The mid-to-late 90s represent a blind spot for me, at least in terms of cinema. I was drunk, for the most part, without money or means. I was living alone, which meant no cable, and I was in between relationships, which meant no movie nights. It was the winter of my discontent, a full five years before I took up writing about A&E.

It is for this reason I often find myself returning to that period, mining for great movies I might have missed along the way. This explains how – and why – I finally got around to watching The Sweet Hereafter late last week. The movie was fantastic, but I found myself distracted by one name during the opening credits.

Sarah Polley. 

I know Sarah Polley. That is to say I recognize her as the autobiographical voice behind 2013’s Stories We Tell. Polley downplayed her background throughout that documentary, passing herself off as a better-late-than-never B-actor. Upon further investigation, it turns out Sarah Polley was actually a teen sensation, having landed the lead role in CBC’s Road to Avonlea before she turned 11. That series was rebroadcast via Disney, a corporation that would eventually black-ball Polley for refusing to remove a peace symbol during a White House gala. The symbol was a sign of protest, a silent dig against the first Gulf War. Having seen fame’s early compromise, Polley’s focus began shifting.

In the mid-90s, Polley became an indie starlet, then an activist. She lost a pair of teeth during a protest in Toronto. Over the course of the next decade, she made a formidable transition into directing. Her feature-length debut, Away From Her, racked up seven Genie Awards in 2007, while appearing on more than a dozen major critics’ “Top 10” lists. Next came Take This Waltz, a touching meditation on relationships, the pre-publicity of which became overshadowed thanks to talk of an appearance by Sarah Silverman’s vagina.

Last May, Roadside Attractions released Stories We Tell – a documentary that chronicled Sarah Polley’s extensive search for her biological father. Polley positioned the film as a narrative about the everyday fictions people construct to keep the distant past at bay. Championed by critics, Stories We Tell has since been awarded Best Documentary by The National Board of Review and Best Documentary Screenplay by the Writers Guild of America (among other things).

At 35, it would seem that Sarah Polley is only now beginning to appreciate the long-term fruits of all her labor. For here we find an actor who lost her mother at 11, got spurned by Hollywood at age 13, and spent her entire childhood being raised by a man who it turns out was not her biological father. Yet, Sarah Polley has consistently proven bold enough to rise above, to oppose the Hollywood machine, to bypass an easy road at every turn along the way.

Consider this: During the late 90s, Sarah Polley famously turned down a role in Almost Famous that made Kate Hudson an Oscar-worthy name. Fast forward 15 years, and Kate Hudson’s making cameos on Glee. Sarah Polley, on the other hand, is a highly-respected actor, director, political spokeswoman and writer. Polley’s an atheist, and yet a true believer; a divorcee, newly married. She’s a staunch advocate for Toronto, her constant home and place of origin. She’s emerged at middle age a constant testament to her own assertion that less corporate backing results in more creative freedom.

Anyway, that’s a little bit of what I learned after watching 1997’s Sweet Hereafter, a unanimously-acclaimed motion picture featuring Sarah Polley as its moral conscience.

“This is a story about love and death in the golden land, and begins with the country. The San Bernardino Valley lies only an hour east of Los Angeles by the San Bernardino Freeway but is in certain ways an alien place: not the coastal California of the subtropical twilights and the soft westerlies off the Pacific but a harsher California, haunted by the Mojave just beyond the mountains, devastated by the hot Santa Ana wind that comes down through the passes at 100 miles an hour and whines through the eucalyptus windbreaks and works on the nerves. October is the bad month for the wind, the month when breathing is difficult and the hills blaze up spontaneously. There has been no rain since April. Every voice seems a scream. It is the season of suicide and divorce and prickly dread, wherever the wind blows.

The Mormons settled this ominous country, and then they abandoned it, but by the time they left the first orange tree had been planted and for the next hundred years the San Bernardino Valley would draw a kind of people who imagined they might live among the talismanic fruit and prosper in the dry air, people who brought with them Midwestern ways of building and cooking and praying and who tried to graft those ways upon the land. The graft took incurious ways. This is the California where it is possible to live and die without ever eating an artichoke, without ever meeting a Catholic or a Jew. This is the California where it is easy to Dial-A-Devotion, but hard to buy a book. This is the country in which a belief in the literal interpretation of Genesis has slipped imperceptibly into a belief in the literal interpretation of Double Indemnity, the country of the teased hair and the Capris and the girls for whom all life’s promise comes down to a waltz-length white wedding dress and the birth of a Kimberly or a Sherry or a Debbi and a Tijuana divorce and return to hairdressers’ school. “We were just crazy kids,” they say without regret, and look to the future. The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past. Here is where the hot wind blows and the old ways do not seem relevant, where the divorce rate is double the national average and where one person in every 38 lives in a trailer. Here is the last stop for all those who come from somewhere else, for all those who drifted away from the cold and the past and the old ways. Here is where they are trying to find a new life style, trying to find it in the only places they know to look: the movies and the newspapers.”

