don’t recognize it.  I want this blog to be a place where you can jump in and find your next escape, but I also want it to be a place you can come to find things that will move you, that will affect, and will make your world bigger.  I have been clear about my thoughts on diversity, representation, empathy, inclusion, and equality through this project, but now I will make it abundantly clear for anyone for whom I was too subtle.  Abolish ICE.  Prosecute those responsible—the ones who pulled the trigger and the ones who put the guns in their hands and pointed them at their neighbors and told them that they were their enemy.  Because we know how this movie ends if it goes unchecked.  We saw how it played out 85 years ago.

And through all this, in our darkest moments, when things look the worst, when the news is so overwhelming that all we want to do is crawl into our shells for the magnitude of the evil standing in front of us, we can take a moment.  Take a beat.  Catch your breath.  And remember, that just like Laszlo leading those French refugees in song, your voice is loud.  Take time if you need to, I know I have.  We have to breathe or we’ll die.  And we have to fight or the world will die.  Laszlo was right about that too.  But fighting takes many forms, from the biggest protests down to something as small as a tweet.  A reminder to those around us that we’re also willing to stand up can go a long way.  I’m still going to be here, coming at you every week with analysis about great entertainment and talking about representation and empathy and equality through these films, shows, and games.  Next month, we’re going to have another theme, like we did back in October.  But for now, I’m going to leave you with my favorite quote from a different film, a film I didn’t even like that much, because I look to this quote when I need a reminder that optimism is a form of resistance:

“When I choose to see the good side of things, I’m not being naive.  It is strategic and necessary.  It’s how I’ve learned to survive through everything.  I know you see yourself as a fighter.  Well, I see myself as one too.  This is how I fight.”

Empire of the Run

It doesn’t take a lot to get me on board for a movie.  Well, that’s not true; there are certain specific phrases that will get me interested in a film.  To name just a few, you could say “starring Mark Duplass” or “directed by Rian Johnson” or “elaborate heist” and I’m immediately interested in what comes after.  And there’s another name that triggers the same response.  Edgar Wright.  If you read my post on Last Night in Soho, you’ll already know how highly I regard the director of icons like Hot Fuzz, Shaun of the Dead, and Baby Driver (though the less said about some casting decisions the better).  So when I heard he was teaming up with actor-I-have-a-soft-spot-for Glen Powell (Hit Man, Twisters) to do a new version of Stephen King’s The Running Man, I was ready for it, even though I’d never read the book nor seen the 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger film of the same name.

He’s quick to anger.  And by quick to anger I mean he’d punch his reflection in the mirror for looking at him; Ben Richards has absolutely no chill.  His daughter is sick and he and his wife can’t afford medication anymore because he lost his job and has been blacklisted for talking to union reps about radiation exposure.  Right off the bat, we see a world where workers have no rights and where a reality TV landscape in which humiliation is the only currency rules the airwaves.  Humiliation and one other thing.  Ben sits at home trying to care for his baby daughter Cathy and watches a trivia show where a man runs in a giant hamster wheel until it kills him.  The only thing the poor have to offer other than their humiliation, is their death.  Let’s get into The Running Man, currently streaming exclusively on Paramount+, a lighthearted romp through nostalgia where life has no value unless you’re super rich and an entertaining death is all the poor are valued for.  Can you imagine living in a world where the poor are dehumanized and looked at as expendable fodder for the rich?  Terrifying.  I’m so glad to live in a world where we value people for their inherent humanity and not for how much money they have.

Ben’s wife Sheila, played by Jayme Lawson (Sinners, The Batman), returns home with black market meds for Cathy because that’s all they can afford.  Sheila is a waitress at a club and in the process of discussing their problems, she mentions the idea of taking an overnight shift.  Her clientele is the wealthy, and while as a waitress, she’s not the main show at the club, there’s no end to the entitlement of the men Ben refers to as savages and fears for her life.  Because even though she could make an entire $20 in one shift, she wouldn’t be the first waitress to work that shift and end up as an unsolved murder.  Can you imagine living in a world where women can be assaulted or killed at the hands of powerful men with no consequences to them?  Thank goodness this is fiction and not the real world.  Ben’s only choice is to go to the television studio and try to get on one of the game shows.  Anything but “The Running Man”.  He’s got a mind for trivia; he’d probably be pretty good at a less deadly game show, but with his background, at the end of the assessment, he was only ever going to end up on one show.  All this happens about 9 minutes into the movie, blink and you’ll miss it.  The Running Man certainly isn’t hanging around.

