Welcome to Ticket Stubs, a semi-regular column where I record some brief thoughts on a series of movies I watched for whatever reason recently. This informal diary is not meant to recommend or dissuade you from seeing the movies yourself but rather record some stray observations I found during my own viewing experiences. Feel free to take your own journey with them at your own pleasure or risk.
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Coming up with a metaphor to describe watching Bad Times at the El Royale is its own choose-your-own-adventure game ripe with landmines aplenty. But rest assured when I say that your time will likely be better and more efficiently spent playing a role-playing game with some friends who loudly and routinely remind you of their theatre arts degrees. Drew Goddard’s latest genre riff establishes its spastic characters with far less success than the confident, playful The Cabin in the Woods from a few years back. There is certainly a lot of story possibilities offered up by this twisty plot but an indecisiveness to fully commit to any of them only ends up making all of them feel perfunctory. The cast is just as much of a mixed bag: Jeff Bridges & Cynthia Ervio (a promising newcomer) are definite highlights, Chris Hemsworth a surprising low light, and the underutilization of Jon Hamm perhaps the film’s cardinal sin. All told, Bad Times at the El Royale plays like an intriguing creative flop that is nevertheless welcome in today’s multiplexes if nothing else as a laboratory for just how far talent in front of and behind the camera can animate ultimately derivative ideas.
“I’m never serious about anything.”
Shampoo immediately puts its cards on the table by opening with the Beach Boys’ hit song “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” itself an ode to a sunny future of marital bliss that never got a proper, fulfilling follow-up, unless of course you count Brian Wilson’s subsequent struggles with his psychological wellbeing. Warren Beatty’s George Roundy is all about rallying anyone and everyone entranced by his tractor beam of being to look on the sunny side of life. How else is he going to keep fooling them into thinking that any future with him has any chance of taking them to a better place than the one they are already discontent with? For a project and a part that could have served as the very definition of vanity theatre, Beatty accomplishes one of the greatest tricks a movie star has ever pulled: crafting a character that at once sparks arousion and repulsion. At his core, George really does seem like a kind, decent soul who even he admits at one point just cannot seem to get out of his own way. But that’s what gusts of wind do: they run their course, offer little in the way of warning or care where you end up, and force you to react to their aftermath. The ultimate tragedy with George resides with his inability to recognize that he’s the problem, not the solution, to everyone who exists in his orbit.
But it’s not like that orbit is that far ahead of recognizing the follies of their own lives either. Felicia (Lee Grant) finds herself losing a husband and competing with a daughter (Carrie Fisher) who’s coming into her own as a woman, Jackie (Julie Christie) picks up the same boring but reliable stiff that Felicia let slip through her fingers, and Jill (Goldie Hawn) sits a crossroads between her commitment to her profession and George, all struggles George himself would never even consider getting himself entangled into, knowingly that is. But this female triumvirate, the subjects Shampoo is ultimately most interested in, see in Los Angeles’s most popular hairdresser an escape hatch, a temporary dalliance they know full well will never turn into anything substantive, even as they pursue it with a lustful vengeance. It is not much of a spoiler to say that they all end up choosing options that do not involve George and as much as we have grown to like him over the course of the film, it feels pretty safe to say that they all chose wisely. Much has been made of Shampoo‘s historical positioning on election day 1968, an event many would have you believe unceremoniously struck a mortal wound into whatever early 60s idealism still drew breath by a fall preceded by continual assassinations and increasingly dire pictures coming out of Southeast Asia. But the screenplay (penned by Beatty and the legendary Robert Towne) and Hal Ashby’s careful, patient direction suggests that these characters, and by extension the nation, were hardly as well-off or healthy as they ever purported to be. Just taking a quick glance inside of the salon George works in tells us that story: the garish combination of architectural styles and misplaced attempts to foster a community of self-obsession may have left an empty vessel like George feeling right at home but this failed utopia turned out to be just that, the place that could not be.
