Whitestone, Queens - June 13th, 2020, 12:11 PM

Review: "Vanilla Sky" (2001)

Today I saw a big article on NYC movies. Obviously there are tons of NYC movies and, when I review one here, I try not to review the big famous ones -- instead, I look for the forgotten or overlooked NYC movies, trying to make my meagre audience aware of those they might have missed. Like this article indicates, I also try to review movies that give you a sense of the city, a feeling of living and experiencing it -- not just where the city is used as a convenient, familiar backdrop.

One such example is Vanilla Sky.

A few weeks ago I blogged something that included a clip from the 2001 Tom Cruise movie where he is driving around a deserted Manhattan, stops in an empty Times Square, gets out of his car, starts running, then stops and yells into the (not exactly vanilla) sky. We learn later on that this moment was probably some kind of technical glitch in an artificial dream that he is living through --  and that is apparently the plot of the movie.

I say "apparently the plot of the movie" because, to be honest, the plot makes no friggin' sense. Tom Cruise plays a guy very much like ... Tom Cruise: handsome, rich, famous, lots of broads (one too many as it turns out) who gets into a car crash, messes up his face, gets accussed of murder ... and then, from there on, it becomes a weird heady trip.

This movie was on the back-end of a trend that really started in 1999 with movies like The Sixth Sense, Fight Club, and Being John Malkovich where the entire reality of the story, the world the movie is set in, gets totally undermind and flipped around. But instead of using this plot-twist once, Vanilla Sky tries to outdo them but have numerous "reality redefining" moments and you get nice and confused until you don't care anymore and you don't really understand what the "vanilla sky" is or why we should care and then Kurt Russell shows up as some kind of psychiatrist/interrogator and Cameron Diaz gets to look hot and act crazy and Penelope Cruz gets to look hot and get naked and a bunch of other really good actors spend their time telling Tom Cruise that he's an asshole and, yeah, that's about it.

But it's still a great NYC movie -- the city is not only lovingly rendered, it becomes a real character in the movie, the filmmakers give you a great sense of life in the city. I also have a personal love for this movie -- in the scene where Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz are driving around (she's busting his balls because she believe that once a guy sleeps with a woman, he owes the lady his entire soul -- and presumably money), and then she drives off the 96th street overpass on Riverside Drive. During this scene they drive past the building I grew up in -- so that was cool.

Anyway, see Vanilla Sky, preferably in an inebriated state, because then you might understand it better. 

Oh, btw, Tom Cruise couldn't drive into Times Square and yell anymore -- in 2007, the city turned most of it into a pedestrian plaza so now he'd have to go yell elsewhere.

Black Lives Matter Solidarity Bicycle Protest

Review: "Sea of Love" & "Crimes and Misdemeanors" (1989)

The fall of 1989 was an eventful time -- not unlike now. Communism in Eastern Europe and the Berlin Wall were collapsing. Apartheid was drawing to a close in South Africa. Here in NYC there was a legendary election raging between three men who had and would be Mayor -- Ed Koch, David Dinkins, and Rudy Giuliani. And our movie theaters saw the debut of two classic NYC crime thrillers: Sea of Love and Crimes and Misdemeanors. Watching them again after 30 years, they more than hold up -- they are examples of great storytelling, brilliant acting, peaks in the arcs of historic careers, and wonderful NYC movies. Despite being thrillers, and being very different movies, they have one big thing in common: they are studies in the trials and tribulations of becoming middle-aged.

Sea of Love: Al Pacino stars as a Manhattan cop named Frank Keller. He's a classic movie detective: getting older, divorced, drinking problem, wondering if he should "put in his papers" to retire at "his 20" (years on the force that is), and generally depressed about his life. Meanwhile he's investigating a series of murders -- men who had answered personal ads turning up dead, shot in the head. The latest victim had a 45 record playing when he was found -- "Sea of Love." Frank and his new partner Sherman (investigating a similar murder in Queens) start an undercover operation where they will place a personal ad in the paper, meet up with women at a restaurant, and then take the glasses from the dates to swab them for prints. They hope that this will link them with the killer. But then Frank meets a woman named Helen on one of these dates -- and they fall for each other, hard. Suddenly Frank finds a new unexpected love, a new joie de vivre, but there continue to be more murders and Helen starts to look more and more guilty -- until he finds out the truth and solves the case. (I remember the tagline for this movie: "He's found somone who's either the love of his life ... or the end of it!").

