Reeling Backward: "Planes, Trains & Automobiles" (1987)

Everyone is entitled to their opinion, and mine is this: "Planes, Trains & Automobiles" is simply one of the funniest movies every made, not to mention a beacon of absolute joy.

I can't think of a film that I have laughed at harder, longer or more consistently. And it's not especially sophisticated humor -- mostly pratfalls, gross-out moments and personality clashes. It's the classic odd couple tale, with a more or less straight man bothered and befuddled by a loudmouth lout. These are signature roles in the careers of both Steve Martin and John Candy.

With a few script changes, you could easily have made it in the 1940s with Bob Hope and Bing Crosby.

It's hard to believe it's been 30 years since "Planes" came out, but here it is getting a very nice Blu-ray combo pack video reissue from Paramount. This is definitely one that will stay in my library. It includes a great transfer plus plenty of cool bonus material, including a press footage from the film's promotional tour and a comprehensive overview of the career of John Hughes.

Up till then Hughes had been known exclusively for teen dramedies, so it was considered a big risk at the time for him to make an R-rated comedy featuring a pair of middle-aged men. The film was a critical and commercially successful, though not a runaway hit. Its reputation has only grown with the years.

You know the story: persnickety marketing executive Neal Page (Martin) is trying to get back home to Chicago for Thanksgiving after his meeting in New York runs late. He is repeatedly foiled by circumstance and the intrusion of Del Griffith (Candy), a jovial traveling salesman who hocks shower curtain rings. They ping-pong back and forth between antagonism and cooperation as they make their journey by the various conveyances listed in the title, along with a few others.

I can easily tell you the movie's high point for me. After having their plane grounded in Witchita by bad weather and their train broken down on the tracks, their cut-rate bus tickets only get them as far as St. Louis. (All their cash had been stolen by a motel thief.) Del manages to secure a rental car -- using Neal's credit card, which had earlier gotten switched between wallets by the hapless motel operator, Gus (Charles Tyner) -- and they're cruising down the road.

(The car, an ugly little green Chrysler LeBaron Town and Country convertible with wood paneling, surely must be the diminutive cousin of the station wagon from "Vacation.")

This entire sequence is 10 minutes or so of pure hilarity. Hughes warms us up with some contretemps over the passenger power seat, which Del manages to break. Then Del loudly cranks up the radio playing Ray Charles' "Mess Around" while Neal snoozes next to him. Del be-bops and shakes his thing while driving down the road in the middle of the night, repeatedly looking over to Neal, hoping he'll wake up and join in.

It's a tiny encapsulation of their entire relationship: Del, the man who can't stop reaching out, and Neal, the guy who just wants to be left alone.

Del gets his coat sleeves caught on the seat while trying to remove it, leading to a crazy screaming spin-out that finally awakens Neal. Del, trying to cover up his latest screw-up, reassures him and starts driving again, not realizing they're going the wrong way on the interstate. Failing to heed the warnings of another motorist, they carom between two semis, a fireworks of sparks spraying everywhere. Neal looks over at Del and envisions him dressed in the full red devil's suit, from horns to cape, laughing with wild glee.

Funny stuff, but what follows is even funnier. As they realize how close they've come to death, each man discovers the extent of their peril. Del has bent the steering wheel in half, and Neal gripped the dashboard so ferociously that he's left finger-shaped indents, an audible pop sounding as he pulls his hands free.

If you don't bust a gut laughing at that, I can't help you.

I love that the mystery of Del's oversized trunk is never solved. He trundles that thing everywhere, platooned with stickers and an endless source of grief. It's his totem and, quite literally, his baggage. Does he keep his shower rings in there? Souvenirs from his wife? Like the glowing suitcase in "Pulp Fiction," it works better because it remains a mystery.

Watching the film again for the first time in awhile, I was struck by how many cameos there are by recognizable performers -- character actors and future stars. Kevin Bacon plays the young businessman who outraces Neal for a cab at the start of the film. Owen, the redneck son of the Witchita motel owner who gives them a ride to the train station in Stubbsville, is played by none other than Dylan Baker, doing a bestial snort/croak thing that's impossible to mimic without giving yourself an anyeurism.

William Windom has a cameo as the corporate honcho whose indecisiveness results in Neal being late for his plane, and Lyman Ward, who played the dad in Hughes' previous film, "Ferris Bueller's Day Off," is Neal's colleague from Chicago. Bill Erwin does his signature cantankerous old man routine on the plane, and Ben Stein turns up as an airline worker delivering catastrophic news in soothing, dulcet tones.

