Friday's Old Fashioned: Blue Hawaii (1961)

The opening scenes of “Blue Hawaii” are a picture-perfect tone-setter. I say picture-perfect because the opening credits, set to The King’s lilting rendition of the tune bearing the movie's title, is a montage comprised of clichéd Hawaiian images – blue surf, white beaches, palm trees swaying in the breeze – that go to show how the clichéd can still make you dreamy.

From there we move on to Maile (Joan Blackman) jetting down an Oahu roadway – jetting too quickly, it turns out, because a motorcycle cop pulls her over and explains she’s speeding. Well, he calls her by name first and then she proceeds to tell him she’s speeding only because her soldier boyfriend is coming home from service overseas. Never mind then, says the motorcycle cop, transforming himself into her personal pace car and escorting her to the airport. Maile may be in a hurry but “Blue Hawaii” is not, content to function as a tropical postcard (the film was released but two years after Hawaii joined the union), escapism of the most breezy sense.

Consider the motorcycle cop. We won’t give the actor’s name to protect the innocent but suffice it to say his acting is of the most stilted sense, as if he just landed the role the night before and tried too hard practicing his lines in the mirror. Which, hey, maybe he did! Maybe director Norman Taurog noticed him on patrol and asked: “Do you want to be an Elvis movie?” It would have fit the mood just right.

Back to the layabout story. Maile’s soldier boyfriend is Chad Gates (Elvis). She plans on driving him home to his well-to-do parents, his pineapple magnate father and his meddlesome mother (an annoyingly ostentatious Angela Lansbury – yes, Angela Lansbury), but Chad would rather postpone this reunion as long as possible. He diverts them to a secluded beach with a shack where we reckon Chad has spent a lot of time in the past. “It’s a Hawaiian holiday,” he tells Maile. “Haven’t you ever heard of hooky-hooky-day?” This is what passes for humor in “Blue Hawaii.”



Chad seems content on this beach – when Maile exclaims he can’t spend the rest of his life on a surfboard he replies “The G.I. Bill of Rights say I get my old job back and this is my old job” – and, frankly, the movie does too. Of course, a movie about a guy laying on a surfboard and watching the sun rise and the sun set and then strumming a guitar and crooning a casual ditty probably won’t pass muster for a whole 90 minutes. So Chad’s dad wants his son to join the family business and Chad’s mom wants him to refrain from hanging around those ne’er-do-well “beach boys” but Chad, by golly, wants to be his OWN man and make his OWN way in life. Therefore he decides to cash in on the burgeoning Hawaiian tourist industry.

Elvis fans often dismiss “Blue Hawaii” as the moment his film canon jumped the shark. Its box office success – third all-time for Presley behind “Viva Las Vegas” and “Jailhouse Rock” – as well as its easy-to-recreate vibe and values meant that for the rest of his career his movies followed the “Blue Hawaii” template, much to their detriment. There is certainly truth in this viewpoint but, at the same time, harsh as it may sound, I don’t know that Elvis was headed for a transcendent acting career. People will point to “King Creole” and while Elvis was decent in the part and showed at least of semblance of potential, I genuinely think that film gets graded on a curve. This is to say that while “Blue Hawaii” is definite fluff, it’s not quite the harbinger of middling disaster it’s made out to be.

So, too, did the character of Chad Gates stray from Elvis’s image of the young rabble-rouser who burst on to the scene throwing flames with The Sun Sessions. The tuneage in “Blue Hawaii” is decidedly more adult contemporary – “Rock-a-Hula” barely rocks – and his image is more polished. Yes, he aims to defy his parents, but he also brings a dose of levity to young Ellie (Jenny Maxwell), a rambunctious child in a small tour group he escorts around the islands. She is intent on not having fun and then she is intent on getting into Chad’s pants and Chad is having none of it, forced to finally forced to……spank her. Yes, spank her. No, this is not in any way lascivious, rather it is Elvis making like the parental chaperone he is and scolding this unruly teen. It would have been a moment to make Steve Allen – the square talk show host who viewed Presley as a no good ruffian – proud.

In fact, this entire second-half storyline of Ellie & The Tourists threatens to stall out “Blue Hawaii” as it alters its leading man into being a sort of moral policeman while balancing tepid humor, sing-alongs and, of course, the obligatory bar fight. (Not every Elvis movie has a bar fight but it feels like they do.) It’s funny – every time I watch this movie I start to drift off as it meanders toward the end, like napping on a longboard out in the water, and yet I return to it again eventually anyway.