As Ben goes for his assessment the mantra of this world in which he lives becomes painfully clear.  Eyes forward, mouth closed, no sitting, no lying down.  No rest, no conversation.  No support from one another.  I mean it.  A man collapses in line after spitting up blood and when Ben tries to help him, the officers stop him and say loudly for everyone to hear “No helping” and they stop Ben from helping him with violence.  That’s right.  In this world, armed police will stop a citizen from helping another person who is lying on the street bleeding to death.  Can you imagine.

If you’re not familiar, “The Running Man” is the most popular show in this version of the United States, where the rules are easy.  They give you and two others a snazzy red jumpsuit and you just have to last 30 days to get a billion new dollars.  Considering Sheila was willing to put her life on the line for 20 bucks, a billion seems like it’s an even bigger deal than it is in our world.  That’s never want for anything money, not just for you and your family, that’s your entire bloodline generations to come covered.  The only catch is that there’s a cash prize for the person who gives the tip that leads to your death at the hands of an elite squad of hunters.  It leads to this paranoid, high intensity game of Survivor (Jeff Probst could never) where any person who recognizes you could make the phone call that leads to your imminent death.  But, if Ben can survive even a week, he’d have earned enough money to get his wife and daughter out of the slums.  The action that follows is kinetic, Edgar Wright utilizing drone shots to impart his style on the film in a way that adds to the visual storytelling.  The hunt and the kill is part of the show, so the cameras in the show are drones, so we get diegetic drone shots.  It fits.  It’s all televised mayhem and misery, with the callous disregard for any form of innocent life getting huge ratings as families gather around TV the way they used to.

While the action doesn’t reach the stylishly fun levels of Baby Driver, there’s a lot to delight in the action sequences and they lighten the tone of the otherwise very bleak and angry film.  That’s all done very well. But where we do run into some problems is the comedy in the film.  There are some moments where I’m not sure if the violence is supposed to be over the top for comic effect or over the top to shock you into disbelief.  Some of the jokes work, with Michael Cera (Arrested Development, The Phoenician Scheme) providing a great deal of angsty comic relief as a member of the underground who helps Ben.  But when it comes, it always seems to be flanked by the tragic realities of their world and ours.  You could get whiplash trying to keep up with the tonal shifts.

Now, if I’ve been unsubtle in my sarcasm thus far, that’s how the movie is.  Everything about it is over the top and it really feels like it’s on purpose.  There’s a lot to unpack here, so let’s do the hits.

Colman Domingo’s (Sing Sing, The Four Seasons) performance as Bobby T, the extremely Billy Dee-coded host of the show, is a pure showman and Domingo eats up every frame he’s in.  His amoral, everything for the ratings approach is as entertaining as it is detestable, but for sure you can’t look away.  Josh Brolin (No Country for Old Men, Avengers: Endgame) does an acceptably generic and intimidating job as Dan Killian, the evil network executive who is an expert gaslighter and is so talented at making people think he’s on their side.  Emilia Jones (CODA, Task) is in it also, but while her character is pivotal to the story, her role feels so small and rushed, there wasn’t much for her to do.  I’m glad she’s having a moment because she deserves it, but I hope this leads to meatier roles.  Lee Pace, who remains for me the most “Oh, that’s who Lee Pace is” actor in Hollywood, was also in it as the masked head of the hunters Evan McCone.  The top dog hunter, he wants nothing more than to find and kill Ben, and like Brolin, he’s sufficiently intimidating as a literal faceless evil relentlessly hunting human beings. 

