Those eyes, those eyes … Marion Cotillard can beat the world back with those eyes. And she does throughout The Immigrant, a rich and gorgeous period picture that is equally well-realized and well-acted. Set in 1920s New York City, James Gray’s motion picture shares both the palette and the pace of The Godfather, Part II (particularly the young Vito Corleone segments). The set up is similar – a fleeing immigrant escapes to America where she is left to make it on her own – and the two films maintain a similar stance on how American culture praises money most of all. But the broad-stroke similarities end there. Jeremy Renner, Joaquin Phoenix … all the major players are superb. But in the end it all comes back to Marion Cotillard, and the way she beats the world back with those eyes – a French actress playing a Polish refugee living in a Russo-Jewish neighborhood in post-war New York City. How’s that for an American dream?

(The Immigrant opens in limited release today.)

I am not a fan of guided tours, nor the guided tourists who tour them. Too many questions, too much historical bedwetting, too many guests determined to lead the tour themselves. Along those lines, visitors to Oak Alley Plantation in Vacherie, Louisiana can be seen posing for selfies in the slave quarters, dribbling ice cream down their T-shirts, paying $20-a-head to greet employees dressed in period garb, beset on all four sides by the massive weight that pulled these oak trees down.

I spend an hour at Oak Alley before heading north on 55 to Jackson, where I visit the one-time home of Medgar Evers. A civil rights activist, Evers was gunned down in his driveway by a white supremacist named Byron De La Beckwith. Beckwith lived free for another 30 years before being convicted of Evers’ murder in February of 1994.

Upon arrival in Memphis the following day I visit the hotel where Martin Luther King was assassinated. The facade of the Lorraine has been preserved, yet I find an anemic lack of tourists idly wandering the vicinity. The lion’s share have already departed on a chartered bus to Graceland, where they’ll fork over $34-a-head to roam the castle of another King, one who crossed the racial barrier before descending into sloth.

Bob Hill’s America: General Index

Heading east from Santa Monica, none of the locals has any idea how one might find Route 66. “The real Route 66?” a gas station attendant replies, defiantly. “Oh, man, I’ve no idea.” I am standing in a service plaza that is actually named Route 66, approximately half-a-day’s drive east of a zero-mile marker for the original road. As I continue into Arizona, I become all but convinced the 90-year old highway’s current existence is little more than urban legend, an inside joke among the yokels, if you will. GPS is useless and my atlas offers no additional guidance whatsoever. That is until the markers begin to take hold – “Route 66,” they read in stencil, “Please follow exit Y or Z“. For the better part of an afternoon, I weave in and out of decommissioned highway, a petrol graveyard full of septic tanks and crumbling marquees. The late-day sun glares bright and hard, throwing blood onto horizon. I am speeding through north Texas, prepared to jackknife down to New Orleans.

Bob Hill’s America: General Index

“With so many trees in the city, you could see the spring coming each day until a night of warm wind would bring it suddenly in one morning.  Sometimes the heavy cold rains would beat it back so that it would seem that it would never come and that you were losing a season of your life. This was the only true sad time in Paris because it was unnatural. You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person had died for no reason. In those days, though, the spring always came finally; but it was frightening that it had nearly failed.”

(Excerpted from A Moveable Feast)

“I just spent three weeks in the hospital,” a middle-age man explains. “I been tellin’ my sister to nail that trick stair down for months. Wouldn’t you know I’d be the one to throw my back out on it?”

The man is speaking to an elderly woman behind the counter at a Motel 6 in Eloy, Arizona. The man’s mother has just had her leg amputated, he explains. He is on his way to Mexico to visit his teenage daughter who has just given birth.

The man stands 6’2, salt-and-pepper crew cut overshadowed by a massive web tattoo spiraling outward from his elbow. He excuses himself to check the license number on his car.

“Poor guy,” the attendant addresses me. “Says he just got out of the hospital.”

“Yeah, yeah, I heard that,” I reply. I am standing by a display case along the north side of the wall. “Say, I called down here a few minutes ago. I was looking for a wifi password? Room 216?”

“Just give me a minute,” the attendant responds.