“My French blood,” says Maile at one point, “tells me to argue with you and my Hawaiian blood tells me not to mind.” And while I have no French blood nor Hawaiian blood, well, while my French blood tells me to examine the film analytically and structurally and say it’s not very good, my Hawaiian blood is telling me not to mind.

Happiness Is...

Your two favorite movies of 2012 arriving together in the same Amazon package. 

My Favorite Time Travel Movie

Time travel is inherently ridiculous. It is, after all, time travel. This is why I always find the generally overused film criticism term “plot holes” being associated with the term “time travel” to be almost as ridiculous as time travel itself. Oh, perhaps one day a sturdy, serious filmmaker will get down to brass tacks and create a time travel docudrama in which every single action, every single movement, every single breath is coordinated exactly to ensure prevention of the Butterfly Effect’s wrath (though, more than likely, this will drive audience members to naps in droves) but until that day time travel should merely exist as the dilithium that drives the plot.

Dilithium, of course, is the element that propels spaceships in “Star Trek” to travel at warp speed. At least, I think that’s what it is. At least, that’s what it was in “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home”, the only “Star Trek” movie Cinema Romantico really deems worthy of discussing. (I don't mean that as a knock against "Stat Trek", trekkies. Honest, I don't! It just ain't my bag, baby.) And hey! As chance would have it, “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home” is all about……time travel! In fact, “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home” is the greatest movie ever made about time travel.

That’s right. You heard me. Time travel is most effective and enjoyable when its explanation is limited. How? Don’t care. Why? All that matters. Establish the end game so that time travel is the only means to get us there and then, you know, just get us there. The end game in “Star Trek IV” is that humpback whales are needed to answer a probe threatening to destroy 23rd century humanity. Humpback whales have been extinct since the 20th century. Thus, the sole remedy is time travel. Now, how to time travel? What follows is what passes for the movie's entire explanation:

McCoy: “Are you really going to try time travel in this rust bucket?” 
Kirk: “We've done it before.” 
McCoy: “Sure, slingshot around the sun. If you pick up enough speed you're in time warp. If you don't, you fry.” 

On with the show!!!!!!!!!!!!! So yeah, they travel back in time, back to 1986, and proceed to do anything and everything that could overwhelmingly f--- up the future. Like, they’re not accidentally stepping a single innocent butterfly, yo, they’re basically taking battering rams to rhinos and driving them off cliffs. They need to ferry the whales to the future, of course, and Kirk’s requisite love interest COMES BACK TO THE FUTURE WITH HIM and in a minor mishap a naval officer winds up with Chekhov’s phaser and Spock Vulcan grips an 80’s-styled punk into submission and – gasp! – Kirk orders a Michelob (The Butterfly Effect should really be re-named The Michelob Effect) and, oh right, I almost forgot, Scotty gives away the secrets of futuristic transparent aluminum.

Well, he and McCoy need to barter with the kindly Dr. Nichols in order to attain the necessary equipment to house their whales aboard their spaceship for the spaceship ride home, see, and the only real bargaining chip he has is this futuristic formula. At this moment you can practically see/hear The Plot Hole Picker Outers blowing a gasket and The Butterfly Effect-ers crying heresy and, as if the movie senses it, McCoy pulls Scotty aside to strike it all down with one brilliant blow.

McCoy: “You realize that by giving him the formula we’re altering the future.” 
Scotty: “Why? How do we know he didn’t invent the thing?”

Scotty. Out.

The Great Gatsby's Perfect Shot

No, this isn't the shot.

“There are eight million stories out there and they’re naked.” This is what hip hop virtuoso - and "Great Gatsby" executive producer - Jay Z espouses in his generally iconic “Empire State Of Mind.” His line, of course, was an ode to the famed lines in the 1948 noir “The Naked City” recited in memorable monotone that go: “There are eight million stories in The Naked City. This has been one.”

Well, eight million stories……I mean, that’s a lot of stories. Right? How can you possibly convey eight million stories? In their song “8 Million Stories”, A Tribe Called Quest managed to squeeze in – roughly – twelve tales of woe before, of course, the song had to end. So, by that estimation, they would have needed to record about 667,000 songs to completely encapsulate all the stories out there in the naked city. This is why it is necessary to follow “The Naked City” template. In order to tell these eight million stories, we must tell them one at a time. Everyone has a story worth telling, don’t they? Isn’t that another semi-noted idiom?

Of course, there is a reason why this phrase has become affixed to The Apple. Whenever I’m in New York City, I can feel the brunt of those eight million stories with an almost ineffable lucidity. It’s like this: I leave my apartment in Chicago and I’m on my block, which is a very lovely block, and……that’s it. I’m on a block with houses and apartments and parked cars and trees. I leave my best friend’s apartment in Brooklyn when I visit and I’m immediately in the midst of a mystical energy, of lives being lived all around me.