Larry Hankin, whose specialty is playing skeevy interlopers, plays Doobie, the Kansas taxi driver with a pimped-out muscle car. Michael McKean plays the state trooper who makes Del and Neal take their burnt-out rental car off the road. Martin Ferrero, another classic "that guy" actor known for his snivelly connivers, most notably the lawyer who gets chomped by a T-rex in "Jurassic Park," is the motel clerk who accepts bribes in lieu of cash. He happily pockets Neal's expensive wristwatch, but resists Del's energetic sales job for his Casio, even after Del dangles the cheap ticker over his knuckles in full trade show mode.

Without a doubt the most iconic cameo in "Planes" belongs to Edie McClurg, who's made an entire career out of her chirpy voice, Midwest accent and matronly demeanor. She plays the car rental agent upon whom Neal unfurls a banner of f-bombs as long as your arm after he's ditched in the distant parking lot with no car. It's the most famous scene in the movie bar none, with Neal using the f-word in gerund form dozens of times before Edie lands the punchline using the same base word as a descriptive adjective.

Interestingly, without this scene and one or two other brief bits of language, "Planes" could have easily gotten away with a PG rating from the MPAA. Well, there's also the "two pillows" scene, which is probably the second most memorable scene.

Let's talk about that for a minute.

Seen today, the motel room sequence would probably be frowned upon as a homophobic example of gay panic. Forced to share a double bed, they awake in the morning to find themselves snuggling contentedly, with Del giving Neal an affection nibble on the earlobe for good measure. Then, of course, they discover the location of Del's other hand, between two pillows that are not actually pillows. They leap to their feet, screaming in disgust, then quickly covering up the awkward moment with football chatter about the Bears.

Hughes and audiences probably took the scene at face value in 1987. Seen today, though, I think the joke endures with a distinctly different color. In their half-awake state of sleep, both men are quite happy to share physical closeness and a mild bit of affection. It's only when their grogginess is punctuated, and they realize how this scene must appear, that their instincts kick in to reassert their straight self-image.

The joke is not that they might be gay, but that they're petrified of others thinking they are.

There are so many other memorable moments of "Planes, Trains &; Automobiles" to mention, but time and space runs short. Such as Del raising cash for their trip by passing off his shower rings as fashionable ladies' earrings -- which, given the state of '80s fashion, is not so incredulous as you might think.

If you haven't caught "Planes" in a while, I urge you to go back and check it out again. It's one of the true comedic gems of the 1980s.

Review: "Patriots Day"

The Boston Marathon bombing was less than four years ago, but already it seems a deeply embedded piece of our national lore, like a piece of shrapnel in our collective soul. Two Chechen brothers with radical Islamist sympathies planted a pair of improvised bombs along the race route, killing three people, including a child, and injuring hundreds of others.

The sight of Boylston Street spattered with blood and limbs is not something any of us should soon forget -- or want to.

“Patriots Day” is a painstaking recreation of that fateful day, from the early morning hours leading up to the attack to the time the Tsarnaev brothers were captured and killed. It takes the form of a police procedural, following parallel paths of the domestic terrorists and the army of law enforcement chasing them.

Director Peter Berg, who co-wrote the script with Matt Cook and Joshua Zetumer, based on the book “Boston Strong” by Casey Sherman and Dave Wedge, has delivered an unrelentingly grim film that somehow leaves us with a sense of hope and community. It takes pains not to depict the perpetrators as soulless vessels, the victims as mere statistics or the cops as faceless automatons.

There are many powerful images and moments that will linger for me. Such as a young bride waking up after the blast, seeing that both her and her husband’s legs have been torn to pieces, and choosing to bind up his wounds before her own. Or a father, his body similarly shredded, trying to prevent a rescue worker from whisking his toddler son to safety.

Mark Wahlberg, John Goodman, Kevin Bacon and J. K. Simmons play the main roles as police officers on the chase, and are all resolute and effective. Wahlberg plays Boston Police Sergeant Tommy Saunders, while John Goodman is Police Commissioner Ed Davis. Bacon plays the FBI guy, Richard DesLauriers, brought in to lead the investigation, and Simmons is Jeffrey Pugliese, the sergeant in nearby Watertown who become involved when the chase led to his sleepy burg.