(Excerpted from “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream“)

Eugenio Mira is a director who understands the difference between a ticking suitcase and a bomb exploding. And he uses that difference to his advantage throughout the movie Grand Piano. Here we find a slice of Old Hollywood – a Hitchcockian thriller, featuring a lead character named Selznick, with a wink and a nod to Citizen Kane. Add a new Chicago looking old along with an opening theme right out of The Untouchables, and, conceptually, Grand Piano has a lot of good things working in its favor.

But a critical gap exists between pitch and execution, and the longer Grand Piano lingers on (which is only 90 minutes, by the way), the more implausible its lead character choices become. Tom Selznick (Elijah Wood) goes from making really dumb decisions, to making really smart decisions, to making inconceivably stupid decisions. During the first half-hour, Selznick is motivated by fear, during the second half-hour, self-preservation, and during the final half-hour, whatever Mira needs to keep the storyline afloat. It’s a common pitfall wherever big-screen thrillers are concerned. The writer and director work so hard on airtight set-up, they wind up sacrificing credibility down the road. Think Silent House, or House of Games, or even the final episode of Lost.

Grand Piano succeeds in mimicking the style and  tradition of Alfred Hitchcock. Mira employs an entire litany of Hitch standards including: psychedelic lighting, jagged camera angles, split-screens and The Vertigo Effect. But Mira fails to adjust integral plot points in accordance with the times. Back in 1959, moviegoers might’ve been willing to accept the real-world ineptitude of a North by Northwest. But expectations have evolved, and so too have storytellers’ ability to oblige. This isn’t the case toward the end of Grand Piano, a movie which may be entitled to a pass specifically because it’s an homage to early thrillers.

Finally, a word about the casting, as this represents a glaring oversight, to say the least. Elijah Wood is almost invisible as the leading man, a well-coiffed body in a board-stiff suit that’s performance – above and beyond playing the piano – feels equally starched. John Cusack, meanwhile, in his current pursuit of playing villainous men, seems completely out of place. The same can be said for a lot of the lead players, a dynamic which causes one to wonder how much better Grand Piano might’ve been with ample casting.

All told, Grand Piano is still an entertaining throwback, so long as one accepts it on those terms. A great deal of work went into synchronicity (Eugenio Mira’s also a talented composer), and, as such, Mira has tapped into a wellspring worth exploring. A little tightening on the story and some slightly better casting, and this director might be looking at a breakthrough down the road.

(Grand Piano is currently available via iTunes and OnDemand. It arrives in theaters on March 7th.)

“There’s a great quote that says, ‘Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty.’ I have children, and we always say the thing that makes kids hard to raise will probably make them great adults. But it’s all that defiance and all those things that society doesn’t want to recognize, or agree with. It’s kind of like they want you to go get in a line, walk over there and go through that door and ‘We’ll tell you what to do,’ and, ‘No, you can’t do that.’ I remember growing up and having teachers tell me, ‘Y’know, you’re not going to be anything,’ ‘You can’t surf for a living,’ ‘You can’t eat your surfboard.’ I mean, I heard it all. But that’s the time when you have to decide if you want to try to live for yourself or you want to try to live for other people.”

(From interview conducted by best-selling author Jake Ducey.)

Jake Johnson is a comer, a guaranteed presence via every movie he’s appeared in. Generally cast as either the cool-ass Bro (Safety Not Guaranteed) or platonic No (Drinking Buddies), Johnson also plays a recurring character in the FOX sitcom, New Girl. He’s got a voiceover in The Lego Movie (opening this weekend), and a significant role in Colin Trevorrow’s Jurassic World (slated for release in June of 2015).

Like I said: “Jake Johnson = comer.”

Unfortunately, Johnson also plays the only sympathetic character in Jenee LaMarque’s The Pretty One – a schizophrenic indie romp featuring Zoe Kazan in dual roles (a career choice twice as bad). The Pretty One‘s writing is stale, the story’s macabre, and you’re constantly distracted by that fat dude from Zodiac. Regardless, Mr. Johnson comes off swimmingly. I mean, he always does. The dude is just a pro.