But for a film with as many strong, distinct visionaries both in front of and behind the camera at work, Shampoo‘s brilliance ironically owes multitudes to the confluence of ideas that highlights, not minimizes, a wide spectrum of voices. Take for instance Jack Warden’s Lester, the clueless fat cat who in any other movie would serve as a pliable punching bag that both the characters and audiences alike take pleasure in pummeling into submission. But an earnest performance on the part of Warden prevents such a clobbering from ever taking place. By the film’s concluding moments, Jack turns out to be really the only one who is not only self-aware enough to understand his place in the universe but sufficiently satisfied in exercising his privilege to achieving an end that makes himself happy, faculties that no other character possesses in any tangible way. It is this sincerity amongst the irony, the honesty within the cynicism that set Shampoo apart as a real piece of work about a real piece of work.
The Old Man and the Gun may not necessarily represent David Lowery’s best movie to date but it is an encouraging step towards the talented filmmaker growing more comfortable in his own skin. We already know from the precedent of Ain’t Them Body Saints and A Ghost Story that Lowery can create a vibe all his own yet the more accessible nature of this material will hopefully translate to his work finding a larger audience in the future. This adaption is no doubt aided by the farewell performance of Robert Redford, one of the medium’s very finest movie stars who leaves every ounce of charm and charisma he’s accumulated over the past fifty odd years on the field, prompting me to at least a handful of times get a little misty-eyed. Sissy Spacek is nearly as good as his love interest who frequently engages her male counterpart in a dialogue about the lives yet lived, lines of thinking that only grow direr and more wistful as the clock continually bears down on old man and woman alike. This theme of making the best with what time you have got left extends to Redford’s fellow cohorts in crime, played dutifully by Danny Glover and the always delightful Tom Waits, but also even to Casey Affleck’s lawman doing his best to hunt down Redford’s Forrest Tucker. No matter where you look in The Old Man and the Gun, you are sure to see individuals making the most out of substandard circumstances, grasping tightly to maintain whatever sense of accomplishment, or at the very least dignity, intact to make it till next light.
It goes without saying (yet here I am) that Tim Burton, former animator turned live-action extraordinaire, could not have chosen a better debut feature than he did with Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure. The brainchild of Groundlings comedy partners Paul Reubens and Phil Hartman (future SNL icon), the lovable, sharped-dressed doofus needed special care in being realized in the most optimal medium. Burton, himself a professional practitioner of the techniques and joys of childlike wonder, proved to be the perfect collaborator in bringing Pee-Wee and his vivid world to life. Though shot on film using real, that we know of, flesh and blood humans, you could easily imagine the alternative reality where Burton executed Reubens, Hartman, and Michael Varhol’s brilliantly simple script into a metatextual experiment that ultimately went nowhere, the proto-Cool World entry into the strangely great run of 80s Yuppies-In-Trouble films (After Hours, Into the Night, Something Wild, and even Burton’s sophomore homerun Beetlejuice). But thankfully, Burton and cinematographer Victor J. Kemper shot the film in glorious Technicolor utilizing playful camerawork that is transporting, never alienating, and always curious. Like Pee-Wee himself, the film never shies away from a new experience if it means getting him closer to his goal, which for the film is always escapism to the nth degree. A guiding precept of Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure is that a world of wonder awaits you right outside your front door, even if your house is as littered with as much kitsch and odd-ball paraphernalia as Pee-Wee’s. The plotting, cyclical dialogue, and the sheer number of memorable one-off characters culminate into a quiet triumph of world-building bravura with an off-handed confidence award-worthy in its daring to not only dream but dream big. Likewise, Paul Reuben’s rendering of his own creation acts as its own proud freak-flag for persistence to the point of near foolishness in the face of absolute desperation. In his own way, Pee-Wee really is the rebel that he purports to be to Dottie in the film’s opening moments. But instead of leaving destruction or discontent in his wake, his very center of gravity lifts the spirits and prospects of everyone he meets, no matter how dire their circumstances. Despite the absurd behavior he displays throughout his Quixotic quest, Pee-Wee time and time again rises to the occasion to answer the call against challenges he would have never previously imagined having existed period. I cannot think of anything more inspirational in the movies than that.
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