Ads, memes, R.I.P.s

An email I received: “Join the DoorDash Community Today.”

The word “community” is overused.

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The loan officer in charge of our mortgage already sends us Christmas cards and fridge magnets. Recently, he’s begun sending postcards advertising U.S. national parks.

What’s his angle? I asked Karin, who works in banking.

He wants us to take a vacation so we’ll borrow more money from him.

Seriously?

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This has been making the rounds:

The meme varies: 35 years, 30 years.

Masculinity, smoking meats, and WW2 are constants. So is woeful grammar.

But the sociology is sound. As it happens, I’m reading three books about WW2. I also read about that war in December, January, and February; and I expect to do so again next month.

As for smoking meats: the closest thing I do is to boil scraps of leftover KFC, with other ingredients, in the rice cooker.

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I was saddened to read of the death of burger restauranteur “Rusty” Miller, beloved by Quito’s U.S. expatriates. This nice obit gets a detail wrong: it says “Rusty” closed his stores in 1985, but I’m sure I ate in one, just east of La Carolina, in the late ’80s. (I would’ve been very young if it was in ’85.) I knew the mustaches but not the man. I never knew that “Rusty” returned to Ecuador in the 2000s.

R.I.P. Miss Hultberg, school librarian and Minnesotan who loved cows.

R.I.P. Gene Hackman, his wife, and their dog, whose unusual deaths kept fans in suspense for days. Hackman was iconic, all right. Apart from other oldsters like Eastwood, Nicholson, De Niro, and Pacino, there is no comparable living U.S. actor. Cage, perhaps. Cruise is monumental but altogether different from Hackman. (Funny that The Firm, which features both of them, is so ho-hum.) My favorite Hackman performances are in Hoosiers and Night Moves.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 24: (a) Les rendez-vous de Paris; (b) Nelly & Monsieur Arnaud

Both of these movies, released a week apart from one another in the USA, are about men and women who talk about love while keeping it at arm’s length. In Les rendez-vous de Paris, they do much of their talking out of doors, in and around parks, markets, graveyards, and cafés; in Nelly & Monsieur Arnaud, they talk in restaurants and apartments. All the locations are stereotypically Parisian. Together, the movies suggest: If you want romance, go to Paris; if you want true love, stay away.

The great and prolific director of Rendez-vous is Éric Rohmer. (I’ve already reviewed another of his movies, A Summer’s Tale.) Gene Hackman, playing a hard-boiled detective in Arthur Penn’s thriller, Night Moves (1975), says, “I saw a Rohmer film once. It was kind of like watching paint dry.” This is correct. In Rendez-vous, the characters literally watch the paint dry in order to talk about it.

Roger Ebert says:

I think [Rohmer] believes that love is love and that flirtatious conversation is an entirely separate pleasure, not to be confused with anything else. … What the people in Rendezvous in Paris are really saying, underneath all of their words, is: “I am not available. You are not available. But let us play at being available because it is such a joy to use these words and tease with these possibilities, and so much fun to be actors playing lovers, since Paris provides the perfect set for our performance.” Rohmer splendidly illustrates the theory that Parisians possess two means of sexual intercourse, of which the primary one is the power of speech.

Ebert’s review is spot-on, and I have little to add to it. The same is true of his review of Nelly & Monsieur Arnaud:

What a delicate dance they perform. … It is a matter of great erotic fascination when two people are intrigued by the notion of becoming lovers, but are held back by the fear of rejection and the fear of involvement. Signals are transmitted that would require a cryptographer to decode. The difficulty is to send a message that can be read one way if the answer is yes, and the other way if the answer is no.

I’ll say nothing about the movies’ respective plots. (Rendez-vous alone contains three separate stories, and each is fairly complex.) I’ll just note this difference between the two movies. In Rendez-vous, the characters are still young, and their flirting is fraught with insecurity. Not so in Nelly & Monsieur Arnaud. Nelly may only be in her twenties, but, as played by Emmanuelle Béart, she’s an expert at wielding her beauty against men. And M. Arnaud (Michel Serrault) is a wily ex-judge and businessman who knows precisely what sort of allure he holds for one such as Nelly. Theirs is a dance, yes, but also a sparring match between two assured veterans. Compared to them, the lovers in Rendez-vous are amateurs.