And then there’s Glen Powell; playing against type, he swaps the likable confidently cocky for no good reason guy out for the likable angry at everything all the tim guy.  It’s Powell’s first attempt at playing a serious action hero and, frankly, I’m tired of pretending that he’s not a star.  While I’ve always been a fan of Powell, this isn’t the first time his acting has shown range; his performance in 2022’s Devotion should have been his star vehicle—and his costar’s, but he went and ruined that by being a horrible person.  Powell’s rage isn’t always convincing, but it’s always earnest.  There’s this vein of righteous anger that runs through him that makes it work; he’s otherwise unhinged, but he rarely directs that anger at people who don’t deserve it and he’s always the first person to put himself on the line for others, even at his own detriment (peep the blacklisting for trying to protect his workers from radiation exposure). Give me more Glen Powell, make it happen. Just not Twister 3, please. That particular well has spun itself dry.

The Running Man tries to do a lot.  It wants desperately to be a pointed social commentary with a dystopian future that feels far too much like today and it wants to be a light action-comedy at the same time.  Unfortunately, that leads to a very uneven movie.  It’s incredibly heavy-handed and over-the-top and implausible as well.  I’d call it good fun if it weren’t so relevant.  And I understand why it’s so heavy-handed, though. The world has lost the ability to read subtlety anymore.  That’s why a show as unsubtle as The Boys still had fans who took four seasons to realize the guy who kills children is the bad guy.  Maybe this movie isn’t heavy-handed at all, but rather written in conversation with audiences that seem to be missing the point at ever more alarming rates. You know I don’t like when filmmakers don’t trust the audience, that’s one of my big things that bother me, but in this case, I feel like there was a worry that if the movie were more subtle, there would be those in the audience that don’t realize that the murderous authoritarians who foster so much poverty and misery that people have to wait in lines that stretch around the block to get basic medicine at the pharmacy are the bad guys.  A worry that the world in The Running Man will be taken as an ideal and not a cautionary tale.  After all, the original novel is set in 2025.   But while Wright can usually balance tone and impact very well, The Running Man can’t quite reconcile what kind of movie it wants to be.

There’s that feeling when you’re watching baseball, which I haven’t done in many years but this still looms large in my mind, when a batter hits a fastball on the sweet spot.  All that work, years of training, hours and hours of conditioning, practice, practice, practice, and it all culminates in a crack that cuts through the air and tells your ears that a home run has just been hit before the ball ever crests over the fence.  Movies have that crack too; it used to be a round of applause when you’d go to the movie theaters, those moments when we, as a crowd, stood together and applauded a screen bathed in the light of a projector for the work a cast and crew did long before and far away.  Now it’s different.  It’s not the sound of applause or the crack of a Louisville Slugger, no; now sitting at home, watching a movie on a streaming service, it’s the sharp breath in that you hold.  That’s how you know a movie hit the sweet spot before the credits ever roll.  Edgar Wright is usually a master of this.  But this time, The Running Man just fell short of the outfield wall.

Despite all this great action fun, there was a feeling that stuck like a thorn in my side as I watched this.  No, it wasn’t that it’s so over the top as to lack the subtlety that I crave in a film.  That is true, but for as much as I am a proponent of of filmmakers trusting their audience, I think this was an example of a filmmaker basing the movie around the idea that current audiences are unfortunately untrustworthy.  And it hit me.  This is a fun action movie.  But for a dystopian future, it’s a little too close to now.  We watch people shot dead on TV and argue about it on the internet.  People can’t afford medication for their children and diseases that were a non-issue for years are suddenly killing people again.  We are being fed AI slop and forgetting that slop is what you feed a pig before slaughter.  Wright doesn’t trust the audience because the audience is the lesson.  The people gathering their families around a TV that watches them back to see just how many people are going to be murdered on their favorite reality show can so easily become us.  We’re already becoming numb to watching murders unfold in front of our eyes and then arguing over whether it was justified or not.  With how much this movie reflected our society, as much as it was the mirror art is supposed to be, ultimately, what I saw in the mirror was just a little bit too tasteless for me to lose myself in the fun of The Running Man. 