(The Pretty One arrives in limited release this coming Friday.)

By March of 1995 Mad About You had reached the zenith of its network fame. Boasting the eight o’clock slot in NBC’s Must-See-TV line-up, Paul Reiser’s highly relatable situation comedy functioned as a lead-in to Friends, which was then followed by Seinfeld (a series which would eventually lampoon Mad About You in September of that same year). As the lowest rated of all three, Mad About You was still achieving a robust 15 share, admirable enough to covet a top 10 spot in the weekly Nielsen ratings. In the wake of Cheers, NBC’s prime-time priorities were shifting. Consequently, Paul Reiser – co-creator and co-star of Mad About You – had been called upon to host the March 18^th edition of Saturday Night Live, the first and only time the 38-year-old would be enlisted to do so.

Meghan was a fan, which meant that I – by extension – had become a fan, as well. I mean, Mad About You, that was us, y’know? How could it not be? Forget about the fact that Paul Buchman represented the prototypical 1990s New York nebbish, and Jamie Buchman, the safe-but-attainable career-minded woman. He had dark hair, and she was a blonde. He wore plaid shirts … and she was a blonde. He wore denim jeans … and she was a blonde. To a young and struggling couple living in the armpit of New Jersey, Paul and Jamie Buchman represented the art of possibility. New York City, Union Square, a one-bedroom opening out onto a fire escape. And they were married. They were married. They were so crazy-happy married. They were Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine, the empty promise of a Springsteen song (Walk tall, or, baby, don’t walk at all). Paul and Jamie Buchman represented the height of where blind faith could take us – one last dying remnant of a narrative gone cold.

More to the point, Paul and Jamie Buchman represented the reason I stood showering in a bath tub with no curtain now, watching steam fog up a mirror with brown metal rusting through. There was a bug inside the bathroom sink – black and shell-like, sliding down. There was a carpet in the main room, red and black with door-mat bristles. The outside hallway reeked like turpentine, despite no paint on cracking walls.

We were staying on the fourth floor of the Latham Hotel, a one-star establishment along 28th and 5th Avenue. The room cost $60, which I had paid through 3-inch glass.

“Did you know he wrote the theme song?” Meghan shouted. She was sitting on a desk chair in the corner of the bedroom.

“He wrote the what?” I shouted back.

“The theme song,” Meghan shouted. “Paul Reiser co-wrote the Mad About You theme song.”

I turned the shower off – C for hot and H for cold. I drip-dried on drab tiles.

Meghan was sitting by drawn curtains, denim jacket half-unbuttoned. She asked if I was ready. I told her I was not. She was behaving like a woman who had long since sworn off sex.

We went strolling north through Midtown, toward the New York we’d been advertised. We remained stunningly oblivious to corner stores and miles of scaffold. Looking up outside the Empire State, I was reminded of my only other visit to Manhattan, an 8th-grade field trip to Tower Two of the World Trade. There was an observation deck along floor 107, all waist-high bars and slanted glass. One could see the entire universe unfurling out there –  Fitzgerald’s Lost City, Platner’s Windows on the World. And yet, the only thing that I or any of my classmates could conceivably think to do was bow our heads and look straight down.

Meghan and I embarked upon a tour at Rockefeller Center, prompted by the notion this was Saturday, and, as such, NBC might provide us limited access to Paul Reiser. Alas, Studio 8H ran mostly empty, as did the Nightly News studio and the original Tonight Show set – a stunning array of hanging lights and bundled wires, tourists commenting on how much bigger all the props looked on TV. Following the tour, Meghan sought out a concierge, who assured us there were no remaining tickets for that evening’s SNL.

We ate dinner at The Hard Rock, where Meghan ordered a $6 daiquiri known as Strawberry Fields. Feigning disgust, I argued the use of a fake ID might get us booted. And yet, the reality was, my aggravation stemmed from shame – shame about the fact that I was poor, and Meghan was poor, and we were holed up in some poor hotel because I’d insisted on this trap café.

***

“We’re lost,” Meghan told me.

We were lost, continuing north-northwest along Riverside, in pursuit of a diner, the exterior of which was prominently featured throughout Seinfeld. A mutual friend assured us it was located “up near Columbia,” which Meghan and I assumed might make it reasonable to find. Only we were tourists, and, as such, New York City unfolded more like a neverending labyrinth than an easily-navigated system of grids. We zigged, and then we zagged, skirting fringes of the Harlem we’d been advertised.

