Casablanca: What is a Classic?

What is a "classic?"

Something made before you were born? Something in black and white? Something that you were introduced to by a loved one? Something you have an emotional connection to?

Everyone has their own answer, but when asked the question, you've got to at least consider Casablanca—even if you haven't seen it. Maybe especially if you haven't seen it. 

Casablanca is the purest example of the "Golden Age of Cinema." A heavy-shadowed noir with impeccable lighting, superstar romantic leads, great character actors—and quotable lines that have been memed, mixed, parodied, referenced, mocked, and reclaimed thousands of times in the 80+ years since its release.

Even people who haven't seen it know the basics. A soup of pop culture references, like the tacky paintings pressed onto diner walls where Bogart sips milkshakes with James Dean. Nostalgia defined and commodified, flattened and shrink-wrapped and mass-produced, until even the silhouettes of the characters are recognizable, their words processed and twisted until they are not endlessly quoted, but endlessly misquoted, like "Play it again, Sam"—a line that no one in the film ever utters.

What do people mean when they say "Play it again, Sam?" Or "Here's looking at you, kid?"  Or "We'll always have Paris?" Does anyone even know anymore? These lines have been elevated to the pop culture pantheon alongside other memes like "Mai waife!" and "Luke, I am your father"—another common misquote—with no consideration that these were once written by a screenwriter, memorized by an actor, and delivered on a set. Lines that were created to evoke an emotional response unique to the film they were written for have now been disseminated throughout modern culture, stripped of their initial meaning, now heavy with personal emotional investment.

With all the misquotes, tacky posters, bad Halloween costumes, and Animaniacs parodies, of course, Casablanca is "good." If it wasn't, how has it survived? We all know Casablanca is "good," even if we haven't seen it.

But here's the thing: Casablanca is REALLY FUCKING GOOD.

It's good now, in 2023, and it was good in 1983. It was good in 1953 when it was rediscovered and elevated beyond the standard studio picture the cast and crew thought they were creating: another noir romance, with maybe a touch of geopolitical reference to add authenticity, rushed out the door by the studio when the actual Second World War made the film's themes all too relevant.

It is astonishing this was made DURING WW2. Every character represents their own country's involvement in a war that was being fought while the cameras were rolling. 

Bogart's Rick is an American opportunist, made cynical by personal heartbreak, secretly doing the right thing behind everyone's backs—or whenever it suits him. Bergman's Ilsa is an Eastern European refugee who is wracked with guilt over her romance with Rick in Paris while her lover was tortured by the Nazis. The only real hero in the film is Paul Heinreid's Lazlo, a world-famous resister who uses the power of nationalism, courage, and a brass band to wage a guerilla culture war against the Nazis. 

The standout is Claude Rains as the local police captain, a pure opportunist who hangs out at Rick's to collect blackmail material and because he just likes the guy. In a movie literally stuffed with character actors, even the cartoonish performances have meaning, like Rick's jovial German stereotype. No scene is wasted, every line lands. 

And those lines! 

"Here's looking at you, kid." What starts as a cliched pickup line Rick has probably used on hundreds of girls morphs into a requiem for the time they had, the people they used to be, forever destroyed by war and heartbreak.

"Play it, Sam." The "it" is "As Time Goes By", a song about the fundamentals of romance and how love can survive the most horrific occurrences. A song loaded with the movie's themes written ten years earlier. Sam's reluctance to play the song for Rick or Isla and how he tries to pull Rick out of his depression gives Sam way more depth than any parody allows, where he is often portrayed as a piano-playing idiot savant. Rick saved Sam from Paris at great cost to his own happiness, and Sam's debt is to keep his boss happy and distracted—something Ilsa's arrival makes impossible.

Finally, "We'll always have Paris." Often omitted from this quote is the rest of the line:

"We'll always have Paris. We didn't have it, we lost it until you came to Casablanca. We got it back last night."

