... wherein Peter posts a Weekly Media Update.
Books:
Movies: Midnight Run
TV:
Midnight Run
This is the 1988 action comedy about a bounty hunter (Robert DeNiro) who has to transport a mob accountant from New York to Los Angeles in three days. One complication is that both the FBI and the mob are trying to nab this same accountant (for different reasons). Another complication is that the accountant is played by Charles Grodin, and in his beleaguered-but-calculating way, the accountant makes life hell for the bounty hunter.
Watching this movie more-or-less cold in 2024 is an almost mystical experience. You sit down. You see the opening action scene, with DeNiro chasing down a criminal, and you see the opening title, and you hear the wailing saxophone (go Danny Elfman go) on the soundtrack. You think, "Okay. It's an 80s action comedy. It's 80s-action-comedy-ing as hard as it ever could. I know what I'm dealing with."
Then after ten or fifteen minutes, you're thinking, "Wait. Am I watching one of the best movies ever made?"
And honestly, what sneaks up on you is just the pure craftsmanship of the film. First, you notice how much plot the movie juggles. We introduce the bounty hunter, and his boss, and his boss's underling, and his rival bounty hunter. We introduce the accountant, and his friends. Then the mafia boss, and his minions, and the FBI boss, and his minions. There are many, many pieces on the table, and everyone is trying to outwit each other. ²
In a good classic action movie, you can watch an intricate fight, and due to camera placement, shot selection, and so on, you-the-audience can know exactly where everything is arranged in space, and who is doing what to whom, and why. Midnight Run is like that same clarity of action and geography, only writ large, across the whole movie. There are ten things going on at once, but it's all told so cleanly that you just 'get it'.
Then you have a conversation where someone asks you what Midnight Run is about, and give them the one-line summary, and they ask you to talk about the plot in more detail, and... then your brain kinda seizes up, because only then do you realize what an intricate story you've been told. The only way to clearly convey the plot of Midnight Run is to show the film itself.
At the same time, the core of the movie is the friendship that slowly emerges between the two lead characters. Yes, that's a cliché, to the point that most movies in this genre would feel vaguely embarrassed that they have to step away from the set-pieces and quips to have some obligatory, treacly, emotional moment.
This feels like such faint praise, but Midnight Run cares deeply about its emotional beats. The characters reveal layer upon layer as the road trip carries on, with the bounty hunter's elaborate backstory and the accountant playing games within games within games to try to escape. Tiny little moments - DeNiro getting Grodin's coattail out of a car door - feel genuinely heartwarming and well-earned.
To paraphrase the excellent Blank Check episode, in Midnight Run, you're never stuck waiting for the good part. The action is fun. The banter is fun. The soundtrack is fun. The emotional beats are great. The dialog feels spontaneous - no doubt the result of director Martin Brest putting the actors through so many takes that he exhausted them of clichés and forced them to find weird, off-kilter takes on their material. *Every* small part is a riveting side character - Hard Eight is arguably Paul Thomas Anderson writing fan fiction about Philip Baker Hall's briefly-glimpsed mob fixer, some twenty years later.
-
And yet, for all that, one's initial impression of Midnight Run is correct: it is absolutely a straight-down-the-middle 1980s action comedy. Some movies achieve greatness by subverting the genre we've seen so far, or redefining how it's going to be done. Sci-fi could never be the same after The Matrix, basic filmmaking techniques couldn't be the same after Citizen Kane, and so on. But some movies are like Casablanca - they don't subvert the form at all, they just do the traditional thing very, very well.
After Midnight Run, you could absolutely keep doing action comedies. The only problem is, you're working in the shadow of Midnight Run.
Movie buffs consider this something of a hidden gem, and it feels *weird* that it's hidden. There's nothing inaccessible about the movie. It's aged shockingly well for a 1980s comedy. ¹ People my age remember seeing it a billion times on HBO (alas, my household didn't have HBO when I was a kid), and remember it being pleasant enough, but nobody feels compelled to put Midnight Run on best-of lists or recommend the movie to serious cineastes.
Ultimtaely it's a victim of "just" coloring brilliantly inside the lines. At the time, critics sniffed at how many action-comedy clichés it indulged in. Then it became an HBO staple, and I suppose it just became too familiar to be revered. And then it largely vanished in the streaming age, like so many 80s catalog titles. For the longest time it wasn't available on any streaming channel in the US - I had to pay to rent it here in Canada.
And so it vanished from public consciousness. I only watched it myself because Blank Check covered it.
But again, in a way that's a good thing. Now, you can watch this movie for the first time and you're not comparing it to every similar 1980s action comedy, and (say) rolling your eyes at the semi-gratuitous Blues Brothers-esque car chase. Instead you're comparing it to modern tentpole pictures, which makes its intricate, lived-in charms shine even more by comparison.
Isn't that lovely?
For next week: in the backlog, I've got season six of Game Changer and an audiocourse about the history of math. I'm currently watching Turning Red and season one of Shōgun on Disney+. I'm reading a nonfiction book about the Harvard Longitudinal Study and a fun math book about topology. I'm listening to the Blank Check miniseries about Martin Brest and an audiocourse about the history of mathematics.
____
¹ I noted one homophobic exchange - a goon stares at DeNiro; DeNiro asks, "What, are you going to propose?" - and one joke (about having sex with farm animals) that feels distressing today. I'm sure it's not faultless beyond that, but it's beating the curve by a wide margin.
² The screenwriter was apparently at least partly inspired by It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, which sought to cast (by my reckoning) *every single* comedy star from 1963.
