Recent Reviews
The Cagneys
A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935)
Something to Sing About (1937)
Angels with Dirty Faces (1938)
A Lion Is In the Streets (1953)
Man of a Thousand Faces (1957)
Never Steal Anything Small (1959)
Shake Hands With the Devil (1959)
Friday November 30, 2018
FilmStruck, We Hardly Knew Ye
Last night, the last night in existence for FilmStruck, the streaming service that combined Turner Classic Movies, the Warners archive, and the Criterion Collection, I watched “The Sword of Doom,” a 1966 Japanese samurai/ronin movie directed by Kihachi Okamoto, and starring Tatsuya Nakadai—the gun-wielding Elvis samurai villain from Akira Kurosawa's classic “Yojimbo.” He's a villain in this one, too—a lethal, dead-eyed warrior who only gains some aspect of humanity when he comes across a greater master—Toshiro Mifune, of course. It's a beautiful, horrifying and strange movie, with an end that compares to Kurosawa's “Throne of Blood” in the lengths it takes for the protagonist to fall. I fell in love with young Yoko Naito, who only made movies from 1965 to 1970. She's barely online.
Now neither is FilmStruck, thanks to AT&T. The partners go their separate ways and each tries to come up with their own Netflix, whose lack of classic films led me to FilmStruck in the first place.
This was part of my Watchlist at the end:
I'd already seen some of these but wanted to watch them again—including Edward Yang's four-hour masterpiece, “A Brighter Summer Day,” about Taiwan in the late 1950s.
The site was obviously designed by people who love movies. AT&T, no doubt, will give us a website designed by people who love money.
Goodbye, FilmStruck. Thanks for the Cagney movies. Thanks for being a happy place when I needed one. Au revoir, adios, sayonara, auf wiedersehen, 再见。
Friday November 30, 2018
NYFCC: All Roads Lead to Roma
When in Roma...
Fast on the heels of the National Board of Review, the New York Film Critics Circle announced its best of 2018:
- Best Picture: “Roma”
- Best Director: Alfonso Cuarón, “Roma”
- Best Screenplay: Paul Scharder, “First Reformed”
- Best Actress: Regina Hall, “Support the Girls”
- Best Actor: Ethan Hawke, “First Reformed”
- Best Supporting Actress: Regina King, “If Beale Street Could Talk”
- Best Supporting Actor: Richard E. Grant, “Can You Ever Forgive Me?”
- Best Cinematography: “Roma,” Alfonso Cuaron
- Best Non-fiction Film: “Minding the Gap,” director Bing Liu
- Best Foreign Language Film: “Cold War,” director Pawel Pawlikowski
- Best Animated Feature: “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse”
- Best First Film: “Eighth Grade,” director Bo Burnham
- Special Award For Career Achievement: David Schwartz, Chief Film Curator at Museum of the Moving Image for 33 years
- Special Award: Kino Classics Box Set “Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers”
Interesting seeing both Pawlikowski and Hawke honored. Makes me think of an underrated movie they made together in 2011. Also makes me want to see “Cold War.”
NYFCC's big winner, “Roma,” I won't be able to see until Dec. 7 at the Cinerama in Seattle. Wanted to go big screen on it. But I‘ve tended to like NYFCC’s choices. Past NYFCC winners here, with thoughts.
YEAR | NYFCC BEST FILM | THOUGHTS |
2000 | Traffic | Not for me |
2001 | Mulholland Drive | Sure |
2002 | Far from Heaven | Nah |
2003 | The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King | Please |
2004 | Sideways | Sure |
2005 | Brokeback Mountain | Definitely |
2006 | United 93 | Definitely |
2007 | No Country for Old Men | Definitely |
2008 | Milk | I could watch this again. |
2009 | The Hurt Locker | Safe choice |
2010 | The Social Network | Good choice |
2011 | The Artist | Fun and inventive |
2012 | Zero Dark Thirty | Problematic |
2013 | American Hustle | Even more fun |
2014 | Boyhood | Deserved |
2015 | Carol | Wasn't head-over-heels like a lot of people, but respected. |
2016 | La La Land | Similar |
2017 | Lady Bird | Long live Greta Gerwig |
2018 | Roma | Seeing Dec. 7. |
Thursday November 29, 2018
Quote of the Day
“It is damaging and troubling enough that a candidate for the Presidency, throughout his primary campaign, was actively pursuing a business deal that required a favor from the President of a rival nation. It is damaging enough to learn that the President, his children, his business partners, and his campaign officials lied and dissembled frequently about this deal and other contacts with Russia. It places the need for Mueller to complete his investigation in even sharper light. Cohen's revelations call into question much of what Donald Trump and others have said publicly and, perhaps in some cases, under oath, regarding his business interests. It's a point that Adam Schiff, the presumptive future chair of the House Intelligence Committee, made, saying that, after Cohen's guilty plea, ‘We believe other witnesses were untruthful before our committee.’”