The film's thesis distilled into three sentences, circling back to the groundwork laid by "Here's looking at you, kid" and "Play it, Sam." How many people even know this line comes from Casablanca? That it's Rick's last-ditch attempt to get her on the plane, absolving her of the guilt she feels for leaving him in Paris and to absolve herself for romancing Rick in the first place, for daring to be happy when her husband, the film's real hero, who roused an entire city with nothing but La Marseillaise, was languishing in a German concentration camp. 

It's breathtaking writing from a forgotten, unproduced play, delivered by one of the world's biggest movie stars, who thought he was making just another in a long line of forgettable studio pictures, elevated and sanitized and polished to a mirror sheen by pop culture erosion. The dopamine hits like a tidal wave: the peanut butter of nostalgic recognition blending with the chocolate of expert filmmaking.

If classics are tenured members of the faculty of film, some of them, as relics of their time, aren't allowed to teach anymore. But Casablanca is out there giving 1 hour and 52-minute lectures on the transcendent power of a good story, well told, every day.

Avatar: The Way of Water

The best science fiction serves two purposes: to transport us to impossible worlds with fantastic technology we can only dream of and to make an existing social issue digestible through a technological or sociological abstraction. It's entirely possible to watch Aliens and think, "Wow, cool machine guns," but there is an allegory for American imperialist bravado post-Vietnam there if you choose to engage with it.

Avatar: The Way of Water delivers impossible worlds and fantastic technology, but its allegories are shallow.

Straight off, the movie is way, way too long. You could easily shave the first hour down to fifteen minutes. My sympathies to the FOUR credited editors, but a movie that takes this long to get going and has intermittent voiceover is a structural weakness inherited from the first film. In Way of Water, the cracks in the foundation have spread to the walls and ceiling. 

When the evil human megacorp returns to Pandora, Jake Sully and his precocious teen Na'vi kids, including born-on-Pandora human kid Spider, wage a year-long guerilla war against them. They blow up a train and stage a very cool nighttime rescue mission in the rain, but when it's revealed that The Bad Guy from the first film has been reincarnated in his backup Na'vi body, the Sullys abandon Spider to torture and death and flee to the ocean. 

(The Sully family motto, repeated ad nauseam, is "Sullys stick together," but I guess that doesn't include their adopted human son. The implications of this racial segregation are explored about as much as any of the movie's themes, but I'll get to that.)

That paragraph worth of story takes an hour.

Hour two begins with the Sully family finally arriving at the Polynesian-inspired water tribe. It took me until minute 85, but I finally accepted that the movie doesn't really have a plot for 2/3s of its runtime. 

Those captivated by the potential of Pandora as a "real place" will probably love this part, as the movie fragments into a series of vignettes exploring the society of the water tribe, a mishmash of Polynesian culture, which was very hot when this movie was being shot. 

The main tribe, whose name I cannot remember and will not google, is covered in Polynesian tattoos. They exhibit elements of Maori war culture (though they never do a full haka, thank god) and are pretty much just Pacific Islanders but green. To my ignorant eye, there isn't any creation here, just elements taken from existing human cultures and blended into a soup, except now they ride dolphins.

I'm fine with taking existing human cultures and grafting them onto alien species: it brings an authenticity that is extremely difficult to manufacture. But why does the Na'vi islander tribe exhibit elements of Earth-bound islander culture? What is the connection between elaborate, flowing tattoos and the ocean? Why do the Na'vi warriors stick out their tongues as a sign of aggression, just like Maori? Is there a lore reason, or is it to make them more understandable to us, the Earth-bound audience? The answer to both these questions is yes. 

Consider the criticism of Denis Villeneuve's Dune, which took elements of Middle-eastern and African culture without casting many MENA actors. Villeneuve and his team put a lot of effort into making Arrakis feel like a place distinct from Earth-bound deserts, like the ocean tribes of Pandora, but Arrakis is still populated by humans. 