Movies: Midnight Run
TV:
Midnight Run
This is the 1988 action comedy about a bounty hunter (Robert DeNiro) who has to transport a mob accountant from New York to Los Angeles in three days. One complication is that both the FBI and the mob are trying to nab this same accountant (for different reasons). Another complication is that the accountant is played by Charles Grodin, and in his beleaguered-but-calculating way, the accountant makes life hell for the bounty hunter.
Watching this movie more-or-less cold in 2024 is an almost mystical experience. You sit down. You see the opening action scene, with DeNiro chasing down a criminal, and you see the opening title, and you hear the wailing saxophone (go Danny Elfman go) on the soundtrack. You think, "Okay. It's an 80s action comedy. It's 80s-action-comedy-ing as hard as it ever could. I know what I'm dealing with."
Then after ten or fifteen minutes, you're thinking, "Wait. Am I watching one of the best movies ever made?"
And honestly, what sneaks up on you is just the pure craftsmanship of the film. First, you notice how much plot the movie juggles. We introduce the bounty hunter, and his boss, and his boss's underling, and his rival bounty hunter. We introduce the accountant, and his friends. Then the mafia boss, and his minions, and the FBI boss, and his minions. There are many, many pieces on the table, and everyone is trying to outwit each other. ²
In a good classic action movie, you can watch an intricate fight, and due to camera placement, shot selection, and so on, you-the-audience can know exactly where everything is arranged in space, and who is doing what to whom, and why. Midnight Run is like that same clarity of action and geography, only writ large, across the whole movie. There are ten things going on at once, but it's all told so cleanly that you just 'get it'.
Then you have a conversation where someone asks you what Midnight Run is about, and give them the one-line summary, and they ask you to talk about the plot in more detail, and... then your brain kinda seizes up, because only then do you realize what an intricate story you've been told. The only way to clearly convey the plot of Midnight Run is to show the film itself.
At the same time, the core of the movie is the friendship that slowly emerges between the two lead characters. Yes, that's a cliché, to the point that most movies in this genre would feel vaguely embarrassed that they have to step away from the set-pieces and quips to have some obligatory, treacly, emotional moment.
This feels like such faint praise, but Midnight Run cares deeply about its emotional beats. The characters reveal layer upon layer as the road trip carries on, with the bounty hunter's elaborate backstory and the accountant playing games within games within games to try to escape. Tiny little moments - DeNiro getting Grodin's coattail out of a car door - feel genuinely heartwarming and well-earned.
To paraphrase the excellent Blank Check episode, in Midnight Run, you're never stuck waiting for the good part. The action is fun. The banter is fun. The soundtrack is fun. The emotional beats are great. The dialog feels spontaneous - no doubt the result of director Martin Brest putting the actors through so many takes that he exhausted them of clichés and forced them to find weird, off-kilter takes on their material. *Every* small part is a riveting side character - Hard Eight is arguably Paul Thomas Anderson writing fan fiction about Philip Baker Hall's briefly-glimpsed mob fixer, some twenty years later.
-
And yet, for all that, one's initial impression of Midnight Run is correct: it is absolutely a straight-down-the-middle 1980s action comedy. Some movies achieve greatness by subverting the genre we've seen so far, or redefining how it's going to be done. Sci-fi could never be the same after The Matrix, basic filmmaking techniques couldn't be the same after Citizen Kane, and so on. But some movies are like Casablanca - they don't subvert the form at all, they just do the traditional thing very, very well.
After Midnight Run, you could absolutely keep doing action comedies. The only problem is, you're working in the shadow of Midnight Run.
Movie buffs consider this something of a hidden gem, and it feels *weird* that it's hidden. There's nothing inaccessible about the movie. It's aged shockingly well for a 1980s comedy. ¹ People my age remember seeing it a billion times on HBO (alas, my household didn't have HBO when I was a kid), and remember it being pleasant enough, but nobody feels compelled to put Midnight Run on best-of lists or recommend the movie to serious cineastes.
Ultimtaely it's a victim of "just" coloring brilliantly inside the lines. At the time, critics sniffed at how many action-comedy clichés it indulged in. Then it became an HBO staple, and I suppose it just became too familiar to be revered. And then it largely vanished in the streaming age, like so many 80s catalog titles. For the longest time it wasn't available on any streaming channel in the US - I had to pay to rent it here in Canada.
And so it vanished from public consciousness. I only watched it myself because Blank Check covered it.
But again, in a way that's a good thing. Now, you can watch this movie for the first time and you're not comparing it to every similar 1980s action comedy, and (say) rolling your eyes at the semi-gratuitous Blues Brothers-esque car chase. Instead you're comparing it to modern tentpole pictures, which makes its intricate, lived-in charms shine even more by comparison.
Isn't that lovely?
For next week: in the backlog, I've got season six of Game Changer and an audiocourse about the history of math. I'm currently watching Turning Red and season one of Shōgun on Disney+. I'm reading a nonfiction book about the Harvard Longitudinal Study and a fun math book about topology. I'm listening to the Blank Check miniseries about Martin Brest and an audiocourse about the history of mathematics.
____
¹ I noted one homophobic exchange - a goon stares at DeNiro; DeNiro asks, "What, are you going to propose?" - and one joke (about having sex with farm animals) that feels distressing today. I'm sure it's not faultless beyond that, but it's beating the curve by a wide margin.
² The screenwriter was apparently at least partly inspired by It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, which sought to cast (by my reckoning) *every single* comedy star from 1963.