Adam Davidson, “Michael Cohen's Disclosures Raise Serious Questions About Donald Trump and His Business Interests,” New Yorker, after the revelations today from Trump's former lawyer. Check it out, too, for “The pathetic part of the Cohen story...”
Thursday November 29, 2018
National Board of Review Honors ‘Green Book’
I posted a semi-critical review of “Green Book” on Monday. On Tuesday, the National Board of Review honored it with the best film of the year.
So it goes. Me and NBR have never really agreed on much. Here are its best pics this century:
YEAR | NBR BEST PICTURE |
2000 | Quills |
2001 | Moulin Rouge! |
2002 | The Hours |
2003 | Mystic River |
2004 | Finding Neverland |
2005 | Good Night, and Good Luck. |
2006 | Letters from Iwo Jima |
2007 | No Country for Old Men |
2008 | Slumdog Millionaire |
2009 | Up in the Air |
2010 | The Social Network |
2011 | Hugo |
2012 | Zero Dark Thirty |
2013 | Her |
2014 | A Most Violent Year |
2015 | Mad Max: Fury Road |
2016 | Manchester by the Sea |
2017 | The Post |
2018 | Green Book |
Years in which its best would be in my top 5: 2007, 2010 and 2016.
Its odd choices are inconsistently odd: from the lightweight (“Finding Neverland,” “her”) to the heavy/gritty (“Zero Dark Thirty,” “A Most Violent Year”); from black-and-white serious (“Good Night, and Good Luck”) to outlandishly colorful and comically pop (“Mad Max: Fury Road”). NBR is like an odd cousin. When they show up, not sure what I'm going to get.
That said, “Green Book” is part of its celebration of the middle of the road. They did it last year with “The Post,” too. They also released their top 10—or I guess #s 2 through 11. (Why do they call it top 10?) Here they are in alphabetical order:
- The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
- Black Panther
- Can You Ever Forgive Me?
- Eighth Grade
- First Reformed
- If Beale Street Could Talk
- Mary Poppins Returns
- A Quiet Place
- Roma
- A Star Is Born
Looking forward to “Roma,” “Buster Scruggs” and “Mary Poppins.” Willing to watch “First Reformed” again to see what I missed in my “meh” review. Otherwise...
Thursday November 29, 2018
Movie Review: Incredibles 2 (2018)
WARNING: SPOILERS
2018 is the year the dastardly plots of supervillains in movies began to make sense to me. Either our superhero movies are becoming more complex or I’m becoming more diabolical. Or both.
Start with “Black Panther.” The hero, T’Challa, is part of a long line of Wakandan leaders who not only hide their superior tech but their entire nation. They’re less Invisible Man than Invisible Country. They even let the slave trade continue unabated for centuries despite the tech to stop it. Killmonger, the villain, wants to share this wealth; he wants to help oppressed peoples rise. The only reason we really root against him is because he’s an asshole. But in the long view he makes more sense than T’Challa—who, by the end, actually adopts part of Killmonger’s platform. That was in February.
In “Avengers: Infinity War,” we don’t exactly root for Thanos but at least we recognize some cold Malthusian logic to his actions. He doesn’t want to rule the universe, as so many supervillains before him, he wants to save it. By killing half, sure, but his heart is vaguely in the right place. He just wants to do his job, then retire and sit on his porch and watch the sunset. Who can’t relate?
But the 2018 supervillain who makes the most sense is Screenslaver.
Director as smuggler
First, can I get a shout-out for Pixar supervillain names? In “2,” our heroes first encounter “The Underminer” (Pixar perennial John Ratzenberger), who emerges from below in a giant digging machine spouting the catchphrase, “I’m always beneath you ... but nothing is beneath me!” Love that. (By the way, is he still at large? I don’t think they ever caught him.)
He’s just the warm-up. “Incredibles 2”’s main supervillain is Screenslaver, who is able to hack into almost any system and hypnotize the people watching the screen. It’s basically all about the dangers of screens. Can there be a better message for kids in 2018? I mean, are parents now able to tell their kids, rather than the ineffectual “No more screens,” something like: “You don’t want to be hypnotized by Screenslaver, do you?"
But that’s not what I meant about Screenslaver making sense. Screenslaver’s true purpose is to get rid of superheroes—or, as they’re called here, supers. Initially a hypnotized pizza delivery guy, Screenslaver is in actuality Evelyn Deavor (Catherine Keener), sister to Winston Deavor (Bob Odenkirk), who is trying to help legalize supers via the most modern means possible: public relations.
Evelyn—who looks astonishingly like some actress I can’t quite place, but I’m thinking some ‘90s sitcom I never watched—initially seems the cynical counterpoint to Winston’s wide-eyed enthusiasm. At one point, she and Elastigirl (Holly Hunter) have the following conversation over glasses of wine:
Evelyn: I invent, he sells. I ask you: Which of us has the greater influence?
Elastigirl: Which side of me are you asking: the believer or the cynic?
Eveyln: The cynic—
Elastigirl: —would say selling is more important because the best sellers have the most buyers. It doesn’t matter what you’re selling, it only matters what people buy.