What's the first thing you think of when you think of Arrakis? It's all desert, and it's hot. Humans adapt to hot temperatures in specific ways and leveraging that history works in Dune's favour. It's not perfect, but there was an intention to the design and casting choices made that I just don't see in Way of Water. Javier Bardem as Stilgar is one thing, at least he's from Spain, but in Avatar 2, the ocean tribe's queen is played by Kate Winslet.

Maybe it's not fair to compare James Cameron to Denis Villeneuve. Villeneuve is the best storyteller filmmaker on the planet, whereas Cameron is more of a tech genius. Both are interested in pushing movies forward, but Villeneuve feels like he's working out of a big city opera house, while Cameron works at NASA. 

The second hour of the film is truly beautiful. The open spaces of the island village and vast underwater areas give Cameron a wide canvas not possible in the claustrophobic jungle of the first film. There's something about the way the characters look in the water that makes them seem more real than they do out of it.

This brings us back to abstraction. If scifi is a way to abstract complex ideas away from fraught, real-world implications, the balance is extremely delicate. Take things too far, and the message is lost or rendered inert, don't go far enough, and the scifi element feels cowardly, a way to avoid engaging with the issue directly. Somehow, Cameron does both.

Let's count Avatar 2's layers of abstraction: 

- It's set on a distant planet, far in the future. This planet is 100% alive, even though they never say it is. It is though. Eywah, the Na'vi god, is the planet. I absolutely guarantee this will be central to the plot of one of the upcoming sequels, and it will be treated as a major revelation.

- All but one of its main characters is an 8-foot-tall blue cat person who can, through the use of glowy tendrils in their fleshy ponytails, commune with the planet and certain animals. This is also how the Na'vi fuck, which makes a sequence involving a teenage boy swimming into the mouth of a talking whale to interface with its glowing golden whale pussy pretty messed up.

- Some of the Na'vi kids call each other "bro" and "cuz" and constantly tell one another, "I got this." The Na'vi also have accents, which makes no sense since the movie shows us they speak their native tongue. Shouldn't Jake have the accent? Who cares.

- 95% of the movie takes place on CGI sets, ironically making the real sets in the human locations look fake. This is nothing normal to hold onto, especially since all the humans are either psychopathic military grunts, mercenary whalers, or a kid in a loincloth raised in the jungle.

- The intended way to watch this is in 3D, which sucks. Even in Super Laser Ultra IMAX Best Movie, the glasses dim the image and fuck with the frame rate, so the action is choppy and hard to parse. The 3D is actually less immersive since the glasses present a literal barrier between you and the movie.

All these layers pile up, like the beer glasses in that old drunk-driving commercial, presenting a movie that, despite all the filmmaker's efforts, you don't experience, you simply watch.

There is just nothing to grab onto. The characters are completely interchangeable. I kept wondering why there were two sons—I must have forgotten every other movie I've ever seen! The only character names I can recall are "Spider," because Spider, and "Toque" which is either a weird callback to Cameron's Ontario roots or proof that he hasn't been north of the border in a long time.

Zoe Saldana is as committed as ever, but she's relegated to the Mean Mom character who cares too much about nature, like a weird crystal-obsessed aunt who always smells like patchouli. Saldana doesn't really Arrive in the film until the very end when Cameron finally takes a break from trying to convince us the Na'vi are sexy and embraces the alien aspects of their design. Combat Ney'tiri is legitimately terrifying and the closest Cameron has come to horror since Aliens.

That sequence, coming about midway through Hour Three, is both exciting and a huge bummer. A really awesome whaling sequence pulls a balancing act that is very Cameron: it shows you all these cool toys and then punches you in the gut with the purpose of those toys. This leads right into the big climactic battle, the Scary Neytiri sequence, and an exhilarating, extended callback to Titanic. James Cameron is one of the greatest action directors of all time, but it's clear now his ego won't let him make a movie as simple as The Terminator ever again.

