Can’t Hardly Date

Meet Bob Kenner.  Bob’s a normal guy.  He lives in a quiet neighborhood called Peckham in southeast London.  He goes for walks on the high street and his neighbors know him.  He sings (quite poorly) in a church choir.  He opens jars for people.  He’s a bit socially awkward and a bit lonely.  He’s kind and he makes mistakes, sometimes he says the wrong thing, but he always apologizes when he does.  He’s completely normal.  Just like you or I.  Well, for the good of the world, I don’t sing.  I prefer to spare people from that.  But in most other respects, Bob’s as regular as the next person.

Except, well, a meteor struck London and gave him superpowers and now he acts as the world’s only superhero, being deployed by the British government and Ministry of Defense to help aid the world with disasters and the like.  There are no supervillains, he doesn’t have a rogues gallery.  He has a small house in Peckham, a mother in a care home, and a housekeeper who’s his only friend.  And your basic suite of superpowers; super strength, invulnerability, and flight.  But most importantly, he’s got a date.  Let’s get into 2015’s British indie rom-com, SuperBob.

SuperBob has been having some PR issues lately, which I’m sure you’re bound to when you crash about and break stuff.  In this instance, the villain here is a US Senator who has developed a vendetta against Bob after he tried to poach him for the US government and Bob didn’t go along with it.  So Bob’s boss at the MOD, Theresa Ford, played by Catherine Tate (The Office, Going Dutch), hires a documentary crew to follow him on his day off.  The goal here is to humanize Bob, so people think of him as a person and not just a cape.  Bob, played by Brett Goldstein (Ted Lasso, Shrinking), forgot about this, so the first time we really get to see him on camera is when he opens up the front door and is immediately awkward in front of the doc crew.  How uncomfortable he gets is instantly endearing (and yes, it helps that the many hours I’ve watched Goldstein as Roy Kent makes me inclined to like him, but he’s a likable character even independent of that) and you can tell he just wasn’t really meant to be in the spotlight.  In superhero films, there’s often this idea of heroism being thrust upon people and them rising to the occasion.  Bruce Wayne didn’t ask to be traumatized by his parents’ murder.  Clark Kent didn’t ask to be sent to a planet where he’d be nigh invulnerable to escape his own local apocalypse.  Peter Parker didn’t…you get the idea.  But in the end, they all stepped up and found the hero inside them (in wildly different ways) and they embrace that role as a hero and role model.

Well, Bob didn’t ask for a meteor to fall on Peckham and give him superpowers.  And he seems to do the superheroing well, especially in a world where there are no other superheroes and he doesn’t really have free will in what he responds to because he works for the UK government.  I feel like if someone had shown SuperBob to Tony Stark, we could have avoided that whole Civil War he had with Captain America, because Bob’s ability to do good is severely hindered by having to go through a governmental buffer.  To Bob, being a superhero isn’t something he loves or wants to do to be an example or anything like that.  To Bob, being a superhero is just a job.  It’s another fact of life in a mundane existence that’s punctuated on occasion by moments of the fantastic.  He goes where he’s sent and he does what he’s order to do by the Theresa and the MOD.  But, as much as I could go on about the politics of superheroing, that’s not really what this movie is about.  It’s certainly not not about that, but since it is February, I want to focus on the other aspect of this film.  It’s somewhat sneakily a rom-com.

It doesn’t look like one on its face, but the movie takes place on Tuesday, Bob’s day off.  And after months of crushing on June, he tries to work up the courage to ask her out.  June, played by Laura Haddock (Guardians of the Galaxy), works at the local library in Peckham, is sweet and passionate about books.  Which is good, given her career, and through months of wayward wooing, Bob finally reads her favorite book, House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski (who liked one of my tweets once) and details the unique reading experience of that novel.  I have a copy of it sitting on a corner of my desk, I am going to get to it (I’ve started it before, but it is freaky) and if you’re familiar with the book, his description of it is rather hilarious.  But for a guy who flies headfirst into danger on the reg, asking June on a date turns out to be a greater challenge than he’s previously faced and she asks him first.  Adorable.  He’s like a slightly less fuzzy Paddington sometimes, I love it.