It’s a fine and realistic portrait of dedicated men with strong personalities trying to do an important job, and occasionally getting into beefs with each other. The feds-versus-locals is a common theme in crime stories, and we also get to see how politics plays into events like these, with Michael Beach as Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, pushing for more information to be released to the public.

Alex Wolff and Themo Melikidze play Tsarnaev brothers, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan. It’s essentially an abusive relationship, with the older married Tamerlan constantly bullying his 19-year-old brother, a seemingly normal college student who’d probably be spending his days smoking weed and cutting classes if not for his radicalized sibling’s harassment.

Like the best historical reenactments, I learned things about a wildly publicized event that I hadn’t previously known. Like the Tsarnaevs kidnapping a young Chinese-American businessman (Jimmy O. Yang) and forcing him to ride around with them in his brand-new SUV for hours. Or the assassination of an MIT cop sitting in his vehicle. Or the extent of the firefight they engaged in with Watertown cops, complete with pipe bombs and vehicles rocketed into the air.

Wahlberg is the biggest star in the movie, but there’s no real main character in this ensemble cast. His police sergeant is an amalgam of several different officers, which I might normally find objectionable but I think works narratively here.

This way the audience can experience a continuous face from the scene of the bombing to the behind-the-scenes forensic investigation that quickly pinpointed the Tsarnaevs to the actual manhunt. He serves as the locus of the story, a source of constancy amid a tumult of faces and details.

His character has a bum knee that he aggravates right before the marathon, so he spends the whole movie hobbling around. The fact that he’s already wounded on the outside gives him a connection to the victims we comprehend at a visceral level.

“Patriots Day” is a hard movie to watch, but ultimately an extremely rewarding one. It’s only at their worst that people show us their best.

Review: "Black Mass"

Johnny Depp is expectedly magnificent in "Black Mass," the tale of Irish-American gangster Jimmy "Whitey" Bulger and the unholy alliance he forged with the FBI.

Icy stillness. Searing rage. Dead gaze. A man who exists almost as an energy form: pure malevolence and terror.

It's a terrifically commanding performance. I'm not certain it's a terribly complex one.

Depp holds our every attention every second he's on the screen, as we witness Jimmy's dark, violent saga over a 20-year period. What his character does not do is change one iota over the course of that span.

He arrives in 1975, fully formed and unspeakably evil. We leave him in 1995 without any notable alterations.

His circumstances do shift: initially a small-time hood fighting to control just his hardscrabble Southie neighborhood, Jimmy winds up as Boston's kingpin -- with the unwitting (and witting) help of the local feds. Countless murders are attributed to him or his henchmen, the dank river bridge piles serving as his personal well-stocked graveyard.

He came, he saw, he buried.

The unnerving physical transformation is what first grabs our attention. With stabbing blue eyes, scant, slicked-back hair, corpse-like pallor and a dead tooth, Depp looks like he was dug up out of the ground 10 minutes ago and ensorceled back to rotting half-life.

He seems at once ancient and virile, strutting Mick bravado encased in a body that reflects the soul's irreversible decay. Notably, his appearance does not change as the other actors' faces thicken with increasing layers of age makeup.

Based on the book by Dick Lehr and Gerard O'Neill, "Black Mass" aims to be a sprawling gangster saga a la "Goodfellas," showing how absolute corruption seeps everywhere like an oil spill. The plot tends to wander, piling up secondary and tertiary characters, and compounding scenes of Jimmy facing down adversaries that begin to blur into each other.

Director Scott Cooper debuted with the amazing "Crazy Heart," then got caught in a family crime ramble with 2013's "Out of the Furnace." He seems to be a filmmaker who's a master at evoking vivid figures, but is less adroit at assembling a raft of characters and events into a coherent, compelling narrative.

Screenwriters Mark Mallouk and Jez Butterworth craft some great individual scenes, but the connective tissue has a Frankenstein feel. I wouldn't so much say that "Black Mass" is too long, but that it allocates its 122 minutes unwisely.

The focus of the story is, or should be, Jimmy's two decades as an informant for the FBI. He found a partner in agent John Connolly (Joel Edgerton), a fellow Southie who grew up idolizing Jimmy. Connolly offers to protect him if he'll feed information about fellow mobsters. Jimmy's reptilian mind immediately sees an opportunity to use the feds to take out the competition.

