The Holdovers (Alexander Payne, 2023)

I wanted to adore The Holdovers. This is the kind of warm, cozy film I can imagine someone keeping on in the background during that odd interzone between Christmas and New Year's Eve when those lucky enough to be off work have no clue what to do with themselves. Indeed, The Holdovers takes place across that very week when Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa, gangly and totes adorbs) gets held over for the holidays with several other unfortunate students at the New England boarding school they attend. Largely as a result of his curmudgeonly behavior, classics professor Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti) is tasked with supervising the holdovers and much tension arises when he expects diligent study from the misfits under his care. Payne, along with screenwriter David Hemingson and cinematographer Eigil Bryld, deserve whatever Oscar nods may come their way for evoking moments when something could happen. With an empty campus as their canvas, the film's architects paint situations pregnant with possibility, to quote Margo Channing in a film underestimated for its warmth, including the possibility of sitting on your ass and doing nothing at all.

Would that the film progressed in such a lazy fashion. But alas, the lash of narrative progression must strike down upon us. It's ye olde vertically compelling, horizontally moribund problem of mainstream cinema once more. In a crusty deus ex machina, the group of holdovers gets broken up when one student's rich father arrives on campus via helicopter and airlifts all of the the boys save Angus to a ski trip. That leaves Angus alone with Paul as both Come To Terms With Things and Payne abandons the polyphonic density of, say, Paul Thomas Anderson's greatest film Licorice Pizza (2021) for story beats that march forward in lockstep. In a career-defining performance I hope/predict will earn her an Oscar, Da'Vine Joy Randolph airs out the proceedings a bit as Mary Lamb, a cook mourning the loss of her son in the Vietnam War. But the depth she provides is not enough to swerve away from the predictable spectacle of Paul finding a heart and Angus learning valuable lessons on the cusp of adulthood. Still, I expect to enjoy The Holdovers in fitful chunks around 2038 on whatever streamer is left standing long after they've all adopted ad-supported plans.

Grade: B+

The Verdict (Sidney Lumet, 1982)

VAGUE SPOILERS

 

The Mr. asked me why I would keep the digital file of The Verdict that I procured to watch this feted middlebrow product. And that's as good a summation as any about our feelings for this extremely okay film - far from a masterpiece but not bad enough to get enraged about or make fun of. The first half is an unforgiving drag. Paul Newman plays an alcoholic lawyer who takes on a malpractice case that is sure to be settled out of court. The case centers on a comatose woman whom Newman observes several times in a hospital. During one visit, he has an unconvincing epiphany (signified by staring at her longer than previously) and decides to try the case for more money. The trial picks up the pace. But at 75 minutes into the film, it comes far too late. Lumet and screenwriter David Mamet perform a twist on the trope of the younger female foil (Charlotte Rampling) improbably falling for the older loser male (Newman). But no matter how duplicitous this femme fatale turns out to be, it's still no fun watching Newman smack the shit out of her. And despite the fact that the film does not end with the formation of the heterosexual couple, it's still so competent, so blandly well-done that it forces one to ponder saving 3.12GB on an external hard drive by junking it altogether. 

Grade: B

The Cassandra Crossing (George Pan Cosmatos, 1976)

I watched The Cassandra Crossing a few months ago on the strength of film scholar David Melville Wingrove's Facebook description of it as "[a] movie that transcends its own awfulness and becomes a perverse work of art." As you might suspect, it didn't live up to such hype. But I don't recall hating it either. The problem is I don't recall much at all about the thing, an increasingly frequent and frustrating reality for a film scholar of advancing years such as myself. So when the title came across my feed recently, I took it as a hint to revisit and pin down the film for good (if possible).

Turns out it's that most dreaded reminder of mortality - the okay movie. I'm baffled by the contemporary pans of the film which label it "an unintentional parody of a disaster film," "[a] sometimes unintentionally funny disaster film," and "so awful it's unintentionally hilarious." My experience clocks it as a solid thriller/disaster flick and little more. Sure, some of the performances from the all-star cast might be a tad overripe. But I see nothing to challenge Maria Montez's or Divine's status as queens of camp. And structurally, it's relatively straightforward, lacking the demented construction of, oh, Voyage of the Rock Aliens (James Fargo and Bob Giraldi, 1984). 

Three pieces of evidence support my conclusion. The Cassandra Crossing appears in neither Michael J. Weldon's The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film (1983) (where such disaster movies d'estime as Earthquake, The Poseidon Adventure, and Rollercoaster sit proudly) nor his 1996 follow-up The Psychotronic Video Guide, thus weakening the film's trash profile. It enjoys a respectable but rather dispassionate 6.3/10 rating on IMDb. Most importantly, Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide, that indispensable arbiter of the status quo, gives it three stars (out of four) and dispatches it in one indifferent sentence: "Entertaining disaster epic as train carrying plague approaches a weakened bridge" (220-221). Of course, camp, trash, and its myriad cousins result from acts of reception - one queen's so-good-it's-bad is another's meh. But this post commemorates the fact that I need never revisit this film again to determine its psychotronic verities. 

Whew! One down, 150,000 more films to go before I sleep.

Grade: B (downgraded a notch to prevent further viewing)