This movie was a big deal for Al Pacino -- his career had been in decline for most of the 1980s, after his triumphs of the 1970s and early '80s (think The Godfather to Scarface period). Sea of Love was his comeback, a big hit that started the next act of his career. Meanwhile John Goodman was breaking out from Roseanne and his performance as Sherman made him a big movie actor too. Ellen Barkin was a star then too, and few performances are as sexy and frightening as her's in this movie. What's fascinating about this movie is that, while it's certainly a sexy thriller, it's also a working class NYC movie, set largely on a still-then middle-class Upper West Side. It's both extremely familiar and also exotic -- it's about becoming middle age, trying to find a new happiness, figuring out life, working hard for a living while also trying to find excitement and thrills. 

Crimes and Misdeameanors: Woody Allen has made nearly 50 movies, many of them great. This may very well be his masterpiece. Woody has directed numerous comedies and a few dramas but this was his first movie to combine both comedy and drama. In fact, the movie contains two stories -- one comic, one tragic -- and the endings of each make them come together in a way you wouldn't expect. The drama centers around a man named Judah (played by Martin Landeau who got an Oscar nomination for it), an extremely successful eye doctor who has recently overseen the opening of a new opthalmology wing at a hospital. But Judah has a dark secret: he has been conducting an affair for a few years with a former airline stewardess (a scary Angelica Huston) who is making increasingly desperate demands that Judah leave his wife or else she'll confront his entire family about his adultery and also reveal his financial chicaneries. Judah calls up his brother Jack -- a dissolute character with underworld connections -- who sets up a hit to kill the mistress. Will Judah get caught and the scheme unravel? You need to see the movie to find out! Meanwhile, the comic story concerns a man named Cliff (played by Woody), a struggling documentary filmmaker who also has a failing marriage (although no mistress) who is making a TV special on his very successful brother-in-law, a pompous Harvey Weinstein-like producer named Lester. One of the producers on the TV special is a woman named Hailey who both Cliff and Lester fall for -- will she choose either man or reject both of them? Again, you need to see the movie to find out! And how do the stories relate, one makes them link-up? Again, only Woody Allen would make the connecting character a rabbi who's going blind ...

Woody Allen is not only one of our greatest directors -- he's also probably the most brilliant screenwriters of all time (he's been nominated for more screenplay Oscars than anyone in history). The Crimes and Misdemeanors script is perfect -- specifically the way that these seemingly unrelated stories are interrcut and made to relate to each other, the tightness and swiftness of the plots, the enormous amount of character development and emotional complexity in a few lines of dialogue, it is simply the best kind of storytelling you can ever encounter. The major overarching theme of this movie is seeing -- looking at what's in front of you and also trying to see something that may or may not be there. This is a movie, in some ways, about people who are looking not only for love but also for mercy and justice and order in the world -- a kind of God -- and not finding it. I remember reading that this is the movie where Woody looked for God and "found Him not there." This movie won't make you find God (in fact, his absence will only be confirmed) but you will certainly see a truly great movie by one of NYC's best filmmakers.

Rebel Radio Ratings

The entire world has been stood on its proverbial ear during this pandemic. Here in NYC we can see a lot of it in front of us: the people wearing masks, the empty streets, the signs for COVID-19 related messages and directions and warning signs everywhere, everyone staying and working at home (if they're lucky enough still to have jobs), and all sorts of other changes. 

One thing I'm quite sure none of us thought would be radically changed by the pandemic is something we can't see at all but can all hear: the radio. Specifically, the radio ratings.

In normal times, here in NYC, there's a basic pattern to the radio ratings: Lite-FM, the soft rock station, is far ahead all others at Number 1, and CBS-FM and WSKQ (Spanish language) compete for Number 2. Then the other talk, pop and rap music, Spanish-language, and all-news station round up the Top Ten.

Not now.