I remember watching Avatar and thinking, during the last battle, that I should be enjoying it more. "This is by the guy who made Terminator 2!" The action in Way of Water is better, cleaner, and easier to follow—the film's last third is rad!—but it takes so long to get there, with so much meandering exposition, bad dialogue, shitty teen drama, and superficial mysticism that it doesn't feel like an event. It's just another thing to watch.

2022 was the year Movies Came Back when Top Gun: Maverick made the strongest case yet for the IMAX experience. But Way of Water fails where Maverick succeeded in every way. Top Gun's cliches are just as predictable, but they elicit smiles rather than groans. Top Gun's characters are reduced to single-word callsigns, but I can remember every squadron member and not one of Jake and Neytiri's kids—except Toque. Way of Water spends a ridiculous amount of time trying to humanize its villain, a man who literally crushes his own skull with his bare hand, whereas Top Gun doesn't even have a villain! 

For all Cameron's effort into making Pandora "feel real," Top Gun was far more transportive simply due to its clarity. I would jump at the chance to see Maverick in IMAX again, but I'd much rather watch Way of Water on my TV. By streamlining the blockbuster formula, Maverick focuses on the thrills of the theatre experience. By going big, Way of Water makes the whole thing seem a little silly, like the commercials that play after the trailers promising that you'll "be a part of the movie." Despite all the money, all the time, and all the innovation, Avatar: The Way of Water never pulls you beneath the surface.

I am pleased to report that Rogue One still slaps

The only people who are still talking about the 5 Disney Star Wars movies are:

1) Star Wars people

2) Movie people

3) Emotionally damaged, terminally online people

As someone who fits neatly into all three categories, I can confirm that Rogue One still kicks ass.

A lot of the backlash towards Rogue One and The Last Jedi wasn't about the movies themselves. I can't believe anyone is able to watch these without conceding they are very nice-looking. These are well-put-together, expensive blockbusters. Few filmmakers can say their billion-dollar action/sci-fi studio blockbuster was a weird outlier on a brilliant career—but Rian Johnson sure can.

And how many people who will go to their graves declaring the Bourne trilogy as the greatest action franchise of all time are aware that the guy who wrote all of them co-wrote this movie? (And directed an apparently not-insignificant chunk of it after Gareth Edwards was fired—classic Disney Star Wars move.)

There are people who consider the late 80s and 90s as the Dark Ages for Star Wars, but for me, they're anything but. I came to Star Wars through the original trilogy, of course, but the video games and novels sustained me as I grew up. There were plenty of stories about the continuing adventures of the Skywalkers. But I always loved the stories of regular soldiers. The heroes of Stackpole and Allston's X-Wing novels, and the X-Wing and TIE Fighter computer games, star normal people. Even the Dark Forces series start you off as a normal soldier who never loses his blue-collar cool as he becomes a Jedi.

On top of these relatively grounded stories were countless novels about talking crystals and sentient planets and extra-galactic aliens. There were love stories and buddy comedies and young adult adventures. Star Wars was producing novels and games that felt like other movies, in the same way the original trilogy aped Lucas' favourites. Novels that felt like Jaws or Night of the Living Dead or The Long Goodbye with lightsabers and starfighters.

These weren't cash-cow paperback dreck. A brain trust was overseeing the canon of Star Wars—long before that was a word every Reddit poster had tattooed on their heart. Authors twisted their stories through the original trilogy, each others' work—and beyond. 

Star Wars could be anything. 

But now, after decades of concentrated marketing pressure, there is a prevailing sense of what Star Wars is allowed to be.

I know movie people, smart movie people, who are casually, contemptuously dismissive of Rogue One. People who can debate the artistic merits of The Batman or are looking forward to the spectacle of Avatar 2 won't even entertain the idea that Rogue One is #goodactually.