Maybe it’s because everything and everyone is so close together in New York. We’re close together in Chicago, too, sure, but it’s a different closeness – in New York it’s all just right ON TOP of each other. You walk around the city and wherever you go, whatever you do, you see a story or hear a story or sense a story. You leave a Kylie Minogue show and realize the two gay dudes walking directly behind you are in the midst of hooking up (Godspeed, gentlemen). You talk to a bartendress at some random Times Square pub you duck into to get out of the heat and away from the people and have her explain to you, frazzled, how she is in love with a co-worker but could never tell this co-worker she loves him because, well, she’s obviously too frazzled. You see a bewitching redhead that kinda resembles Jenny Lewis at an East Village tavern and realize that for the rest of your days you will wonder: what was her story? (And wonder: was that Jenny Lewis?)

I live in Chicago and I love Chicago and sometimes I think I don’t ever want to leave Chicago but I sometimes get in arguments with friends in Chicago about why I believe the New York City skyline is so much better than Chicago’s. Perhaps Chicago’s skyline is more aesthetically pleasing, as I’m often told, but the Manhattan skyline? That skyline TALKS to you. When I visit my best friend and I cross the Pulaski Bridge to catch a train to the city it affords a view that's not so much a view of buildings as a view of a stage. You look at Chicago's skyline and think: architecture. You look at New York's skyline and think: joy and grief and madness and all the lives lived amongst those buildings that have passed.

This long-winded wind-up brings me to my main point - that is, a specific shot in Baz Luhrmann’s flamboyant telling of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby”, just released theatrically in 3D that sort of makes it seem like you’re showering with champagne.

One of the early scenes involves Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire), the aspiring bond salesman, tagging along with rough and gruff Tom Buchanan (Joel Edgerton) to a booze-filled party with him and his married mistress (Isla Fisher) and a few of her garish friends. It’s a scene that really doesn’t have a whole lot to do with anything in the bigger picture – aside from establishing Fisher's character so later on she can......eh, never mind – but on its own it’s a genuine marvel. Andrew O’Hehir of Salon was struck by it too and wrote: “(T)he entire sequence is an out-of-body mini-masterpiece that blends sex, jazz and liquor – the great trifecta of the Roaring ‘20s – into a potent cocktail that kicks like a horse.”

It concludes when Nick drunkenly traipses to the window. Across the way is an apartment building, another building - that'd be the Empire State - standing in exaltation to the left of the frame, and each window is romantically lit with an inhabitant peering out at the city and its infinite wonder and terror below. And then……

Then Luhrmann’s camera looks in on Nick from the outside – an omniscient spectator – and employing CGI in the best way possible it pulls back and pulls back and pulls back, faster and faster, taking in all the buildings and all the streets and all the lights of that decadent metropolis. It’s still a stage but we are no longer on the outside looking in – we are in the play, we are mixing it up. For a few dizzying seconds this isn’t just Nick’s story, it's the story of each of those people at the windows gleaming in Nick’s eye and everyone else in all the buildings and on all the streets and beneath all the lights as the camera whirs past.

There are eight million stories in The Naked City. And for once, it feels as if they are all being told at the same time.

Examining The "I'm Pregnant" Reveal

It happened again recently. I was watching “Save the Date” (I have a full review that perhaps I'll post one day) when a nice little film that could suddenly decided it couldn’t and decided it needed to help resolve its story by resorting to one of the more insipid and frustrating story reversals of our time. You know the one I’m talking about. It’s where a female character utters the magic words… “I’m pregnant.” Bam! Movie re-prioritized! Free of charge!

It’s a cheat! An easy out! A pulling of the statue on the mantle and opening up a secret wall! Maybe this is a bad analogy but do you recall the moment in “127 Hours” when James Franco as real-life hiker Aron Ralston is trapped in the canyon wedge and he drifts off and dreams of an epic storm that magically lifts him up and out of the wedge and sends him running to his wondrous freedom only to then come to and realize, nope, that ain’t real and he’s still stuck and to get out he’s going to have to……well, you know?

It’s like “Save the Date” – and this is the identical fate of so many other films – yearns to avoid the heavy lifting and hard work of getting its characters out of their own proverbial wedges and where they need to go and so it simply has a character say “I’m pregnant” and she isn't stuck anymore.

Ah, but as with any trope, however antiquated or normally ill-fitting, there are exceptions and examples of proper usage.