“We should just hop on the parkway,” Meghan insisted. She was pointing off toward the Hudson with her cigarette. “There’s a huge green billboard on, like, every other corner.”

“It’s a bad idea,” I countered. “We commit to the wrong exit and it could take us hours to get back in.”

“Well, we need to think of something,” Meghan bristled. “My car is running on E. Why aren’t there any gas stations around here?”

“Maybe we should just give up,” I whispered.

Neither of us seemed too keen about the prospect. I mean, what were we to tell our friends, many of whom we’d promised close-up pictures of the diner? Alas, it was decided: We would reverse course, doubling back toward Manhattan, en route to see if any last-minute standby SNL tickets had been released.

We were directed to a lobby inside of 30 Rock – jet-black marble, mustard trim – where we stood with several others. Molly Ringwald rambled through around 11, followed by the actor who had played Phillip Spaulding on Guiding Light. A few minutes later, a network page emerged, declaring, “We can take another.” Before Meghan or I could summon the initiative, a nearby couple raised their hands. A rope was lifted. They were escorted through.

Meghan and I called it quits just after midnight. A hush had fallen over 5th Avenue, and we reveled in the silence, staring past our dark reflections in the garish windows. Meghan lit a cigarette. She leaned her back against a wall.

“We could give it one last shot,” I murmured. I was staring at a storefront – heat-lamp orange, flanked by flowers.

“What, Saturday Night?” Meghan said. “That show’s as good as over.”

“Yeah, but the entire cast’ll still be up there,” I responded. “You gotta figure they’re gonna exit through the lobby.”

“What about the car?” Meghan said. “If we don’t pick up the car by 1 it’s gonna cost another $15.”

“OK, so we’ll go pick up the car,” I said. “I’ll wait outside while you hurry in.”

Meghan re-emerged from 30 Rock around 1:40, boasting autographs from David Spade and Kevin Nealon, Adam Sandler and Chris Farley. Annie Lennox hurried past, Meghan told me, Chris Elliott ignored me.

“What about Paul Reiser?” I wondered.

Paul Reiser never showed.

I bought a 6-pack on our way back to the Latham, then sat drinking it while Meghan fell asleep. Our relationship felt older now, forever dog-eared and unclear. All the greetings cards read desperate; all the plans, void of conceit.

I opened a window. I tapped my smoke out on the ledge. I watched the ashes drift like snowflakes, several stories into the dark. There was no posh view of the city; there was no atmosphere at all. Just one concrete wall across the alley, and an empty sky too bright for stars.

Day 776

(Moving On is a regular feature on IFB.)

©Copyright Bob Hill

“Try to be great. Try to give extra. Try to be bold. Try to invent your own reality. Try to do what’s not been done before. Don’t even get started if you’re gonna try to do some mediocre shit, cause there’s so much of that. Don’t do it just to make noise. There’s too much noise. Give me something amazing. Give me something new. Give me something I haven’t seen before in a way I haven’t seen it. Make me feel something. Find some kind of magic. Go toward something that’s inexplicable. Give me something that’s aggressive and gnarly. Chew up the world. Come at it from some other place. But just don’t give me the same shit over and over again, cause I don’t want it.”

Consider for a moment the sticktoitiveness required to complete a documentary upon the order of Tim’s Vermeer. First off, Tim’s Vermeer required an artisan. And not just any artisan, mind you. Tim’s Vermeer required an absolutely exceptional artisan … a savant, by all appearances, who was equal parts innovative and intuitive. Next, the film required said artisan to possess an exhausting combination of both malleability and focus. Beyond that, the film required eight full years worth of time … time and enough money to finance international travel, production and architectural costs. Lastly, Tim’s Vermeer required an inconceivable shitload of good fortune … good fortune and good faith that every wrinkle could be ironed.

And so what does it mean, exactly, the fact that Tim’s Vermeer ultimately succeeded on an Oscar-worthy scale? Well, assuming you’re of the belief that revelation and change are the highest virtues any film can aspire to, Tim’s Vermeer represents one of the most effective documentaries of the past 15 years. It also represents a seismic shift in both the historical perspective and artistic application of oil painting. It’s Bob Ross for the intellectual set, and it’s highly recommended.

(Tim’s Vermeer opens in limited release this Friday.)

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