Why? The answer is never rational or thoughtful. "It's a tragedy" they'll say or "it's unnecessary" or—this one makes my blood boil—"I didn't care about the characters because they're nobodies."

These arguments aren't about this movie. They're about Star Wars™. What Star Wars is allowed to be.

(I did have a friend, who is not a Star Wars fan, complain the movie wasn't gory enough, that he wanted to see limbs getting blown off. I'll admit my argument against this was "Well yeah but it's still a Star Wars movie." So I admit I'm not immune to this either.)

The worst things about Rogue One are the added bits to connect the movie to the greater Star Wars canon: the weird "watch yourself" guy cameo, the C-3P0 and R2D2 cameo, the digital recreation of Peter Cushing. These are weird bumps in an otherwise really slick sci-fi espionage war flick—and how many of those do we get? And who better to make one than the guy who created the friggin' Bourne franchise?

The awkward cameos and already-dated technical flexes are especially weird because the real connections are all there. The sets, the costumes and the mustaches all evoke the gritty, improvisational feel of A New Hope—except this time it's shot by Grieg Fraser. The subtle callbacks to the original trilogy, like the clever digital insertion of Red and Gold Leaders, are delightful (and look great).

The story of Rogue One is a tragedy, but the story behind Rogue One is a tragedy too. If this wasn't a Star Wars™, people would have lost their minds when it came out. An original picture that looks, sounds and feels this good, from a script this tight, with this insane cast? Riz Ahmed three years away from a Best Actor nom? Alan Tudyk as a tragi-comic robot? Ben Mendelsohn's gross wet mouth? Mads Mikkelsen? DONNIE YEN?!?!

It would have been a sensation.

And yet, it's fitting that a story about complex underdogs, the grimy heroes of a war filled with shining examples of mythic Good, has slowly simmered into a modern classic. Now the dust has settled on these Modern Star Wars, the real heroes are shown to have been the spies and behind-the-lines troops that held up Sky where our myths were Walkers.

(But also that space battle is just, wow, I thought the little strike on Eadu was all we were gonna get and then BAM full-on fleet engagement AND air-to-ground combat. I've wanted to see X-Wings vs AT-ATs since the cover for Isard's Revenge.)

Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang (2005)

In the mid-90s, Shane Black was the highest paid screenwriter in Hollywood.

After creating the buddy cop genre with Lethal Weapon, Black rode a dizzying lightspeed tightrope by writing a string of high profile hits that stuck close to well-loved Hollywood tropes while skewering the conventions of action filmmaking, traditional masculinity and gender roles, and movie stardom.

But then, in 1996, The Long Kiss Goodnight happened. Long Kiss is, on paper, the next step in Black's recontextualizing of Hollywood genre tropes: an action/noir/spy flick starring a woman and a black man in roles traditionally reserved for white men which is literally about a woman reclaiming her identity. It starred Geena Davis and Samuel L Jackson, two stars with plenty of action credits to their name, though Davis and director Renny Harlin were still stinging from the disastrous failure of Cutthroat Island, a one-two punch that neither ever recovered from.

Black has said that the studios begged him to make the lead male: "It might have made more money, they told me," He said, "but it had to be a woman. The lead had to be female."

When Long Kiss became one of the biggest bombs of all time, Black went underground to lick his wounds, and prepare for a comeback.

And speaking of comebacks. Robert Downey Jr. is perhaps the face of the Hollywood redemption story. Born into a house as rampant with celebrity as with drug abuse, Downey Jr.'s looks, his father's access to the Hollywood elite, and nuclear fission-level charisma made him one of the biggest stars of the 80s even as his catastrophic struggle with drugs and alcohol ensured his career was built on tindersticks. 

Starting, tidily enough for our purposes, in 1996, Downey Jr. was arrested multiple times for drug-related reasons. He blamed his addiction on his father's lifestyle, and told a judge in 1999 "It's like I have a shotgun in my mouth, and I've got my finger on the trigger, and I like the taste of the gun metal."