Now WSKQ is way ahead in the ratings and Lite-FM and CBS-FM are competing for second place. What's interesting is what's rounding out the Top Ten now: while all-news and Spanish language are holding steady, the pop and talk stations have absolutely crashed in the ratings. Even more shocking? Public radio and classical music are now in the Top Ten! Even more bizarre? The huge music station Z-100 is almost tied in the ratings with WQXR (classical music). 

A few months ago that would have been unthinkable -- and now it's for real, now it's normal ...

I suspect Spanish speaking people who are in quarantine are enjoying listening to Spanish radio, boosting the ratings significantly. Since people are not spending a lot of time in waiting rooms and stores and other public places, the ratings for the stations most usually played in the background of them (i.e. "lite" music and oldies) have clearly seen drops. Classical music can very soothing, especially in the house, so that might explain the ratings rise there. And people want intelligent news and information, hence the boost for public radio.

But why the big declines for pop and talk radio? Well, most people can stream pop music these days and, for talk, people don't want to hear other people blither about the horror we're all living through. And talk radio is an exhausted, old-school, boring format anyway -- especially the ugly Republican politics always being discussed. If anything should scare Republicans about their prospects in November, perhaps the crash in talk radio ratings is one of the most prescient -- people are literally voting with their ears. 

The new normal of 2020 in NYC continues to surprise. 

Anthony Bourdain Remembered

Today is the sad anniversary of Anthony Bourdain's death two years ago. I blogged about the time I met him (sorta) two years ago. Now someone who hired him to work at a doomed restaurant two years ago has written a touching, interesting piece about what it was like to work with the man before he became famous.

We still miss you, man. 

Historic Times

This weekend in NYC there were massive Black Lives Matters protests and, today, the city starts Phase 1 of "reopening."

While we're always living in some version of history, we are most indeed living in truly historic times. It's horrible, wonderful, exciting, depressing, bizarre and overwhelming all at once. 

Still Here

It seems like every day there's a new article about how COVID-19 and now racial strife are causing some New Yorkers to move permanently to places far away, to places cheaper, less dense, more rural (and let's face it, more white), and overall less crazy than NYC. They see NYC as in decline, going back to the "bad old" days, they're scared about what the future of the city holds for them, and, since we're clearly in a time of crises, they're "outta here."

So leave! Fine by me!

Here's the way I see it: living in NYC is an investment of money and endurance. Basically, a test of sanity. But the payoff, the benefits, passing that test, and the joy of living here far outweight the problems and challenges. There's a lesson in investing in the stock market -- when there's a big downturn or even Gawd forbid a crash, the last thing you do is pull all your money out of it. Because while the present moment, the moment of crises, is very scary, in the longterm the crises eventually passes, the stock market recovers -- sometimes dramatically, sometimes even bigger and better than before.

Operating out of fear, making huge life changing decisions in the middle of a crises, is the worse kind of decision making. Only after the crises has passed, and stability (to some extent) has been restored, can rational decisions truly be made. 

NYC has weathered many crises in its history, both past and present -- "Fear City" and the near bankruptcy in the 1970s, the crack epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s, 9/11, the financial crises, Sandy, and now COVID-19/the racial turmoil in the streets. 

And guess what? We'll have more crises in the future! But NYC is more resilient than anyone can possibly imagine -- we always come back, we always have, we'll survive  this present crises, and we'll come back from future crises as well. 

Just like other great world cities -- think Rome, Paris, London, Tokyo, and others which survived having literal bombs reigned down on them -- the five boroughs will endure forever.

Christo RIP

The conceptual artist Christo died this week at the age of 84. He was famous for erecting enourmous temporary exhibits where he'd wrap or drape or insert huge canvasses or objects around man-made structures like buildings or bridges or natural wonders like islands or sea coasts and give them an entire new dimensionality, a new way of looking at them, that had never existed before.

Along with his longterm partner Jeane-Claude, Christo's career spaneed decades and continents. 

In NYC, Christo is best remembered for The Gate, his huge early 2005 projects where he took over Central Park, all three miles of it, and erected pale orange "gates" up and down the paths of the city's most popular park. The exhibit was a sensation, a truly memorable and amazing thing to behold (I remember it well) and I blogged about it on The Gates 10th Anniversary in 2015. 