Since Jimmy was notoriously vicious toward "rats" in his own organization, this would seem a ripe area for exploration -- how he justified in his own mind the act of informing on other criminals.

But this movie does not get into those sorts of interior monologues. "Black Mass" witnesses Jimmy Bulger only at external angles.

The supporting cast is bulging with talent and, well, just bulging. The sheer number of names and faces to keep track of is overwhelming at times.

Dakota Johnson and Julianne Nicholson play the long-suffering significant others of Jimmy and John, respectively, given little to do but cry and kvetch. David Harbour is John's tainted wingman. Kevin Bacon and Adam Scott are skeptical FBI honchos who crave the intelligence Jimmy provides but suspect they're being played.

Jesse Plemons, Rory Cochrane and W. Earl Brown play Jimmy's core crew, whom we first meet as aged turncoats giving testimony against him. Corey Stoll is the upstanding new prosecutor who finally starts to ask questions about the Jimmy/FBI arrangement. Juno Temple is a wide-eyed streetwalker who shows up just in time to leave. Peter Sarsgaard turns up as a twitchy accomplice who practically seems to have the mark of doom etched on his forehead.

Most ill-used is Benedict Cumberbatch as Jimmy's brother Billy Bulger, a state senator a political power player who somehow managed to maintain a close relationship with his mobster sibling while (the film would have us believe) staying completely and deliberately oblivious of his business.

All these people waltz in and out of the frame, wah-wahing through Boston accents that seem lacquered on like all the dark wood constantly occupying the movie's backgrounds. Each actor has a scene or two to establish their character's bona fides, then dissolves into the other furnishings.

"Black Mass" was built as a movie to feature Johnny Depp in a dominating, unforgettable performance. At this it succeeds, but to the detriment of the total cinematic experience.

Reeling Backward: "Footloose" (1984)

For such an iconic film, "Footloose" is a strange bird of a movie. Most people remember it as a rock 'n' roll flick about a kid who brings back dancing to an uptight Midwestern town where the local preacher has successfully had it banned. The songs, the now painfully dated clothes and dance moves and the Rebellion Lite mood have it positioned in most people's minds as a delightful confection.

Basically, it's thought of as a music video -- back when MTV still played those things -- with a hip teenage movie wrapped around it.

Those are the parts that interested me least upon watching "Footloose" for the very first time. (Yes, I know, how can any self-respecting Generation Xer have missed it? The same way I've never seen "Dirty Dancing": They were movies about dancing at a time I was doing everything in my power to avoid it. I was probably trying to sneak into some horror flick instead.)

What I liked most about the film is the stuff most critics seemed to hate at the time of the film's original release: The more contemplative sequences devoted to the preacher, Shaw Moore. I think it's one of John Lithgow's best performances, as a conflicted man of God who swings between righteous certitude and soul-crushing doubt.

Quite frankly, I would love to have seen the same story told from the perspective of the preacher: A man who's devoted his life to binding the community together after the tragic loss of his own son, only to see the entire town and even his daughter stirred up by some cocky young interloper.

Diane Wiest also has a terrific role as Moore's wife, a woman whose position as preacher's wife requires her to linger in his shadow, but isn't afraid to give him counsel and try to nudge him toward the light of modernity.

I feel compelled to point out that Lithgow was only 38 years old when "Footloose" came out, while star Kevin Bacon was 25. Bacon's co-star Lori Singer was a year older, which made her a mere 12 years younger than the actor playing her father, and only nine years older than Wiest, playing he onscreen mother.


Two years earlier, Bacon had gotten his big break in Barry Levinson's "Diner," in a story of a bunch of guys facing post-college angst. Now here he is trying to look 17 -- though I'll admit the transformation is more convincing than a lot of stuff you see.

(At least Chris Penn and Sarah Jessica Parker, both memorable in supporting roles that kick-started their careers, were each 18 when the film debuted.) 

I think the reason studios usually decline to cast actual teenagers in high school movie is that they don't feel they can find actors that age who have the acting chops to pull it off. That, and most people tend to romanticize those years, forgetting the pimples, awkwardness and depression that are what most people actually experience. Better to wait until they're 25, their complexions have cleared up and their bodies filled out.

Filled out, that is, except for Singer, whose costumes emphasized her scary-skinny physique. There are several scenes where she looks downright anorexic.