At times, the fun felt pointless because it didn’t change the reality around the movie, nor the reality around me.  It’s not Edgar Wright’s fault that his mirror is reflecting what it’s reflecting; it’s ours.  It’s our society that has become so disappointing; surrounded by technology, but dictated by primitive ideas that drag us further and further away from a truly modern society.  It’s a tough balancing act and I’m not entirely sure how he could have fixed it.  From what I’ve read, Wright’s version sits between the camp of the 1987 film version and the serious bleakness of King’s novel.  And perhaps that’s why it just fell short of being great.  The Running Man is a bit too long at 2 hours, 13 minutes, with some pacing issues, but I enjoyed this movie; I was affected by it emotionally, I will continue to go on record that I was saying that Glen Powell was going to be a star back when I saw him on Scream Queens, and The Running Man is definitely a movie I will watch again just for myself, but it either needed to be a little less fun or a little more over the top to breach that upper limit of a B-movie.  A solid, well made, enjoyable B-movie, for sure.  Ambitious and with something to say, of course.  Worth your time?  Yes.  But is it great?  No.  I just hope it’s not prophecy.

Deep Blue Tea

Life doesn’t always go as planned, especially when you want to be a writer, and Sarah Porter has learned that one the hard way.  Like a lot of millennials, she’s had to move home after chasing a dream that didn’t quite work out the way she hoped it would.  Some sobering time in the big city can make one long for the comforts of home and family; after all, London can chew you up and spit you out if you let it.  So Sarah heads back to her hometown to live with her mum and nan, who run a cafe in Weston-super-Mare, a sleepy coastal town near Bristol, in England, just across the Bristol Channel from Cardiff.  I checked, it’s not that close to Torquay, so you might not be able to grab a coffee at the cafe and then pop over to Fawlty Towers for the night.  I was raised on British comedies (and The Golden Girls and The A-Team), so I’m always on the lookout for them and while I’ve watched many that have been fine, I eventually came across one that I wanted to share with you.

It took me a little bit to connect with The Cafe, as you do really see Weston through the eyes of Sarah, played by Michelle Terry, who also wrote the series about her real life hometown.  You’d probably imagine that she’s not too happy to be back in Weston and you’d be right.  Disappointment always takes time to bounce back from, so I get it.  But she does mope around a bit as she comes to terms with her new reality.  Now, I haven’t lived in London and I definitely haven’t lived in Weston-super-Mare, but I’ve lived in big cities and small towns and coming back to a small town after the city is quite a culture shock.  All of a sudden, your whole world narrows, your choices are limited, and everything feels so different.  But small towns can have their charms, especially on TV (you know me, I’m a city boy through and through; when told to touch grass, I have to take an Uber to the closest grass zone, which is what I think normal people call them).

Sarah’s mom Carol runs Cyril’s, a struggling cafe that represents the dreams of her dead husband, right on the boardwalk by the shore.  It’s an idyllic spot.  Every time the opening credits crawl over the wide shot bringing us into the cafe, despite the theme song being a version of “Beyond the Sea”, which is a song I’ve always found funereal and have, as a result, never liked, I can’t help but think it seems like a hell of a nice place to visit.  Carol, played by Ellie Haddington (Enola Holmes), is both happy to have her daughter back and concerned about her future, often pushing her to settle down.  She’s also in an incredibly Victorian-feeling will they/won’t they with Stan, the local florist.  The series is contemporary to the time it was made, which is 2011, but you wouldn’t really know it to look at it.  I mean, the struggling cafe owner in a very Westley and Buttercup relationship with the local florist, who brings her clippings everyday so she’ll have fresh flowers?  Most of the time, that kind of thing feels saccharine and would make my stomach turn, but here it’s just so…Luke’s in reverse without the gruffness. 

It’s a sleepy town, with not a lot going on, an aging populace, and modernity far away, Weston feels like it came out of a time capsule.  Much like other colorful small towns, though, it’s really the residents who give it the bulk of its charm.  And this little borough has its fair share of Stars Hollow-like folks who call Weston their home.  Don’t get me wrong though, there’s still not much exciting going on.  The major conflict in one of the episodes is about whether, when having a cream tea, a traditional English afternoon snack, you should put the clotted cream on the scone first or if the jam should go on first.  Now, it’s fair to say that will sound completely foreign to most Americans, but if you contextualize it as milk before cereal or cereal before milk, it’s completely relatable.  We all get needlessly pedantic about kind of meaningless things all the time, it’s part of the human condition

Also, it’s cereal before milk, obviously.