Bob’s only friend is Dorris, played by Natalia Tena (Game of Thrones, The Mandalorian), who also happens to be his housekeeper who works at the retirement home where his mother lives.  The relationship between these two is unbelievably sweet—Dorris seems to be the only person in the world who treats Bob like a regular person.  She makes fun of him, she sees him for the hopelessly awkward guy that he his, and she genuinely cares about him and his mom, which is really nice.  Bob needs that kind of normalcy in his life and she’s always there to gently bring him back down to Earth.  And sometimes not so gently; but sometimes a friend has to be the one to say things that you might not necessarily want to hear and that’s exactly what Dorris does for Bob.  Their relationship is lovely and sweet and I couldn’t get enough of it.  Whenever they were on screen together, not only were their interactions always funny, they were also always sincere.  In an interview, writer and director Jon Dever said that through the many iterations of the story, they settled on wanting to make something that was nice.  He wanted to make a sweet, funny film that leaves you feeling good at the end.

And in that goal, SuperBob most definitely delivers.  Comedy is always hard to talk about because the best way to make a joke not be funny is to describe the joke and then explain why it was funny.  But there are so many subtly comedic moments in SuperBob that I found myself really, really laughing a lot despite sitting with a pen in hand, taking notes.  Brett Goldstein is so good here.  My introduction to him was Roy Kent, so I was used to him being very gruff, lovably caustic, and bitingly harsh, and this was a completely new look for me.  He brings this sweetness to the role that you wouldn’t expect from a superhero.  Or from Roy Kent.  It comes as no surprise that he’s funny, because he was the vehicle for so many of Ted Lasso’s funniest moments, but the manner in which he does it is so refreshing.  I watched the original short on which this movie is based and you can see where it all came from; this notion of someone who doesn’t have the personality type you typically associate with being a hero who nonetheless has these incredible powers and wants to good with them.  Although, funnily, in the original short, he name drops other heroes like Batman and Superman, which is a concept they smartly cut from the feature. 

Natalia Tena is also excellent here as Dorris, who came to England to save up money so she could go back to Colombia and open a nursery.  I ran into some terminology here; nursery can mean so many things and British terms don’t always line up with American English, but I gather that she means she wants to take care of children and not plants. Why that word means both a daycare and a place where you buy plants, I’ll never know, but I do remember a very confusing exchange with my mother as a small boy when she said we going to the nursery to pick something up and it was a houseplant and not a new little brother or sister (I was very young, we’re talking believing in stork delivery age).  Either way, Dorris is such a great character played with great care by Tena and she’s absolutely the heart and soul of the film.  Tate and Haddock do well with smaller, but still very important roles.  It’s a more reserved performance from Catherine Tate here, but it still needed that veteran comedic timing she has.

I wanted to look at rom-coms this February because a lot of times, they get discounted as highly gendered films that are often fluffy garbage.  That’s not what this is.  There’s definite emotional heft here, as SuperBob takes a look at different kinds of love and the things that get in the way and how much it’s worth going for when you have it.  In the end, Bob’s not a weapon and he’s not a superhero; he’s just a person.  When Theresa Ford hires a documentary crew to humanize him, well, it’s very effective.  You see Bob as a man first, not a superman.  He’s just a guy with wants, hopes, dreams, and a desire to love and be loved.  And that’s really something, as Dever would put it, quite nice.  It makes him incredibly relatable for a man who’s invulnerable and can fly.  There’s some subtle messaging here too, which you should be able to experience without me drawing it out into an additional essay about the importance of being able to love who you love, but those are the kinds of things that set it apart from other more paint-by-numbers rom-coms.  This is one you can watch with someone on Valentine’s Day or by yourself on a random Tuesday night and it will be just as enjoyable and just as life-affirming.  And it’ll still be just as funny, which is great, because it’s very funny.  And at just 1 hour, 22 minutes, it’s a comedy that knows how long to be in your life.  It’s a short, sweet movie that is delightful and rewatchable and a hidden gem that I highly recommend.   

Wed Reckoning

You may know this story already from your history textbook; probably not though, since history can get pretty selective depending on who’s writing the syllabus.  I didn’t learn about it until I was in law school, when I studied it in 1L Con Law (still better than having to learn about Tulsa from an HBO show).  In 1967, the Supreme Court ruled anti-miscegenation laws to be unconstitutional, settling the case Loving v. Virginia, which made interracial marriage bans illegal across the United States.  Talk about impact legislation—this didn’t just change Virginia or the lives of the Lovings, but changed everything about love in the country.  It opened the door for Obergefell, nearly five decades later, embarrassingly long, yes, and now in danger, certainly.  But Loving was the first blow struck for marriage equality in a long line of them and its legacy is still under fire now, a decade after Obergefell.