Do you know what movie gets “I’m pregnant” just right? “Juno” gets “I’m pregnant” just right. It gets it right because it’s not a Reveal – not to the audience anyway. We know her eggo is preggo straight away and, thus, when it comes time for her to spill the beans to her dad and stepmom there is actual suspense derived – how will they react? – as opposed to phony surprise. And when she says “I’m pregnant” (a deft line reading by Ellen Page that concedes the disappointment she has in herself) those subsequent actions offer a wealth of insight. Juno's folks are shocked and disappointed, but also supportive and understanding. They scold while immediately also focusing on the fundamentals ("first things first, we need to get you healthy"). The scene has laughs and truth in equal measure and cleverly underlines in a matter of moments all the realities of teenage pregnancy.

Do you know what movie gets “I’m pregnant” just right? “Fantastic Mr. Fox” gets “I’m pregnant” just right. That film is Wes Anderson’s masterful piece of animated whimsy, based on Roald Dahl’s book and written by Anderson and the impeccable Noah Baumbach. The opening sequence demonstrates the film’s wit – Mr. & Mrs. Fox (voiced, respectively, by George Clooney & Meryl Streep) are out for a stroll and a bit of thievery, bantering like a canidae Nick & Nora, and find themselves ensnared in a fox trap. At this point Mrs. Fox advises: “I’m pregnant.”

Well, Anderson and Baumbach are fully aware of the trope, of course, and what they do with it here is ingenious and it is both ingenious in the way it works on its own and in the way it signals the tone of the forthcoming film – that is, “Fantastic Mr. Fox” amazingly exists in a perpetual state of total sincerity and irreverence. It's funny that the movie is poking fun at the ancient reveal and, at the same time it's genuinely moving. Only in this moment of need could Mrs. Fox be stoked to confess and the confession underlines how magical it is even in such a moment of need.

But do you know what movie really gets “I’m pregnant” just right? “Rachel Getting Married” really gets “I’m pregnant” just right. This is a film centered around a weekend and a wedding held on that weekend and the sprawling, mildly wrecked family at the center of that wedding. And the two most crucial characters are the Sisters Buchman – Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt), who, as the title indicates, is the one doing the marrying, and younger Kym (Anne Hathaway), the erratic addict out of rehab just for the occasion.

The scene: the family has just returned home from a pre-wedding soiree where Kym (in a bravura piece of acting by Ms. Hathaway) has given an awkward toast. Rachel calls her out, caustically commenting: “Nice apology.” And so Kym says she was trying to make amends – “It’s one of the steps” – and Rachel indicates that she is fully aware of the steps and that Kym has never even tried to apologize and, yet, at her wedding dinner decides to take a painful stab at it. Barbs are traded. Their Dad (Bill Irwin) gets dragged into it. He thinks Kym is making an effort. Rachel thinks Kym thinks she is the sun around which all else revolves. Kym compares the atmosphere in the room to the Salem Witch Trials. Back and forth they go, exchanging big words and pschyological terminology in place of just calling each other the b-word over and over.

“You’re suffering is not the most important thing in the world to everybody!” Rachel declares. “Other people have lives! We have lives! I have a life! I’m in school. I’m getting married. I’m……” And Kym gets this abject look of horror, as if the film has momentarily come face to face with The Amityville Horror. And Rachel says the magic words. “I’m pregnant.”

It’s a Reveal, yes, in the technical sense, because we didn’t know she was pregnant and her family didn’t know she was pregnant – except that it’s not really a Reveal at all because it has no bearing on the overall story. Kym gets it. She says: “You can’t just drop that tectonic bit of information into a completely separate conversation, Rachel. You just can’t do that.” And DeWitt’s expression at this is stone-cold brilliance, glowing with I’m-Gonna-Be-A-Mom warmth and dripping with To-The-Victor-Go-The-Spoils smugness. She replies: “You’re going to be a niece, Kym.” In other words, she just won the argument.

It’s the only “I’m pregnant” confession in cinematic history that doubles as a mic drop.

Obligatory Kate Winslet Casting Update

Screen Daily reports that Kate Winslet - whose official moniker at the Cinema Romantico offices is, of course, The Greatest Actress In The World - has agreed to star in director Jocelyn Moorhouse's adaptation of Rosalie Ham's Australia-set novel "The Dressmaker."

Cinema Romantico confesses to having no knowledge of this "Dressmaker" so we promptly hopped over to Amazon to check things out. As it happens, customer reviewer Redhead provides the necessary breakdown, deeming it an "Australian gothic novel of love, hate and haute-couture." That gets the noted Cinema Romantico roar(!!!!!!) of approval.