Then you have Carol’s mom; Nan to Sarah, Mary Ellis to everyone else.  Mary Ellis, played by June Watson (The Death of Stalin), mostly just knits, but she also nitpicks.  It’s really interesting to see these three generations of women all together, each generation looking at its successor and predecessors, trying to learn, trying to teach, and sometimes, well, more often than not, being a little too judgmental.  But there’s wisdom and caring too, which is why I suppose people put up with family.  Mary Ellis’s friends come in for tea and scones and arguments with Mary Ellis of course.  Then there’s also Richard, who comes by everyday for his regular cuppa.  Sweet, kind Richard, played by Ralf Little (Death in Paradise), who is also a writer on the series, has had a crush on Sarah his entire life and that hasn’t changed, and while they were some sort of item when they were younger, he doesn’t seem to have shaken those feelings, but in a very innocent kind of way.  He’s such a good dude, though; always on the cusp of finally getting a car, he’s a man of endless patience.  He works at the nursing home in town and seems to care genuinely about the people who live there. 

Sarah’s childhood best friend Chloe is still in Weston too: a bit ditzy, quite a bit more outgoing than Sarah, and a true free spirit.  Chloe, played by the incredible Phoebe Waller-Bridge (Fleabag, the best part about Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny), is always a bubbly presence on screen and brings a lot of the show’s laughs.  She also happens to be Stan’s daughter.  Kieran, the living statue is always coming by in his newest ludicrous getup, spanning from Hellboy to Homer Simpson.  And who can forget Frank?  I admit, I don’t really know Frank’s whole deal.  But he generally seems to hang around outside the cafe and ask for leftovers too early in the day.  I don’t know if he’s unhoused or just unable to find a job, but to see him at the cafe everyday, being treated with dignity and kindness make his little cameos endlessly pleasant and often quite touching.

But even a show as cozy as this has conflict.  Of course, there are Carol’s past due bills and the ever forward march of progress that threatens the cafe’s continued existence.  Oh yes, that old dance, the ever-present bugbear we call progress.  It’s not progress that’s the problem, of course.  Progress has given us so much.  It gave us the Internet.  Okay, bad example, that one’s a pretty mixed bag.  It all depends on who’s steering the ship, doesn’t it?  Sometimes progress is just change for the sake of change, so someone looks busy while they collect a check.  Sometimes it’s nefarious, involving someone collecting more than a check.  Sometimes, it’s good, though, which is why all have to keep progressing, annoyingly enough.  But the real black hat here, at least depending on your perspective, is John, played by Daniel Ings (who will be in the upcoming Game of Thrones prequel).

John grew up in Weston and has long since moved to London.  He’s gotten in shape, he has a good job and a Porsche, and he’s back in Weston to deal with the affairs of his ailing mother, whom he hasn’t seen in years.  And boy, do you just hate John the second you see him.  John is perfectly crafted to be disliked from the very first frame.  Driving his Boxster down the motorway, talking on a Bluetooth headset, with so many shirt buttons undone as to render them mere suggestions, and an attitude that says “I’m too good to be here”, he’s immediately at odds with everything his hometown is and represents.  I mean, his ringtone is the James Bond theme song.  Even in 2011, that was douchey.  And I should know, my ringtone used to be fairly off-putting to people.  John butts heads with Richard, who has been his mother’s caretaker at the nursing home, for several reasons.  Richard seems to resent that John hasn’t had contact with his mother for several years as she’s staring down the barrel of dementia and her memories losing a battle with time, but they’ve had beef that goes back to childhood. This particular Wellington, of course, has everything to do with Sarah.  John fancied Sarah when they were younger, which upset Richard quite a bit and apparently in the way that you hang on to.  But I suppose even Richard is allowed his sharp edges here and there, I sure know I have them.  So you hold on to that grudge, Richard.  Sparks don’t exactly fly between John and Sarah, but there is a connection and jealousy rears its head again.  Not that romance is the main focus of the series, but it’s always nice to have a love triangle to get invested in (like in Star Wars, with the gold robot guy, the little trash can, and the old guy who lived in desert).