The attendant’s name tag reads “NORMA”. Norma’s hair is dyed orange with matching eyebrows penciled in. Norma’s collar is permanently stained and there are individual grains of make-up caught between the thick folds of her skin. Norma smiles. I smile back. It is understood no further business will be conducted until the tattooed man returns.

A cow bell clangs above the door signaling the tattooed man’s return. He slaps a credit card on the counter, mentions something about having an artificial hip. Norma hands the man a room key which he thanks her for profusely. He hobbles through the doorway, disappears around the bend.

I cannot say for sure whether it’s the 10-minute wait or the $3.29 password, perhaps the dried-up drops of urine on Room 216’s toilet or the live cricket in its bed, maybe it’s the absence of humility or the fact tomorrow will be Sunday, and – as such – there’d really be no point in me driving over to the offices of Arizona’s InBusiness Magazine (That magazine’s publisher, a man named Rick McCartney, has been refusing to pay me $1950 worth of freelance fees for years), maybe it’s all this ugly immigration business or the fact I’m deep inside a state that prides itself on Sheriff Joe, maybe it’s the dry heat or the ill-conceived construction, maybe it’s the notion I’ve traveled all this way to visit an old west mining town where the locals have been reenacting the same bloodthirsty gun battle for 130 years. Maybe it’s all of these things. Maybe it’s none of them. Regardless, I cannot seem to shake my overwhelming lack of empathy. Fuck this place, this backward pit called Arizona. I look forward to crossing the border into New Mexico tomorrow.

Bob Hill’s America: General Index

Jesse Eisenberg is just one of those guys … one of those guys whose prose pops up in The New Yorker and McSweeney’s despite the fact it really has no right to be there (See also: Michael Cera). He’s one of those guys who fancies himself an uncompromising intellectual despite appearing in bullshit fare like Now You See Me. Jesse Eisenberg is one of those guys the general public loves in certain roles (i.e., Adventureland, The Social Network) despite ignoring the overwhelming majority of his films.

Jesse Eisenberg is just one of those guys, alright … one of those guys who, when asked what originally attracted him to a movie like The Double, might simply stare ahead and say, “It’s Dostoyevsky.”

That’s who Jesse Eisenberg is.

Unfortunately, Dostoevsky does not translate well amidst the dark and tangled mess that is Richard Ayoade’s The Double. Ayoade’s movie is bland and unrewarding, the cinematic equivalent of being locked inside a vacancy. Certain critics will employ the term “dystopian” when attempting to describe Ayoade’s film. What these critics are actually trying to say is that The Double is irretrievably dire and grim. That being the case, one’s best bet might be to stay at home and enjoy an encore screening of Adventureland. It features Jesse Eisenberg in a relatable coming-of-age tale, and – as the title might suggest – it also represents the polar opposite of dystopia.

Your best bet: Revisit 2002’s Roger Dodger, a largely overlooked motion picture which features Eisenberg in his most endearing role. It’s currently streaming via Netflix.

(The Double opens in limited release this Friday.)

Boarders, breakers, bikers, ballers, brawlers, bleachers, beachers and stoics, their eyes fall soft and easy from the sunlight and the glare. There are ex-cons, short cons, gamers, marks and framers, an entire promenade divided equally between predator and prey. There are the drug-fueled dregs of Dogtown, Z-Town relics bronzed with muscle despite a pale lack of ambition. There are guitars and sitars, a lyric poem, a bonfire song. There is the S.M.P. and  the P.O.P, the Ginger Court and Muscle Beach. There are Schwarzenegger and Morrison, airbrushed pictures of their heroes on the wall. There is chess and there are checkers, falling dominoes and rank patchouli. There are steel doors slamming harshly where only vampires dare to roam. They’re out here sleeping neath the cosmos, all but begging me to come along.

Bob Hill’s America: General Index

The temperature reaches 95 by midday and I stop off to change my blue jeans into shorts. The fan is playing catch-up and there are dead flies on my grill. The windshield is dirty, the interior is scolding and the air outside smells charred like burning. It is the advent of brush fire season throughout the San Bernardino Valley, and I am reminded of how brilliantly Joan Didion wrote about this region nearly half a century ago. I am stuck in traffic on the 405 now, one final push before I spill out onto Lincoln Boulevard. No more roadway, no more desert. Nothing left but sea and sand.