Readhead continues: "As Rosalie Ham's first novel unfolds, the reader can see, smell and move through Tilly's jumbled and dusty hometown of Dungatar - possum piss, old tyres, lavender flowers, chugging farm trucks, kids and wheat. Who will die, who will live? Who is marked for life? Who will explode out of their drab life in one of Tilly's creations? Who wears home-made ginghams under their uniform? Read 'The Dressmaker' and find out."

I wanna find out! I do, I do, I do! I wanna know if Kate Winslet wears home-made ginghams under her uniform!

Friday's Old Fashioned: No Man Of Her Own (1932)

Libraries are not necessarily noted for their erotica but there is a scene in “No Man Of Her Own” (1932) that smashes this theory to smithereens. Babe Stewart (Clark Gable), brand new in town, has chosen, almost upon disembarking from the bus, to court the comely Connie Randall (Carole Lombard). Well, court, perhaps, is not the proper term. Perhaps we should say……he pursues her in the manner of a dapper cruise missile. He essentially stalks her to the library, fakes a fuss about wanting to check out a book, makes like he’s interested in some book on a top shelf all so Connie can climb her trusty step-ladder so Babe can check her out, and then he swoops in……right into a close-up on the two of them. He’s looking right at her with that Gable-y smile and she’s looking right back at him, a little more hesitant but unable to tear her eyes away from his. It’s like a 1932 version of Fassbender’s tractor beam stare at the lady on the subway in “Shame.” And director Wesley Ruggles holds the shot and keeps holding it. And you get this lump in your throat and you don’t want them to fall in love or even make love – no, you want them to pick up where Sienna Miller & Daniel Craig left off in “Layer Cake” right before poor Daniel got kidnapped.

Alas, this is the high point of “No Man Of Her Own.”

Recently on his site And So It Begins, Alex Withrow listed his ten biggest movie pet peeves. One of them was, in his words, Falling In Love After Having Sex Once. It’s a fair point, of course, but, hey, at least characters these days get to have sex! Clark & Carole fall in love after kissing twice. Whoops! My mistake again! Falling in love isn’t even the right way to put it – they get married after kissing twice. Of course, they only agree to marry by the whim of a coin flip.

See, Babe’s a gambling man, the sorta gambling man who likes his gambles to be sure things, which is why he chooses to “gamble” in the form of grifts. He and a few devious associates stage fake card games with clients who assume the card games are real so they can take the patsy for all he’s worth. Ah, but the requisite cop is, as he must be, wise to Babe’s scheme and looking to nab him. So, Babe decides to follow the advice Aubrey Plaza would relay many years later in “Safety Not Guaranteed”: “There’s no sense in nonsense, especially when the heat’s hot.”

He high-tails it outta the Big City (Manhattan) for the Small Town (Glendale) which is where we catch up with Connie telling her folks with whom she still unfortunately resides about how nothing ever happens where she is and how she’ll run off with the first handsome salesman she meets. Which, of course, she does. Babe mis-represents what he is, not so much who he is, neglecting to tell Connie of his card hustling and posing as a well-to-do businessman. Always a good idea to start off lying to the woman to whom you propose and so once they wed and move back to Manhattan it isn’t long before Connie is able to deduce that something is amiss at these nightly poker games Babe and his cohorts are always winning. Will Connie still love Babe tomorrow? Will Babe make a play for the straight life? Will he be able to handle it?

Eventually Gable and Lombarde would be married in order to become one of Hollywood’s most glamorous couples until her tragic death in 1942. At the time “No Man Of Her Own” was filmed, however, they not only had never appeared on the screen together (and would never appear on it together again) they were both married to someone else – he to Rhea Langham, she to William Powell. The off screen flirtations would come later, though perhaps there were already burgeoning signs on this production. The Internet is awash in stories of, post-production, Lombarde presenting Gable with a ten pound ham bearing his photo and him presenting her a pair of ballerina slippers with a note saying “To A Real Primadonna.”

I love these stories. I do. A Ham & A Primadonna. The fact they were willing to tease each other this way – even if we did not know they would go on to become husband & wife – suggests a rapport and while in certain moments that rapport shines through, too often “No Man Of Her Own feels disconnected from its dizzying premise. Late in the film, for example, Babe decides to employ a con in an effort to re-woo Connie but its handling and presentation moves at a snail’s pace compared to other screwball comedies for which these two were well known. This leaves it feeling, strangely, like a staid modern day rom com despite being released during the Hoover Administration.

The rest of the film just never quite re-captures the crackle of that eye-to-eye showdown in the bibliotheca. I suppose it’s nice that Babe and Connie get to live happily ever after but the movie in which they are featured might have been better off if it was just a one night stand.