Also, of course progress is the real black hat.  At least this kind of progress.

Despite all this small town quirkiness, the problems all seem very relatable.  Sarah is trying to figure out what to do next.  So is Carol, whether she wants to admit it or not.  Sarah may not have realized it yet, but it will eventually dawn on her; just because you “grow up” doesn’t mean you have all the answers, it only seems that way when you’re a kid.  Carol is just like any one of us; she has to weigh her options, think of the pros and cons, make a decision, and, crucially and cruelly, she has to live with them.  So do I.  So do you.  So does Sarah.  So does John.  John, for whatever reason, isn’t very close with his mother, but now she’s dying and in one of the worst ways possible; by losing herself slowly, a little more each day.  And he’s trying to cope with that and do right by her at the same time, splitting his life in two, between Weston and London.  He’s got a journey ahead of him.  And while I only watched the first season, I get the feeling it’s going to be a satisfying one.  Our cast of characters live in a postcard, a picturesque utopia where nothing goes quite right and it feels like one big wave, from the ocean or otherwise, could come crashing down at any moment and wash it all away.  They call this a comedy, but it’s not.  Not just a comedy, anyway.  Sure, it’s funny, often more smirk funny than laugh out loud, but it’s not the comedy that’s the star of this show.  No, not at all.  It’s the connections the residents of Weston make with each other, their quiet struggles, their refusal to not be there for each other when they need it, those are the things that stand out to me.  I do always say the best comedies are a bit sad because comedy often comes from a place of sadness (The Bear, Fleabag, Lodge 49, the list goes on) and there’s definitely enough sadness to go around in Weston-super-Mare.  But there’s more than that too.

The Cafe rarely has me rolling on the floor in fits of uncontrollable laughter, but through the first six episode season, I admit to having to wipe a tear more than once.  But the good kind.  The kind that lets you know that even though you definitely spent too much time scrolling Twitter and getting mired in the helplessness of the world, there’s still some life left in that chest cavity and it’s not gone completely frozen over just yet.  It paints an unbelievably cozy picture that leaves my heart full and hopeful.  In a time when it seems like everyone is hurting, seeing these characters look out for each other and care for each other is really nice, like a warm blanket with a British accent.  After all, it’s not where you are that matters nearly as much as the people you surround yourself with.  Because you never know what people are going through and it never hurts to help lighten their load if you can.  Apparently, sometimes it takes a small seaside town on the Bristol Channel to help you feel like things might get better out there.  The Cafe is streaming on Peacock and BritBox and it ran for two seasons.

Also, there aren’t that many high res photos out there for to share with you, so apropos of nothing, here’s Jeff the Land Shark looking cute as heck.

The Last Toy Scout

As we dawn a new day (or several new days, I know this post is late) on a new year, let’s go back to the early 2000s for a moment.  It was a simpler time; our phones weren’t all that smart, if you said the word “grok” people just thought you were a nerd, not an idiot, and stores still existed that you could go to, walk in, look at the products on shelves, pick them up, and then buy them.  Right then and there.  No ordering and waiting and then receiving a box, opening the box, thinking “Oh yeah, I remember buying this”, and then hanging on to the box until recycling day.  But sometimes when you go into a store, you want to do it with a little flair, like cutting through the roof and locking the staff up in the freezer and helping yourself to the contents of the safe.  Sometimes, you do that 45 times.  And then sometimes, you decide that you’re going to move into that store until the heat’s off.

And that’s the life Jeffrey Manchester was living back then.  He’s a veteran in a sadly familiar position for many Americans, veterans included, where he can’t quite make ends meet and finds his dreams quickly fading away.  He and his wife are estranged and he’s hardly his kids’ hero, even though the relationship between him and oldest child, his daughter, is very sweet.  He just can’t seem to get it together.  Jeffrey, as his friend points out, is hyper-observant.  I’m talking Shawn Spencer without the whimsy levels of noticing things here.  And his friend Steve, played by LaKeith Stanfield (Atlanta, Sorry to Bother You), tells him that he needs to find a way to use that skill, his superpower, to make the money he doesn’t have.  Unfortunately, Steve, Jeffrey’s sergeant when they were in, has used his skills in a variety of different ways, most of them seemingly not very legal.  And that maybe inspires Jeffrey down the wrong path.  As Steve also points out, Jeffrey is bad at following the rules, even in the military.  He just messes things up.  But when Jeffrey figures out that most McDonald’s restaurants operate using roughly the same blueprint and roughly the same schedules, he sees his next steps.  Cut a hole in the roof on the night before the cash is picked up by the armored car.  Go inside and hide.  Wait for the staff to arrive so he can get into the safe.  Put them in the freezer until the authorities arrive.  Repeat 44 more times, earning the nickname “the Roofman”.  Success.