Singer's role as Ariel, the prototypical rebellious preacher's daughter, is all over the map. She acts sweet and virginal around her parents, but becomes a near-psychotic hellion while hanging with her friends. The early sequence where she balances with one foot each on two speeding cars as a tractor-trailer barrels down on them is totally nutso. As is the bit where she stands in front of an oncoming train screaming her head off, waiting for Bacon's new kid in town, Ren, to save her.

There's actually not all that much dancing in "Footloose." Ren has a big solo dance scene inside the trainyard, where he begins leaping and swinging all over the place like a champion gymnast, that's totally ridiculous -- and not just because the cutaways to Bacon's (several) body doubles are so ham-handedly obvious.

Director Herbert Ross, who had a long and productive career including "The Goodbye Girl," "The Sunshine Boys" and "Steel Magnolias," lets the tone of the movie slip and slide all over the place. The main character, Ren, is actually one of the least interesting people onscreen -- not due to Bacon, but simply because the script doesn't really give him much to do. He ends up falling back on a more or less generic James Dean type of persona, but less angry.

Too many false notes doom "Footloose," giving me little hope this week's remake will be any better.

2 stars out of four

Review: "Crazy, Stupid, Love."

"Crazy, Stupid, Love." reminded me of bits and pieces of movies I love, and that's always a good thing. And yet it does not feel like a rip-off or a rehash, but exists entirely as its own creation.

It's the story of Cal and Emily Weaver, high school sweethearts turned unhappily marrieds played by Steve Carell and Julianne Moore. Going over the dessert menu at dinner, he asks her what she wants and she announces that, after 25 years, she wants a divorce. This actually represents the high point of their evening.

But it's also the tale of Jacob, a smooth ladies' man who trolls his favorite nightclub like a shark hunting territorial waters. He wields pick-up lines and brash confidence as weapons to subdue his prey: pretty, gullible women. "You wanna get outta here?" is the final thrust of his attack, and when they leave with him Jacob notches another triumph.

Jacob spots Cal pathetically pouring his heart out at the bar, post-breakup, and resolves to help him. There's the superficial makeover stuff, of course, like ditching Cal's New Balance sneakers and Gap-meets-apathy wardrobe. More tellingly, Jacob wants to turn sweet-faced Cal into a killer like himself.

"I'm gonna help you rediscover your manhood," Jacob promises.

Jacob is played by Ryan Gosling, not exactly known for playing the sort of slick, shallow pretty boys we've seen entirely too much on screens lately (*cough cough* Ryan Reynolds *cough*). Later Gosling will get a chance to show off the superficial jerk's uncharted depths.

Other characters, who had been standing around the edges of the story, unexpectedly rush to the fore and briefly hold the center. Chief among them is Hannah (Emma Stone), a smart young woman about to take the bar exam and become a patent attorney. She and Jacob briefly meet early in the movie, and she is the one gal who sees through his shtick and blows him off, and yet we are certain they will meet again.

Gosling and Stone share the greatest non-seduction seduction scene in the history of cinema -- probably also the first, but then that's something, too.

Then there is Jessica, the Weavers' 17-year-old babysitter. She has her own dimensions and secret hopes, and is skillfully and heartwarmingly played by Analeigh Tipton, who I learn is a famous model in real life, but here is unaware of her beauty. Tipton has a great scene where Jessica tries to do something that is entirely out of her character, and fumbles at it charmingly.

And then we have Robbie, the Weavers' 13-year-old son, in an arresting performance by Jonah Bobo. Robbie is a hopeless romantic, but is also pretty observant about adult behavior, and has his parents' dilemma figured out perhaps better than they themselves do. I adored Robbie for his spontaneous, unembarrassed declarations of unrequited love -- and also for the way he stares down David Lindhagen (Kevin Bacon), the jerk who stole his mom away from his dad.

I was thinking that I would enjoy an entire film about Robbie, and that's when it struck me that screenwriter Dan Fogelman ("Tangled") has given us at least a half-dozen characters who are each deserving of their own movie. Heck, most flicks don't even give us one.

Co-directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa do a masterful job juggling the tone of "Crazy, Stupid Love.", which is often excruciatingly funny and sometimes mournful, and yet feels like it comes into these moods naturally rather than veering into them to facilitate the plot.

This is the sort of movie that shows us human emotions rather than tells us what they are supposed to look like. Like with Cal, who sneaks back to his former home at night to tend to the garden he knows has slipped Emily's mind. That's the whole of the man, in a moment.

3.5 stars out of four