RIP.

One Night on the George Washington Bridge

I hate sitting in traffic.

This goes without saying -- everyone hates sitting in traffic. But late one Sunday night, around 10 PM, I was sitting in the cab of a U-Haul truck that my brother was drving, stuck on the George Washington Bridge. The traffic was bumper to bumper, and we inched ... and inched ... and inched ... and innnnnnnnnnnnnnnnched forward, bringing us slowwwwwwwly back home into Manhattan.

This was a transitional moment for both of us.

My brother was moving the last of his stuff home after having lived elsewhere for a few years, and he was driving me back from college after I had graduated two days earlier. All of my stuff, my entire life in a sense, was packed into that truck. My future, the entire rest of my life, was right ahead of me, just across this bridge, just sitting there, waiting to start. This wasn't simply another night in my life, just another traffic jam, just another bridge crossing -- this was a demarcation point, a special and a unique moment, a bridge both literal and figurative, between the past and the future, between being a kid and becoming an adult, between hope and destiny ... 

... and it was taking forever!  

Sometimes I feel like I'm still stuck in that traffic jam, an extremely young man, getting ready for my life to start, waiting for the promised excitement to begin.

I've thought about that night, that moment, on the GWB a lot lately because it's hard to square that world with the one we're living in now -- a triple whammy of pandemic, economic depression, and deep racial strife. On that night on the GWB, Bill Clinton was president, George Pataki was governor, Rudy Guiliani was mayor, the World Trade Centers still stood, Iraq remained uninvaded, George W. Bush was Governor of Texas, Barack Obama was an Illinois State Senator, Donald Trump was a has-been real estate developer, the Internet was brand new and could only be accessed with a phone dial-up, talking about phones, most people still used landlines, very few people had cell phones, smartphones were still almost a decade away from being invented, newspapers were still printed in abundance, Howard Stern was still married to his first wife and and Jackie Martling was still one of his sidekicks, Harvey Weinstein was still running Miramax and was a respected Oscar-winning producer, Bill Cosby was still America's dad, there were no pedestrian plazas or bikeshares on the streets of NYC, lots of old buildings still existed and lots huge fancy ones didn't, there were no streaming shows, no Golden Age of Television (not yet at least, The Sopranos had just hit the air and the "Golden Age" monicker was still not invented yet), Amazon still only sold books, and so much more that existed and was going on then that is gone or that has become unrecognizable today. 

Twenty-plus years later it feels like everything is falling apart. These days destruction rules and creation is in retreat.

We live in an age of nihilism, of "disruption", of "creative destruction," of "cancel culture" and neo-McCarthyism, of everyone just wanting just to "burn it down", of people wanting to destroy other people and cultures and businesses and governments and whole industries and whole societies, of ruining and wrecking and "taking down" people while not helping anyone or creating anything, of perpetual rage and ruin. 

This is not the future I wanted, for myself or anyone, during that night on the GWB so long ago.

I was deluded enough to think back then that the future ahead, my future, across that bridge, across the new century/millenium due to start in a few short months, would be a glorious place, an exciting world, one surely much better than the century and childhood I was leaving behind me in what F. Scott Fitzgerald called "the dark fields of the republic" that "rolled on under the night." The blinking lights of the city ahead, just over this jammed bridge, were my green light, my fresh new world, surely destined to be magical, an arcadia of sorts, where the old problems of the past would vanish and a new pancea of possibilities would emerge. After all, it was a time of great peace and prosperity and the future looked bright -- certainly it was only going to get better.

Right?

Nope. It got worse. A lot worse. And here we are today, living in the hopelessly divided "United" States of America, the future looking grim. If only had someone told me that one night twenty-something years ago on the George Washington Bridge ... I might not have gotten so annoyed at the traffic. 

P.S. This is one of the reasons Mr NYC exists -- it's an act of creation, an act of optimism in a pessimisstic place, a place where we "build it up", a place where hope and kindness rule. As always, Mr NYC remain perpetually unfashionable.