Up to this point, I’d been flagging, slightly bored by Winston’s reclamation project, via Elastigirl, and Mr. Incredible’s relegation to the role of Mr. Mom and the inevitable gags that resulted. But this conversation perked me up. I’ve long argued that the one thing we should teach in public schools is how to sell. We all have to do it at some point—even if it’s just ourselves at a job interview—and some of us are naturally gifted at this, others not, and a little help for the latter group wouldn't be bad. (Full disclosure: I’m in the latter group. Virtually its president.)
Yes, this is Elastigirl’s comments, not Evelyn’s, but Evelyn is guiding the conversation. She’s the creator, and yet her brother, the seller, has all the power. Pull back, and it’s Hollywood’s artistic side (writers, directors) complaining about the power of its commercial side—the producers and studio heads demanding sequels and superhero movies; demanding, from Pixar, “Finding Dory” and “Incredibles 2” and “Toy Story 4.” Amazing that this conversation is even in here—in a superhero sequel that grossed $1.2 billion worldwide. But I guess the producers and studio heads know that it doesn’t matter what’s being sold; it only matters that people buy.
But—again—that not what I meant by Screenslaver making the most sense. Here’s what I meant. At one point, as Elastigirl pursues Screenslaver, he (really she) announces his/her doctrine to the world. Please read it all:
Superheroes are part of a brainless desire to replace true experience with simulation. You don’t talk, you watch talk shows. You don’t play games, you watch game shows. Travel, relationships, risk—every meaningful experience must be packaged and delivered to you to watch at a distance so that you can remain ever-sheltered, ever-passive, ever-ravenous consumers who can’t bring themselves to rise from their couches, break a sweat and participate in life. You want superheroes to protect you, and make yourselves ever more powerless in the process, while you tell yourselves you’re being “looked after,” that your interests are being served and your rights are being upheld—so that the system can keep stealing from you, smiling at you all the while. Go ahead, send your Supers to stop me. Grab your snacks, watch your screens, and see what happens. You are no longer in control. I am.
On the one hand, it’s simply a villain attacking the superhero-reliant people in this animated world. Except since supers are already outlawed, that doesn’t make sense. Nobody’s relying on anything. So what’s really going on? C'mon, you know what it is: It’s a superhero movie railing against superhero movies. And insulting its viewers in the process.
That’s amazing. It’s basically the movies owning up to the threat that the movies themselves pose to the moviegoing public:
Grab your snacks
Watch your screens
You’re not in control
We are
They’re not hiding any of it. It’s all right there.
In “A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies,” the famous director divides movies into four overlapping categories: director as storyteller, illusionist, iconoclast and smuggler. The “smuggler” is a director such as Andre De Toth or Douglas Sirk who includes “different sensibilities, off-beat themes, even radical political views” in otherwise conventional genres and stories.
Do we add “Incredibles 2” writer-director Brad Bird to the list? Maybe at the top of it?
Screenslaver ’20
As for the rest of the movie? Shrug.
The animation is fantastic. The characters are either so prototypical or so personal that I was constantly reminded of people I know: the hapless Mr. Incredible as my brother-in-law; the testosterone-filled Dash as my 3-year-old nephew. I was happy when Winston, the man helping the Incredibles, didn’t turn out to have ulterior motives. That would have been a dull move.
The movie was fun but not funny enough. I don’t think I laughed until Jack-Jack began to do his thing in the backyard with the raccoon. I mean, “New math”? Some chestnut to roast again.
But at least “Incredibles 2” gives us Screenslaver’s doctrine. Sure, she’s the supervillain, but she’s not wrong. She may be more right than anyone in any movie you see this year.
Wednesday November 28, 2018
That MLB Donation to Cindy Hyde-Smith? It was at the Behest of Someone Much, Much Worse
On Sunday, I posted a bit about MLB's $5,000 donation to the re-election campaign of U.S. Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS). She's the one who brought up public hangings while running against an African-American candidate in a state that once had a habit of lynching African Americans. She didn't apologize. She was offended that anyone could be offended. She played politics with it.*
(*That said, if you look at the full quote, it's obvious she's not saying “public hanging” in a positive sense: “I would fight a circle saw for him; if he invited me to a public hanging, I would be on the front row.” She's saying, for this particular supporter, she would even go to a public hanging, as awful as that is. To her, they‘re as bad a fighting a circle saw. A shame we didn’t get more clarity on this—from either side.)
Anyway, for some reason, Major League Baseball donated $5k to her campaign even after she said this, and MLB's initial explanation didn't explain much:
“The contribution was made in connection with an event that MLB lobbyists were asked to attend.”
Give me 10 years and I don't think I could write a sentence that vague. Kudos.
Well, yesterday, more details surfaced. And it turns out the contribution didn't have anything to do with Ms. Hyde-Smith. It had to do with someone much, much worse:
When a lobbyist who works for MLB could not attend a fundraiser put on by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in mid-November, the league was asked instead to donate money to Hyde-Smith, according to sources. The league cut the check for Hyde-Smith's campaign on Nov. 12 or 13, two sources told Yahoo Sports – a day or two after the lynching comments were first made public by the Jackson Free Press. The campaign reported the contribution in a Nov. 24 filing.
