The glories of Rowlands and Fiorentino

The opening of cinemas hasn’t blunted my desire to visit them, I’m happy to say. Following seeing Zola (Janicza Bravo) with a “live audience” two weeks ago I may go to see Summer of Soul (Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson) this weekend. Of course, ha, I will be on the lookout as to how many people deliberately leave their pre-booked seats to create even more social distancing from other audience members.

When I get a Criterion Channel email notifying that a whack of films will be leaving the site by the end of the month I jump to attention. Finally, this will force me to watch films I might have otherwise lackadaisically ignored despite how extremely good they are. It’s computer screen vs big screen syndrome. Such was last night when I watched yet another great John Cassavetes film, Minnie and Moskowitz (1971) starring Gena Rowlands (photo right) and Detroit-born Seymour Cassel. Cassavetes is one of my favorite directors, who died way too soon. And Rowlands – I just looove her – one of my fave actresses. And like Bogart and Becall they were married, a romance made in cinematic heaven. This is a quirky story about two, uh, rather quirky individuals who meet and fall in love. But what’s striking is Rowlands. I’ve never seen her so young. She’s beautiful, of course, but so young her face hasn’t filled out with the expressive cheeks, the look she’s normally associated with…. My second feature was Fred Zinnemann’s 1950 The Men starring Marlo Brando. It’s notable for being Brando’s first feature and he doesn’t disappoint. This is the kind of movie that makes you constantly wonder how they coaxed such good performances out of the cast. The story takes place within a post-war veteran’s hospital for paraplegics. It’s also a love story with a charming, misty-eyed final scene with Brando (Ken) and Teresa Wright (Ellen) who bears an uncanny resemblance, or vice versa, to Andie MacDowell.

I recently rediscovered the actress Linda Fiorentino (photo left), in the neo-nor film The Last Seduction (John Dahl 1994). Wow. Tough talking, hard as nails, this suffer-no-fools femme fatale has got to be one of the sexiest actresses over the past 40 years. In fact, she’s a live version, only with black hair, of Jessica in Robert Zemeckis’s 1888 Who Framed Roger Rabbit! 

But I was disappointed in Running on Empty, Sidney Lumet’s 1988 supposed take on former Weather Underground terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn’s life on the lam. A good cast (Judd Hirsch, Christine Lahti, Martha Plimpton and River Phoenix) is wasted in this slim plot that barely touches on the politics, both macro and micro, of 1960s America and how it affected these radicals personally. Any causal viewer might have thought this was just another story about a typical, um, domestic family.

And move over Alec Baldwin. You’d have nothing on Robert Mitchum as the personification of Donald J. Trump. While watching Peter Yates’ 1973 The Friends of Eddie Coyle it donned on me. Mitchum, with his A personality and gruff piercing frown, is the pure embodiment of Trump. He could play him in a nanosecond. 

Not everyone's I-75 trip to Paradise

I saw my first in theatre post-Covid (I know technically we’re still in Covid) film yesterday. The last time I’d been inside a theatre was in February 2020 in Tampa Bay, Fla. (interesting as per review below). The venue for the film: Cinema du Parc, my favorite Montreal art house cinema. The film? Janicza Braco’s Bravo's Zola. How appropriate. Here I am in Montreal – where theatres are open compared to eternally shut down Ontario – and the movie I’m going to see has a Detroit theme. That’s the only reason I saw it. But disappointingly, Detroit plays hardly a significant role at all. But about the Covid theatre-going experience. I went to an early afternoon matinee. The ticket seller was very friendly, and I had to choose my seat electronically, on a graph set of squares that I dubbed a video game. He said it resembled “Battleship.” Then downstairs I went into this three-screen theatre in a small near-downtown subterranean shopping mall (part of the appeal). Only two seats had been picked before I arrived. I picked mine in the row behind and two seats away because it was central. (All individuals or groups were separated by two seats.) Then a couple arrived to fill those seats. Then a couple of guys arrived to sit to my left. After 10 minutes, the couple got up and moved several rows to the front. In the age of Covid one must always ask (at least I do): are people moving away from me because it’s a health risk or in this case they want a better view of the screen? Then the guy in my row sitting closest to me switches to the seat on the other side of his friend, further distancing himself. Again, a health precaution? As for mask-wearing, masks were required when moving around the cinema but not at your seat. And only two people were allowed in the washroom at any time. As for the movie, while Detroit starts out as its setting and where Aziah "Zola" King (Taylour Paige) meets Stefani (Riley Keough), that’s about it for the Motor City’s presence. And, when in Detroit, the characters are all inside buildings. There are no visual clues this is Detroit at all. 95 per cent of the film takes place in Tampa, where the two women drive with X (Colman Domingo) and Stefani’s clueless boyfriend Derrek (Nicholas Braun). There, as per the plot, things turn out not to be as advertised. Stefani had lured Zola into the fanciful trip by saying both could strip at a nightclub for big bucks (Zola is a part time stripper). The story descends into a maelstrom of events from which there is seemingly no escape. While this is a dark comedy, I’d never have gone to see it otherwise had it not been for the Detroit factor, which turned to be immaterial. But technically, this is an almost brilliant film. From the opening multiscreen glamour shots of the two women next to each other applying makeup with an inverted harp score to the crazily disjointed images on their trip south and what happens in Tampa Bay, the soundtrack – with its bouncy score and crazy whistles – laughingly undermines any potential plot seriousness. And Paige and Keough are superb, especially Keough who, despite the film’s title, is really the central character and has by far the more expressive role. So, beware: the film’s a thrill but the subject matter not everyone’s I-75 trip to Paradise.