But behind those facts, behind that landmark case that took the United States closer to the continually unfulfilled promise of the nation, there were just two people in love that weren’t allowed to be.  We’re here at the start of February, a month known for two things.  A celebration of love and romance, albeit very Hallmark-y and manufactured in the form of holiday theming and special edition Reese’s hearts, and a celebration of Black history.  And I can’t think of a better way to start this month off than with a movie, based on a true story, that celebrates both those things.  Let’s get into Loving (2016).

We’re in Virginia in the late 1950s/early 1960s.  Mildred Jeter, a Black woman, tells her boyfriend Richard Loving, a white man, that she’s pregnant.  Richard is overjoyed—he loves kids and can’t wait to be a dad.  His mother is a midwife, so he was raised in a home where babies were being born on the reg.  He takes her out to a field, excited and babbling.  Then it clicks for Mildred.  Richard is talking about building a home for the two of them, just a short walk from where Mildred grew up and her family still lives. At this point in time, of course, interracial marriage was still illegal in Virginia, so Richard wanting to get married raised a big problem.  But he figures out a way around that.  They head to Washington, D.C. to get married and they do, married by a judge.  When they get home, Richard frames and hangs their marriage license in their bedroom. I thought this was a sentimental decision and maybe it was, like hanging a degree, but it turned out to be a more practical choice than I thought, whatever the sentiment may have been.

As it turns out, even though they were married in D.C., Virginia still doesn’t take too kindly to interracial marriage and one night they burst through the door to arrest them.  Richard quickly points to the marriage license on the wall, but the police tell him that the D.C. license isn’t valid in Virginia and throws them both in jail.  Mildred is heavily pregnant at this time.  But that doesn’t matter.  A cold jail cell with no chance at bail until after the weekend when Richard is able to be bailed out immediately, that’s where they put her.

On his way out, the Sheriff has a talk with Richard.  Sheriff Brooks is so gentle in the way he speaks to Richard that it almost takes a moment to realize exactly what he’s saying.  He’s so polite, even bordering on kind in the way he opens his conversation with Richard that it’s not until the second he tells him that it’s god’s law to maintain racial purity that you realize just what a horrible person he is.  This is the most insidious kind of in-plain-sight evil.  The righteous hate, espousing such horrific nonsense with the full and honest believe that they are in the right.  That their evil is holy.  When most people do wrong, they know it.  They know it and they do it anyway, for whatever reason it may be, justified or not.  But this kind of evil can throw a pregnant woman in a solitary cell and call it sanctified.  They think this hate, this inhuman darkness is what makes them good.  This is the kind of belief that is so hard to be reasoned with because it lives outside the confines of basic human decency and in the realm of a fantastical masquerade where hate is godly and any good message a religion has is perverted to serve their twisted stances.  It’s disgusting.

Ultimately, they plead guilty to such crimes as unlawful marrying and cohabitating as man and wife “against the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth”.  Remember, this was the law at the time.  This was legal and the two of them being together was not.  Law is not morality, just look at 55mph speed limits.  One year, suspended sentence, predicated on the two of them leaving the state for 25 years.  If they set foot in Virginia, they most certainly can’t be together.  They have no other choice but to pack up and leave, moving to D.C. to live with relatives.

Mildred can’t find a moment’s peace.  Growing up in rural Virginia, this isn’t anything like the life she is used to or ever wanted to live.  The sounds of the cars driving by, the horns honking, the general din of the city; it’s all so much for her.  I love the sound of the city at night; I can barely sleep if I don’t hear the sound of sirens in the distance.  But for Mildred, the sounds are nigh unbearable; she lies awake at night thinking about the world she left behind, in which the sound of distant crickets were the only obstacle between you and a quiet night’s sleep.  D.C. may be where they live, but it’s not their home.  And when it comes time for their baby to be born, she desperately wants Richard’s midwife mother to deliver the baby because that’s how she always envisioned it.  On the surface, asking your husband to smuggle you into another state like moonshine in the 1920s so you can give birth in your mother-in-law’s living room seems like a wildly unnecessary risk, but when you think about it, is it anywhere near as unreasonable as the rule that would keep them from it?  So their child could be brought into the world among a loving family rather than a large, scary hospital?  Risking prison, risking losing the child to the system.  The risk is so incredibly high.  I’d never risk it.  But it should never have come to this in the first place; this never should have been a decision that had to be made.  The absurdity of racial purity being enforced by the state should be horribly revolting to any decent person, of any creed or religion, or absence thereof.  It’s plain.  It’s obvious.  To any decent person.