First democracy, now baseball: How much of my world is Mitch McConnell going to ruin?
The above comes from an informative piece by Jeff Passan over at Yahoo Sports. It's a shitty site but excellent reporting. He sought out the numbers and crunched them. He got to the when and why and how much:
Since Major League Baseball established a foothold in the nation's capital at the turn of the century, the league has exploited a truism about politics in America: Influence is unbelievably cheap. Over the last 17 years, through its political action committee, MLB has donated slightly more than $3.7 million to 321 members of Congress, according to an analysis of federal election records by Yahoo Sports. For less than one season of the average salary for a single baseball player, the league wooed senators and House members, Republicans and Democrats, men and women, a few thousand dollars at a time, in hopes that someday their power could work in the league's favor.
So it looks like “MLB lobbyists”—a new term for most baseball fans—are in fact a 21st-century phenomenon. One hopes they go away. Mitch first.
Wednesday November 28, 2018
Movie Review: The Shadow (1940)
WARNING: SPOILERS
How many movies give their superhero’s superpower to the supervillain?
In the pulps, and on the radio, the Shadow could “cloak men’s minds” as to appear invisible. Here, that power belongs to the Black Tiger, a man intent on bringing the city’s industrial leaders to their collective knees. Oddly, he only displays this power before his flunkies. In an elaborate and oft-repeated sequence, he appears silhouetted in the hallway outside their hideout with a light emanating from above. (In this shot, he has puffy blonde hair parted in the middle and seems less villain than Paul Williams circa 1978.) Then he pulls a switch, there’s a hum, and ... he’s gone! Now invisible, he walks into the hideout, always trailed by this beam of light, sits at his desk, turns on a few gadgets, and, with a plaster black tiger head on the desk flashing its eyes and emanating smoke from its mouth, he berates his men in a tremulous, high-pitched and highly annoying voice.
They never explain how he can do this. It seems a trick of cameras and lighting—a Hollywood trick, you could say—but in that last episode they don’t go into it. Last episodes in serials are rarely for exposition. It might get in the way of the thousandth fistfight.
Since the Black Tiger has invisibility, what superpower does the Shadow have? None. He’s just a dude in a cape and scarf with a maniacal laugh who’s good at fistfights. His signature laugh actually works against him here. In the radio series, it announced his presence but nobody knew where it came from, which is why it was terrifying. It was like he was everywhere. It was like he knew what evil lurked in their hearts! Here, it merely allows the villains to get the drop on him.
That said, Victor Jory makes a pretty good Shadow.
Invisibility > Fisticuffs
Some background. I began collecting comics in the summer of 1973 and a few months later The Shadow made his return in Batman #253. (Batman: “That laugh ... coming from everywhere ... and nowhere!”) He was new to me but a legend to the caped crusader. As they shake hands in the end, Batman even admits, with a nod toward the pulp origins of superheroes, “I’ve never told anyone this ... but you were my biggest inspiration.”
I was inspired as well. My friend Dan and I were busy creating our own series of comic books, Rory Comics, that were mostly derivative of Marvel. Their Falcon became our Eagle (“Rory’s first black superhero!”); their Dr. Strange became our Magus (“Last of the Maji”). And because of Batman #253, as well as the resurrection of “The Shadow” radio series Sunday nights after “American Top 40,” we introduced/stole The Shadow as well. He appeared as the villain in “James Steele: Master Detective” and then was given his own comic:
My Rory Comics ripoff, circa 1977.
Why was I drawn to him—rather than, say, the Lone Ranger, whose radio series was also resurrected Sunday evenings? Was it the Shadow’s invisibility? (E.L. Doctorow is quite good on this.) His ability to see into hearts? To see deeply while remaining unseen? Who wouldn’t want that power?
The Shadow didn’t even start out as a character. He began as the narrator of an early 1930s CBS radio show, “Detective Story,” which was a series of unrelated pulp mysteries held them together by this mysterious narrator. As Raymond W. Stedman writes in his book, “The Serials: Suspense and Drama by Installment”:
The piercing voice, the macabre laugh, the ironic tones brought fan mail that reflected considerably less interest in the story than in the mysterious “Shadow” who told them. Almost overnight two things happened. The radio program evolved into the eerie dramas in which The Shadow was not narrator but principal participant, and Street and Smith introduced this fascinating new character in The Shadow magazine.
So why did Columbia Pictures take away his powers? Apparently they thought kids wanted action they could see. In the minds of the decision-makers, fisticuffs > invisibility.