Bob Hill’s America: General Index

Weaving, winding, carving deep through snow-capped mountains, Utah summits grasping weakly to what still remains of winter. The Douglas firs fall down in breakneck order, the empty streets feel like the backdrop from some movie. I stop for gas outside Park City and the attendant can’t believe that I’m an “actual New Yorker.” I think better of explaining I identify much more with Philadelphia and continue driving south along the interstate. It is twilight when I break the plane of northwest Arizona. Looking off toward my left I am reminded of the final stanza from Bob Dylan’s “Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie”:

You can either go to the church of your choice,
Or you can go to Brooklyn State Hospital.
You’ll find God in the church of your choice,
You’ll find Woody Guthrie in Brooklyn State Hospital.

And though it’s only my opinion,
I may be right or wrong,
You’ll find them both,
In the Grand Canyon
At sundown.

Bob Hill’s America: General Index

The problem with The Amazing Spider-Man 2 – in a word – is Stan Lee. That’s two words, I know. But they both refer to one concept, that being the idea that blatant, shameless self-reference is the bane of any worthwhile superhero franchise. This is not to say there’s no place for humor or lightheartedness in the Marvel/DC Universe because, quite frankly, humor is what allows both comic books and their celluloid counterparts to maintain a sense of buoyancy. But this odd, ongoing tradition of having Stan Lee – a giant in the industry – pop up throughout the majority of Marvel movies is embarrassing, if not entirely off-putting. These cameos, particularly the more recent ones, take one out of the suspended reality most superhero movies have come to rely on. And for what? To have a 91-year old man with unsavory acting chops deliver some throw-away one-liner? No, sir. There really is no place for it. Least of all in a franchise the likes of Spider-Man, a franchise that’s still battling to overcome the specter of its predecessor (Sam Raimi – for anyone who happens to be keeping score – is now up 2-0 in terms of critical superiority).

The Stan Lee issue speaks to something much larger, of course – the use of in-jokes and subtle winks to compensate for – or distract from – a general lack of substantive writing. Consider, by way of example, that during the opening action sequence of The Amazing Spider-Man 2 there is not only an unnecessary cameo by Lee, but two separate references to the original Spider-Man theme. The first features the theme serving as Peter Parker’s ringtone, the second Parker whistling the tune while in costume (less than one minute later). Cute, right? Wrong. Both references serve no other purpose save for distracting from the matter at hand, forcing viewers to temporarily consider how it might be possible for a 47-year old song to exist in a world where Spider-Man only recently came into being. One might argue this is a minor issue … and one might be correct. But when the joke’s repeated and then stomped on before being topped off by some one-liner from Stan Lee, the cumulative effect becomes stultifying, bordering upon inane.

What’s the point, beyond seeming coy? Die-hard comic fans are going to see each of these movies regardless of whether Lee appears in them or not. The remainder of the box office public doesn’t care. Meanwhile, as a writer/director, you wind up forcing a square peg into a round hole and for what? I mean, can you imagine Christian Bale running by Michael Keaton amidst the dark-end streets of Gotham only to have Keaton turn to the camera and say, “Hey, where’d he get that costume?” What if every Marvel comic book was required to include a cameo by Stan Lee? Poppycock, I say. Nothing more than cornball nonsense … and that, for any of you who might be wondering, is precisely what The Amazing Spider-Man 2 feels like. Dane DeHaan is fantastic and Andrew Garfield is OK, but it’s not enough to save a movie that’s lacking any soul, any deep-down sense of what people actually relate to in terms of style, motivation, layered conflicts and betrayal. The movie’s fun and the special effects are dazzling, but there’s very little left to latch on to once the CGI has run its course. I’d suggest that maybe what it needs is a little bit more, but the reality is The Amazing Spider-Man 2 would have benefited a great deal from trying to cram in just a little bit less.

(The Amazing Spider-Man 2 opens in theaters nationwide today.)