But Jeffrey, played by Channing Tatum (Logan Lucky, 21 Jump Street), does something most people committing armed robbery don’t do.  Before locking the staff into the freezer, he tells them to put their coats on.  And when the manager says he doesn’t have a coat, Jeffrey takes off his own and gives it to him.  He doesn’t want them to get cold; the freezer is just secure storage while he makes his getaway, he doesn’t actually want to hurt anyone.  That’s the last thing that he ever wants to do, though somehow he keeps doing it.  And before you think that this is just too silly a character to base a movie around, let me tell you that it’s true.  Roofman is based on a true story and the movie is happy to show its receipts when it comes to accuracy.  Jeffrey Manchester really did all that.  And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Of course, that sort of life catches up to you, even in early 2000s, and Jeffrey finds himself in prison with an incredibly, unfairly harsh sentence that would mean the next time he was a free man, his children would be middle aged.  But luckily, Jeffrey uses his skills to devise a simple and genius plan to escape and it works like a charm.  He ducks into a store to avoid the manhunt and decides to stay there until the heat is off and he can try to see his family again.  Or at least talk to them.  But until then, he’s forced to live inside of a Toys R Us, living out every 90s kid’s dream.

(As a side note, I really do miss toy stores.  There’s a wonder to them that just isn’t replicated by the toy aisle of a big box store, just like a digital lending library will never feel the same as walking into a public library and smelling all those old books.)

It’s not nearly as fun as Bart and Millhouse make it seem to be, though.  Hiding right under the noses of hundreds of people a day while the manhunt continues can weigh on a person, especially when you’re in self-imposed silent solitary confinement.  He can’t make noise during the day, he could get found out.  As a result, he becomes a nocturnal animal, making the Toys R Us his playground every night after closing.  It looks like so much fun, I used to dream of things like that as a kid.  He literally lives off M&Ms and other candies and plays with toys every night.  But for an adult, especially a fugitive, that’s not really enough.  Eventually, Jeffrey sets up his own surveillance system in the store and uses them as his own personal soap opera.  Things get a bit complicated when he develops a crush on Leigh, a single mom who works at the Toys R Us.

Leigh, played by Kirsten Dunst (Fargo, Jumanji), is a fairly newly divorced mother of two who is struggling.  It’s no surprise that Jeffrey is drawn to her.  I don’t want to get too much into their interactions because it’s really such a genuinely nice to thing to watch that I don’t want to tell you any more about it and spoil that particular emotional journey.  But what I can say is that this movie showcases both Channing Tatum and Kirsten Dunst at the peak of their acting ability.  And they’re no slouches to begin with.  Channing Tatum has been in some excellent films and has shown great skill in different genres and with characters of various depth.  Kirsten Dunst can do more than just kiss you upside down in the rain; her run in Fargo season 2 was fantastic.  The subtlety on display here, the amount of acting they can do just by moving or not moving their faces is astounding.  The two of them are absolutely magnetic on screen and they have easy chemistry together.  I knew that Channing Tatum was capable of delivering this kind of performance, especially because he was able to be emotionally compelling in a movie as plainly silly as White House Down.  His arc of esteem in my mind has been so completely unexpected—I thought he was, you know, another actor for the longest time.  Then came the Soderbergh films Haywire and Side Effects, where he had small roles, and then there was 21 Jump Street, where he made the jump from “he’s fine” to “hey, I like this guy”.  With Logan Lucky, he completely won me over.  While I’ve always liked Kirsten Dunst, it’s rare that she’s given a role where she’s allowed to have this kind of emotional depth (and that’s more a Hollywood problem than a Dunst problem) and she expresses it with the kind of subtle power that is rare this side of Manchester by the Sea.  Her openness and vulnerability and kindness are on display at all times.  She could be saying nothing and her facial expressions would write several dusty tomes filled from margin to margin with her emoting.  Roofman is truly a vehicle for Tatum’s talents, with so much of the movie being him alone and trying to stay sane and positive and find a way out of his predicament while maintaining an amount of caring for others you sadly don’t normally see in people, but don’t for a second sleep on Dunst’s performance here.  If there isn’t Oscar buzz for the both of them, there should be.