By this point, the formula for ur-superhero serials was well-established:
- The villain issues orders from behind a desk
- His henchmen go into the world to implement them
- The hero confronts them, is endangered (cliffhanger), but survives and foils the plan
- Repeat
But “The Shadow” also steals from “The Spider’s Web,” a well-regarded Columbia serial from 1938:
- The villain’s identity is hidden
- His scheme is to disrupt big business
- He turns out to be one of the city’s big businessmen
In both serials, the hero has three identities: himself, the masked hero, and a shady underworld figure who learns key info from the bad guys (Blinky McQuade for The Spider; Lin Chang for The Shadow). Both heroes have teams: an assistant (Jackson/Harry Vincent); an exotic assistant (Ram Singh/Wu); and a girl (Nita Van Sloan/Margot Lane).
In both, too, the “next episode” trailer doesn’t exactly milk the cliffhanger. Instead, it gives us next week’s cliffhanger. At the end of Chapter 7, for example, after The Shadow gets into a gunfight behind barrels marked “ACID,” there’s a fire and everyone gets out except The Shadow. He’s standing in the middle of the room when there’s an explosion and the roof caves in. How will he survive?
Here’s what they say about the next chapter:
“Tonight, the Limited [a train] with all aboard will be destroyed. The Shadow tries to prevent the disaster. He reaches the switch, he’s diverting the train, when he’s attacked by the Black Tiger’s Men! He fights them off, throws the switch, and then he’s knocked unconscious in the path of the roaring express. See THE SHADOW RIDES THE RAILS, next week’s brilliant episode of The Shadow!”
They just jump ahead. They assume he survives. Kind of defeats the purpose of the cliffhanger, doesn’t it?
There’s such absurdities throughout. In the second episode, Cranston and Vincent (Roger Moore) follow the bad guys to their hideout outside the A1 Garage Office. Inside, we hear this conversation:
Hood 1: Hey, whaddaya doing?
Hood 2: Wearing masks from now on.
Hood 1: Well, what’s the big idea?
Hood 2: Orders from the Black Tiger. Get ’em on.
Cranston then knocks out a hood and enters the lair with his mask. Five minutes later, after the Black Tiger finds out he's been duped, he tells his flunky, Flint (Jack Ingram), “From now on, no more masks!” Consider it the shortest management innovation in history.
That said, the dumbest guy in the serial has to be Commissioner Weston (Frank LaRue). In the first chapter, he has Cranston drive to his office to show him a card from one of the Black Tiger’s men that says “Cranston Labs, 2:00” on it. What time does he do this? About five minutes before 2:00. Not much time to prepare. He also thinks The Shadow and the Black Tiger are the same person—“without evidence” as we say today. And when Cranston correctly suggests someone close to the business group is the Black Tiger, he waves it away. “We’ve developed something that indicates just the contrary,” he says. The police commissioner is such an idiot that one businessman, Turner (John Paul Jones), actually suspects the commissioner.
Turner is part of one of my favorite goofs in the serial. In chapter 7, the useless, harrumphing businessmen meet again at the Cobalt Club. Two of their own, Prescott and Marshall, have just been kidnapped, but the rest don’t know that. One of them declares, “But what on earth could’ve happened to Prescott and Marshall?” As he's saying it, look across the table at Turner. He’ actually mouthing the line.
I’ve never seen that in a movie before.
As for the identity of the Black Tiger? It’s Marshall. Not that that helps much. The businessmen are all so generic, it’s like “Which one is he again? Oh right. ... I guess.” Shame they didn’t make it more of a whodunit. But that would’ve required time and money. And maybe more talent.
Who knows what evil ... nah, forget it
Beyond the missteps, what did I like? Jory, as mentioned, is good, with a piercing gaze, and physically correct for the role. Philip Ahn provides some quiet dignity as Wu—30 years before he’d do the same as Master Kan on “Kung Fu.” Roger Moore’s Vincent gets in some jokes. Margot Lane is played brusquely by Veda Ann Borg, but she has little-to-no chemistry with Jory. It’s a shocker to find out they’re supposed to be a couple.
By the way: You know what we never hear?
Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!
This thing is five hours long, it’s one of the most famous lines in pulpdom, and yet they never use it. That’s pretty much all you need to know about “The Shadow.”
SHADOW SLIDESHOW
Tuesday November 27, 2018
Cano to Go?
Will we still see this in spring?
Three of the last four players to reach 3,000 hits were Seattle Mariners. Key word: were. They either were drafted by and made their names as Mariners (A-Rod), spent their rocky prime years with us (Adrian Beltre), or will forever be identified with the team (Ichiro). But none of them actually reached 3,000 hits as a Seattle Mariner:
- Alex Rodriguez had accumulated 966 hits when he left us after the 2000 season for a massive free agency deal with Texas that the team (and he) soon regretted. (He hit his 3,000th, a homer, in 2015 as a Yankee.)
- Ichiro had 2,533 hits when we traded him mid-2012 to the hated New York Yankees. (He hit his 3,000th, a triple, in 2016 as a Miami Marlin).
- When Adrian Beltre desperately left Safeco Field after his prime middling years with us, he was at exactly 1700 hits. (He hit his 3,000th, a double, in 2017 as a Texas Ranger.)