Oh, and this: M. Arnaud and Nelly have money (or, at least, Nelly reasonably expects that she’ll end up with money because of her looks). For the students, scholars, and artists of Rendez-vous, life is more threadbare. This difference also matters.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 9: Mulholland Falls

Note: Please read the updates to the previous entry if you haven’t already done so.

And now, this month’s movie review.

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Assembled into a whole, Mulholland Falls is nothing special, but some of its parts are compelling, even poetic. In its best passages, the movie resembles Night Moves (1975). Both movies are about tough but thoroughly urbanized detectives who are lured away from Los Angeles into weird tracts of wilderness.

(The same is arguably true of Chinatown. In that movie, however, the plot’s spiritual center remains in Los Angeles. In Mulholland Falls and Night Moves, the spiritual center is out in the middle of nowhere.)

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The worst scenes of Mulholland Falls wallow in domesticity. Melanie Griffith – memorable for her portrayal of a teenaged runaway in Night Moves – is cast in Mulholland Falls as the wife of the main detective, played by Nick Nolte. Her role is to be sinless (though she does smoke). This is not what Griffith excels at. One wonders if she was included simply because of her association with the earlier movie.

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A slightly more interesting female character is the murder victim, played by Jennifer Connelly. She is revealed, in a series of flashbacks, to have been a warm-hearted prostitute. As the main story begins, her crushed body is discovered in a field where a new housing development is being built. Most of her bones have been broken. Her limbs are jelly-like.

This is the first interesting development. Why is this corpse in such an unusual state?

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Investigating the Connelly character’s murder, four detectives of the L.A.P.D. follow a lead out into the desert. They arrive at a test site for atomic bombs.

The landscape has certain bizarre features. Its keepers, military minions, exhibit even bizarrer behavior.

The strangest person of all is their leader, General Timms, played by John Malkovich. This actor – often, in my view, miscast – is perfectly suited for his role in Mulholland Falls. His quaint flamboyance is disconcertingly out of step with the clean-cut conventionality of his subordinates.

People are mostly empty space, he tells the Nolte character. Only the oddities of physics keep them from falling through the floor.

Nolte’s detective has little use for this point of view. He recalls the dead woman: all too solid, with crushed bones.

And yet there is something ephemeral about their mission. In one scene out in the desert, the Nolte character and his fellow detectives stand on the edge of an enormous hole. Here, evidently, the ground has disappeared.

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In another scene, the detectives sit inside a beach house, guarding a suspect. They’re unnerved by the rhythm of the ocean waves. They’d be comforted to hear traffic noises instead.

Suddenly, an officer keels over, dead. Solid bullets rip through walls that have been providing merely illusory protection. The detectives engage in a gunfight with unseen foe. When the dust settles, their suspect has disappeared, as if into thin air.

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In such movies as these, there’s usually just one detective: a knight-errant. In this movie, the four detectives stick together. This benefits certain scenes. When the detectives look down into the gaping hole in the desert, it’s better that there are several of them to comment on it; they’re like a questing fellowship or a party of explorers. But in other scenes, the surplus of detectives is distracting.

Historically, mid-century Los Angeles was protected by a special police posse, the Hat Squad, that used strongarm tactics to discourage organized criminals from operating in that city. (Such policing would be depicted with considerably sharper focus one year later, in the great L.A. Confidential.) One of the ironies of Mulholland Falls is that the practitioners of strongarm tactics are themselves subjected to them outside of their own jurisdictions.

There are other tantalizing hints about the operations of the L.A.P.D. The detectives’ slimy boss, the always watchable Bruce Dern, appears for one glorious little scene. I wish the movie had given him a larger part. But so it goes with Mulholland Falls. There are some fine elements, but they aren’t woven together into a satisfying whole.

The same is true of the movie’s score, composed by Dave Grusin (whom I admire for composing the score for Lucas). Some of its passages are not very good, and the whole is a bit of a mess. But certain parts of it are lovely.