And this is where it gets a little tough.  Jeffrey and Leigh feel like such full, real characters that you can forget the reason they feel that way isn’t just excellent acting, it’s because these are real people, who lived this in real life.  So when I started yelling at my TV, realizing I had become way more invested in what I thought was going to be a silly movie about a man who turned a Toys R Us into his own personal version of The Terminal, I realized that narrative structure and satisfying endings no longer mattered.  I knew how I wanted the story to go as a story and even though I didn’t know the story of the actual Roofman, I’ve lived enough to know that the reason we tell stories is that real life is often too heartbreaking to live in without an escape.  That’s not to say sadness and pain shouldn’t be part of storytelling, not at all; it’s just that you get the feeling that if things went well and everyone ended up happy then it wouldn’t feel like a real story.  Because real life doesn’t usually get a happy ending.  Or a happy middle.  Or often times, a happy start.  As you watch Roofman, you’re constantly vacillating between being drawn into the relationships between the characters and the knowledge that a man who lives inside a toy store while being the subject of a manhunt is not hurtling towards a normal, stress-free family life.  You switch between being hopeful and filled with dread, but you’re rooting for Jeffrey the whole time.  Even though I didn’t even really know what Jeffrey winning would look like.  All I knew is that I wanted it to happen and that it couldn’t happen.  And the easy, silly laughs in the first two acts of the film feel like a warmth that’s been blown away by an icy gust of gale force winds.

This movie is so fun.  It’s also completely and utterly devastating.  It encapsulates the wonderfully eccentric life of a man who wanted simple things.  He wanted a family, he wanted kids that adored him because he was a good dad, he wanted a partner who didn’t hate his guts, he wanted good things for himself and others.  He wanted to belong and be connected with something.  It’s a tragedy in itself how much a man like that had to live in self-imposed isolation.  But when it all plays out, it still feels good somehow.  You’re hurting, yeah, because people did get hurt along the way (more emotionally, but also physically), but it’s not in a bad way.  Yes it’s sad, but not the bad kind of sad, if that makes sense.  It’s a little inspiring, in some ways.  I’m not saying that I had the urge to climb up a ladder and cut through a roof, but it did make me wonder.  If Jeffrey could be so considerate and kind in the situation that he was in, can I?  Can others?  I can’t go so far as to say that the world would be a better place if more people were like Jeffrey, because he’s a real person with real flaws; he’s not Captain America, he’s not Superman.  He makes bad decisions.  Jeffrey really proves that you can be a good person and still make bad choices, but it doesn’t make you a bad person (and then also the reverse must also be true; you can make good choices and still be a bad person, which is something I want to explore at some point).  But maybe it would be a little bit better if we could leave behind the armed robbery bits and isolate that part of him that made him care about others.  Because that’s really lacking in the world right now, at least from what I can see.

Roofman is perhaps a few minutes too long at 2 hours and 6 minutes; it could have tightened a little bit in the edit, but it doesn’t waste your time or really drag ever.  With the true story nature of it, it feels ever evolving, not like other movies where you watch until a certain moment and get to the point where it really starts.  It’s also rated R, with a decent amount of profanity and a lot of naked Channing Tatum, so this is perhaps not one to watch with the kids.  It’s also on Paramount+ exclusively at the moment, but I do hope it gets to more popular streamers in the future, because this movie is really very good and engages on an emotional level that was completely unexpected for me.  It’s a unique blend of Superstore and Shawshank, and it really works.  Roofman is a fascinating real life story that feels important somehow.  And with this one, definitely stick around through the credits, you’ll see why.