I bring all this up because apparently the Mariners are shopping Robinson Cano, who still has five years left on his massive 10-year deal, and I assume all the no-trade clauses that go with high-end free agent signings. I was against signing Cano back in December 2013—nice thing about a blog: You have evidence—but I‘ve also loved having him on the team. The very thing that bugged Yankees fans—his looseness, which they took as laziness—I’ve loved. The nonchalance most players display he's able to turn up to 11. He makes tough plays look easy, and he makes routine plays look as if he could do them in his sleep; as if he were bored halfway through. Yeah, this. Got this. Man, I'm already in the dugout.
And beyond his banned-substance suspension, and his acid-reflux slump in 2015, he's done as well or better than I thought he would: .296/.353/.472. 23.6 WAR.
But now comes the tough part—the final five years. Ages 36 through 40 at $24 mil a pop. When a player hits a cliff, it's usually not pretty. So if the Mariners could unload him for the worst years of the deal, that would be an unexpected boon. Depending, of course, on how much we have to pay to unload him.
Drawbacks? For now, he's still good (.303/.374/.471 last year). And barring disaster, or more PED-inspired longterm suspensions, he has a good chance at 3,000 hits. He's 530 short, at 2,470, and for a full season as a Mariner he's never had fewer than 166. Last year, despite being suspended for half the season, he came through with 94 hits. I could see him getting his 3,000th in 2021 or ‘22.
I know it’s a small thing, but the Mariners have never had someone in their uni get his 3,000th. I'd assumed, given the size of his contract, he would be the one.
Monday November 26, 2018
Movie Review: Green Book (2018)
WARNING: SPOILERS
“Green Book” could’ve used more of its title character: The Negro Motorist Green Book, an annual pamphlet that helped guide African-Americans toward friendly accommodations and services while traveling around the U.S. in the Jim Crow era.
In the movie, which is based on a true story, it winds up in the hands of Tony Vallelonga, a.k.a. Tony Lip (Viggo Mortensen), an Italian-American bouncer and bullshitter from the Bronx. He’s been hired to drive Dr. Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali), a classical pianist who lives in an artist’s residence above Carnegie Hall, as he and his band, the Don Shirley trio, tour Midwest and Southern states, playing before white, ritzy crowds in the fall of 1962.
It’s an opposites-attract road movie. Tony is uneducated, earthy, powerful. He’s a nonstop talker with a big heart and a voluminous appetite. You know how certain movies like “Big Night” leave you hungry? I saw Tony shoveling so much food into his yap I never wanted to eat again. I left the theater bloated.
Dr. Shirley is educated, distant, pinched. He’s distant not only from other people but his own people. In high-end white hotels, he drinks his bottle of Cutty Sark on the balcony while the rest of the trio chat up girls in the courtyard. In black-only hotels, he’s drinking Cutty Sark on the ground-level, but uncomfortably. He begs off a game of horseshoes; he doesn’t want to mix. It’s up to Tony to introduce him to popular black music of the day, like Little Richard, Chubby Checker and Aretha Franklin. He introduces him to fried chicken.
Oh, Dr. Shirley is also gay. Oh, and Tony starts out the movie racist.
You know, for something this country can never shake, Tony’s racism sure seems to fade fast.
Schmasist
We first get wind of it after Tony pulls an all-nighter as a bouncer at the Copa—featuring Bobby Rydell singing “Black Magic” (nice touch). The next afternoon he wakes to find two black plumbers working in the kitchen, and friends and relatives grumbling about same in the cramped living room as they watch Roger Maris hit a homerun in Game 6 of the 1962 World Series. After the plumbers leave, Tony takes the two glasses they drank from and deposits them in the garbage. That’s what he thinks of that.
Then he’s offered the above gig. During his interview, Dr. Shirley wears a dashiki and basically sits upon a throne—an elevated bejeweled chair. For the tour he wants Tony to press his pants and shine his shoes. Tony begs off those tasks, but Dr. Shirley remains authoritative. He tells Tony to stop smoking. He tells Tony both hands on the wheel. He tells him he shouldn’t shoot craps with the other (black) drivers outside the private concert hall, that he should have more dignity than that.
How does Tony, the nose-breaker who can’t abide black lips touching glasses in his home, deal with all of this? Shockingly well. His racism? Gone. Poof. He takes pride in Dr. Shirley’s talents (quite endearingly, actually), and never treats him as anything less than a boss, a man, and—ultimately—a friend. The gay thing in the YMCA with the white guy? Whatevs. Onto the next gig.
In fact, of the two, Dr. Shirley has the greater distance to travel. He has to loosen up. He has to eat fried chicken and play boogie woogie. He has to look black sharecroppers in the eyes and own up to who he is. He has to come off his high balcony and pitch horseshoes with the rest of us.
Think about that for a second. What does it say that in a road-trip movie through the Jim Crow South, the black guy has more to learn? It says, among other things, that the filmmakers are probably white. And they are: director Peter Farrelly, who also helped with the screenplay, and screenwriters Bryan Hayes Currie and Nick Vallelonga.