Of course that’s not how it goes in Virginia in the 1960s and the Lovings manage the luckiest of escapes.  Ever so cruelly, life goes on.  They keep trying to make a life in the city.  They have two more kids, jobs, friends.  But it’s never home.  In the meantime, someone you may have heard of marches from Selma, Alabama to Montgomery and the Civil Rights Movement is well underway.  The ACLU gets involved and the Lovings put their case right into the Virginia court system.  The rest of it, as they say, is well and truly history.

Not only is this an important story to be telling—as important in 2016 as it is now in 2026–it’s also a great movie.  Joel Edgerton (The Gift, Zero Dark Thirty) plays Richard Loving so well; Richard was a regular man who wanted regular things and Edgerton plays him with such an emotional honesty.  He just wants to build a life together with Mildred; a home for them and their family built with his own two hands, peacefulness, and happiness.  It doesn’t seem like too much to ask.  Sheriff Brooks is played by Marton Csokas (The Lord of the Rings) and so incredibly effectively.  It was like poison dripped from his fangs every time he opened his mouth, it was so satisfying to hate him with every fiber of my being.  Phenomenal acting job.  The ACLU attorneys who represent the Lovings are played shockingly well by comedian Nick Kroll (Big Mouth, my favorite episode of Brooklyn 99) as Bernie Cohen and Jon Bass (Baywatch the reboot) as Phil Hirschkop.  But they’re far from the stars of the show, they’re not even white knights here to deal with a poison pill.  Kroll is kind of an animal; he seems to really want to make a name for himself and is happy for Richard and Mildred to be his ticket to ride.  Bass is more measured, more savvy than Kroll, but his role is also smaller, so it makes less of an impact.  The lawyers aren’t the heroes here, this isn’t Bridge of Spies, but they are important.   

But the star of the show here is Ruth Negga as Mildred Loving.  You’ve seen her before in shows like Agents of SHIELD and Preacher, and despite the fact neither of those shows are very good, her performances in them were always among the best parts.  And that tradition continues because she is so incredibly powerful here.  Ruth Negga plays Mildred with such quiet strength and dignity, it’s a performance that is subtle and captivating.  She draws you in, pulls your attention to her, and keeps it there every time she’s on screen.  The sheer strength of her performance is nearly impossible to overstate.  Mildred’s bravery is on full display through her incredibly talented acting ability.  As good as Joel Edgerton is as Richard, Ruth Negga is flawless as Mildred in a performance that earned her an Oscar nomination for Best Actress (losing out to Emma Stone in La La Land, which I couldn’t sit through).

There’s a lot in this movie.  And just like Casablanca and even The Running Man, it’s sadly still relevant now, ten years after the movie released and the better part of six decades after the landmark court decision.  But what this movie isn’t, and thank goodness for that, is a courtroom drama.  What makes it so effective as a narrative is the human aspect of the film.  A courtroom drama can be loads of fun to watch and properly nail-biting as well, but you can look that up.  You can read the court opinion, you can read the case brief, you can read the Wikipedia entry.  This movie isn’t about a landmark Supreme Court case.  It’s a movie about two people who fell in love with each other at a time in the United States when their love was illegal because of something so horrendously stupid as their races.  I don’t want to live in a nation where consenting, loving adults are banned from being with each other because of other people’s prejudices.  Can you imagine living in a country that calls itself free while its government tells you who you are allowed to love on the basis of race or sexual identity?  What kind of backwards nation would do something like that?  By focusing on the story of two people who are just trying to get through an already difficult life together, Loving humanizes their struggle rather than locking it behind dense legalese and civil procedure.  It takes it from a film about a fact and turns into a story about poeple.  You see their love for each other and their children, you see the fear they live in when a pair of headlights in the distance behind you grow larger and they worry that it’s at best the police coming to arrest and separate them or at worst a lynch mob coming to kill them.  To fear for your life because of who you love.  What a horrible world that would be.

The message of Loving is incredibly straightforward and it’s exemplified by one single moment.  When going to argue in front of the Supreme Court on their behalf, Bernie Cohen asks Richard if there’s any message he wants to pass along to the Justices.  He says simply to tell them that he loves his wife.  Because what other argument could there possibly be?  A man who loves his wife.  A woman who loves her husband.  Two people who love each other and their family.  What does it matter what color their skin is or anything else beyond the fact that they’re adults who care for each other?  Loving is 2 hours and 3 minutes long and currently available to stream on Prime Video.  And it’s an important two hours and three minutes to spend; a length of time that celebrates with its soft, but strongest voice the power of love and the power of equality.  And the sacrifices one couple made so the rest of us can live and love a little more freely.

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.