Downey spent a year in prison and was released in 2000. Within a year, he had been cast in Ally McBeal, revived the show's ratings, won a Golden Globe and was then arrested again, fired from the show, and went back to rehab. It seemed like his comeback had happened, and failed.

Val Kilmer's story is less dramatic, but still classic Hollywood: after a string of unbelievable hits as iconic characters in the 90s: Batman, Jim Morrison, Heat's icy bank robber Chris, due to reports he was difficult to work with, Kilmer faded out of the spotlight.

So, then, Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, a story about how Hollywood fucking sucks by a bunch of guys that went through the ringer for Hollywood.

For Black, making his directorial debut, it's familiar territory: a neo noir comedy that splits the hard-boiled private eye protagonist in two. Downey Jr plays Harry, a bad thief who blunders through life, and Kilmer plays "Gay" Perry, a bonded PI who hates his job hiding in bushes taking snapshots of cheating husbands, and whose homosexuality is a deliberate inversion of the aggressive heterosexuality of traditional noir PIs. (Whether Black's characteristic lack of subtlety manifests in a portrayal of Perry that is more homophobic than subversive is up for debate.)

Kilmer's deadpan, played so effectively as a leading man in Heat and The Salton Sea, is hilarious and a true revelation for anyone not familiar with his breakout role in Top Secret! Perry is no effiminate stereotype: he is competent but jaded, and Black takes advantage of Kilmer's aging visage to show us a man who is perpetually so fucking tired. 

Adding to the subversion is Michelle Monaghan in her first lead role, and she brings the same laconic charm and grounded emotional accessibility that would serve her so well two years later, in the equally subversive (but way less fun) Gone, Baby, Gone and a decade later in True Detective. Monaghan easily keeps pace with Kilmer and Downey, and the three of them are a screwball bulldozer. This movie's charm could solve the energy crisis.

And then there's RDJ. After thoroughly committing to cleaning up his act, Kiss Kiss was the launchpad for a fucking ridiculous rocketship back to the A-list: in less than five years, he made this, The Singing Detective, fucking Zodiac, Sherlock Holmes, Tropic Thunder, and a little indie gem called Iron Man which I haven't seen but I guess is about a robot?

In Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, Downey isn't just fast, he isn't just charming, he isn't just a loveable pain-in-the-ass: he delivers one of the most effortlessly watchable performances in film acting history. Even without knowing his personal struggles he is electric, but when you do know what he's been through, his performance is the metatextual rocket fuel that Black always needed to make his "bite the hand that feeds" riff on Hollywood excess go. Gibson was too green, Glover too earnest, Willis too jaded—Downey had the right mix of talent, pain, and cynicism to finally make Black's screenplay really come alive, and Black places him in scenes with top-tier comedic foils like Kilmer and Monaghan. The entire process elevates it beyond the groan-worthy sexism and gay panic that may charitably be interpreted as attempts at subversion, but read in 2021 as simply ignorant.

This was Black's comeback too: Downey would bring him into the Marvel fold with Iron Man 3, an exploration of trauma that reads as extremely personal for Downey—no wonder he brought along the guy who helped him through it in the first place. After that, Black made The Nice Guys as a sort-of spiritual sequel to Kiss Kiss, but it's more a comedy and lacks the hard edge that elevates its predecessor. 

Black also made The Predator, where all of his worst instincts were laid bare: The Predator has none of the cleverness and subtlety that mask Black's sexism and homophobia. Instead of a perfectly-timed, mid-2010s riff on the excess of Hollywood blockbusters and reboots, it's just a mean, out-of-touch slog that does nothing to advance the Predator's status as a sexual icon.

But that was in the future. In 2005, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang saved two careers, launched another, and gave western filmmaking one of the most watchable mockeries of its own culture that (I hope. God I hope!) still holds up to this day.

Also, it's a Christmas movie.