Wait, Vallelonga? Yeah, that’s Tony’s son. He’s a longtime B-movie producer, director, actor. In “Green Book,” he’s screenwriter, actor (playing a bit part) and character (played by Hudson Galloway). How often does that happen? The fact that he's involved may help explain why Tony is so ahead of his time.
Mississippi so-so
Gotta say: I enjoyed the chemistry between the two leads; and much of the superficial period detail feels accurate.
But throughout I kept thinking the filmmakers were making the characters extreme versions of themselves in order to give us our accommodating happy ending. I mean: a dashiki in 1962? I’ll take the artistic license of Tony schooling Dr. Shirley on Little Richard; but assuming everyone knew Aretha in 1962 doesn't make sense. She didn’t break big until 1966-67. Which is around the time dashikis became a thing.
As for that small-town Mississippi jail cell? It’s supposed to be horrifying. But after reading books such as Taylor Branch’s “Parting the Waters,” it feels like the nicest Mississippi jail cell these two particular northerners could’ve encountered.
Oh, and apparently Don Shirley’s family has complained about the inaccuracies.
In trying to break past racial stereotypes, “Green Book” slides into one of Hollywood’s favorite tropes: educated people are snooty and working class people have hearts of gold. Elitist Hollywood just can’t tell this story often enough.
Sunday November 25, 2018
Box Office: ‘Ralph,’ ‘Creed’ Exceed; ‘Robin Hood’ Misses Target
“Ralph Breaks the Internet,” the sequel to “Wreck-It Ralph,” won the weekend with a $55 million haul. And since it opened on Wednesday, the five-day haul is more like $84 million. Either way, it's better than the $49 million “Wreck-It” opened to in 2012. (Shit—six years ago? Feels like just a couple.)
“Creed II,” the sequel to “Creed,” came in second with $35 million. It, too, opened on Wednesday and it's five-day total is $55. “Creed” opened to $29, so, again, improvement. BTW: If you adjust for inflation, the first four “Rocky” movies all grossed more than $300 million domestically—with the first one north of half a billion—while the others, “Rocky V” and “Rocky Balboa,” couldn't make it to $100 million adjusted. The first “Creed” did, though, topping out at $115. This one looks to do better.
Meanwhile, the zillionth “Robin Hood” opened to poor reviews and poor box office, finishing the weekend in seventh place with $9.1 million. Good.
Sadly, the new “Grinch,” which I‘ve heard is bad, and which received mediocre reviews, fell only 21% during its third weekend, for third place and another $30 mil. It’s now at $180 domestic, which is just encouraging bad behavior on the part of the studios.
“Fantastic Beasts/Grindelwald” did fall, though, 50+% in its second weekend, and looks to not reach the heights of the first “FB,” which opened to $74 and topped out at $234. “FB2” scraped in another $29 but is at a sluggish $117.
In its fourth weekend, “Bohemian Rhapsody” refuses to bite the dust, grossing another $13. It's now at $152. For the modern, post-1980 era, that's the second highest-grossing music biopic after “Straight Outta Compton,” which is just a stone's throw away at $161. Adjust for inflation, though, and “Coal Miner's Daughter” is on top with $228.
The BOM numbers.
Sunday November 25, 2018
Buy Me Some Peanuts and Senators
Last night, vaguely benumbed by aquavit (skol!), I came across a new controversy involving Major League Baseball. It's not a good controversy, and it gets worse the more you hear about it.
Apparently MLB donated $5,000 to the campaign of Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS), who most of us know best from her “public hanging” comment. Earlier this month, stumping during the runoff against her opponent, Mike Espy, an African American, she said of a cattle rancher who was helping her campaign, “If he invited me to a public hanging, I'd be in the front row.”
Given Mississippi's history of lynching black people, many were offended. Hyde-Smith was offended they were offended. Here's what she said during a debate with Espy last week:
For anyone that was offended by my comments, I certainly apologize. There was no ill will, no intent whatsoever in my statement. ... There has never been anything, not one thing, in my background to ever indicate I had ill will toward anyone. I‘ve never been hurtful to anyone. I’ve always tried to help everyone. I also recognize that this comment was twisted and it was turned into a weapon to be used against me, a political weapon used for nothing but personal and political gain by my opponent. That's the type of politics Mississippians are sick and tired of.
Same old, same old. I'm curious if “...invited me to a public hanging” is a Mississippi colloquialism, and, if so, what is its derivation? (One Southern writer says he's never heard of it, and it's “kind of creepy” regardless of the racial/lynching connotations.)
Either way, she said something either tone-deaf or deeply offensive, never apologized, doubled down.
And Major League Baseball donated $5,000 to her campaign.
Here's the part where it gets worse: MLB donated the money several weeks after Hyde-Smith's comment.
WTF?
After the controversy erupted last night, MLB is now doing damage control. It asked for the donation back and issued the following statement:
“The contribution was made in connection with an event that MLB lobbyists were asked to attend,” an MLB spokesperson said in a statement Sunday. “MLB has requested that the contribution be returned.”
I like Chris Korman's take in USA Today: “We should talk about why MLB giving $5,000 to any senate candidate anywhere is even a thing.” Then he provides some links to MLB PAC's donations, which average about half a million during election years. He wonders over the donations and the lobbying. What is MLB after? What does it want? Particularly from a junior senator in Mississippi, which includes no Major League club.
I hope the digging continues. I hope it clears away the fog of vagueness in MLB's official statement.
Friday November 23, 2018
Super Joe
I love this part of Joe Posnanski's post about his childhood crush Super Joe Charboneau and what he meant to Cleveland in the summer of 1980:
See, we needed Super Joe, needed him more than he could ever know. The city was dying, even as a 13-year-old, I understood that. More than 175,000 people — almost one-quarter of the city's population — had fled Cleveland in the 1970s. In 1978, Cleveland became the first city since the Great Depression to default on its loans; in the mind of a kid this meant the whole city had gone bankgrupt. Smoke billowed into the Cleveland sky. Potholes shook us to the bone. The reason we even have an Earth Day is that the Cuyahoga River caught fire. And no team had won a title since the early 1960s, before I was born.
These were desperate times. Every other day, it seemed, Cleveland had some cringe-worthy new slogan designed to make the city seem better.
- New York's the Big Apple, but Cleveland's a plum.
- The best things in life are right here in Cleveland.
- We‘re a big-league city (with Little Leagues too!)
- Cleveland’s a great place to live
We so badly needed Super Joe.
For some reason, I thought Super Joe was given the nickname “Joltin' Joe” during that summer, but Joey Poz makes no reference to that, and even on a Google search you only come back with 200 examples. After his Rookie-of-the-Year season, Charboneau played in only 70 games, with 210 plate appearances and a .211/.258/.371 slash line. Did any other Rookie of the Year fall so fast?
Poz also comes up with a great term, “the counterfeit hope of lousy teams,” that the Seattle Mariners should really, really pay attention to.
Thursday November 22, 2018
Last Letter Redux
Just putting this up here because I like the feeling this gentle movie left me with. And because I like looking at Zhou Xun.
Wednesday November 21, 2018
Paxton Trade: Passable or Pox?
The eagle has landed, but the M's just traded Tranquility Base.
I keep going back and forth on the Seattle Mariners trading ace James Paxton to the hated New York Yankees.
- He's 30, and prone to injury, and one assumes after 30 it's a downhill slide.
- He just turned 30—November 6. And he actually pitched more the older he's gotten. Via The Athletic:
- Season IP SO
2016 121 117
2017 136 156
2018 160.1 208 - Sure, but, per Art Thiel, he hasn't exactly been a win machine. His career win total after six seasons in the bigs? 41. His season high? 12, in 2017. Here's an amazing stat from Thiel: “Paxton has 52 fewer career wins than rotation mate Mike Leake, also 30.” Yikes!
- C‘mon, you know M’s fans had way more confidence when Paxton stepped on the mound than when Leake did. Plus wins are your dad's pitching stat. Other stats like ERA (3.42 career) and K/BB rate (617/168) matter more.
- Well, at least it's a direction for the M‘s. It’s an obvious strategy. They‘re saying, “Yeah, it’s not going to happen next year, kids. We‘re trading for the future.”
- Well, “It’s not going to happen next year, kids” is certainly something M's fans are used to.
- I know: longest active playoff drought in Major League Baseball. That's why we gotta shake things up!
- So we can get nauseous? Plus I liked Paxton. He was Big Maple: a tall, quiet, kinda goofy Canadian who pitched a no-hitter on Canadian soil, struck out 16 Athletics, and remained cool as a cucumber and tall as a tree when a pre-game ceremony in Minnesota went awry and an eagle landed on his shoulder. All of these are among my favorite moments from this past season.
- Which was just another season we didn't make the playoffs. And it's not going to get better in 2019.
- It will for the Yankees. Don't you rememember your rule? Never trade with the New York Yankees. Never never never. You never help them. Never! See: Tino/Nellie for Sterlling/Russ.
- See: Jay Buhner for Ken Phelps.
- Ancient history. What about Michael Pineda for Jesus Montero?
- What about it? I don't think anyone came out on top there.
- Really? Pineda won 31 games for the Yankees.
- And he lost 31 games for them.
- But he accumulated 6.4 WAR.
- WAR schmore. You‘re nickel-and-diming.
- Please. You know what Montero’s total WAR with the Mariners was? -0.9. That's a minus. In four seasons.
- The trade was a wash.
- In which we got cleaned.
- Oh, so clever.
- You should try it some time.
- Fuck you.
- Fuck you!
Etc.
Bottom line: My heart is bummed, my head says going young is good if the deals are smart. The proviso is the issue. The M's haven't exactly been smart this century. Corey Brock's piece on the trade includes this sad paragraph:
Since 1998, Seattle has drafted and developed only two players who have a WAR (wins above replacement) of 10.0 or higher with the club: Seager (27.9) and Paxton (10.9). That’s by far the lowest mark among teams in the American League West, and certainly a contributing factor as to why the Mariners have not advanced to the postseason since 2001.
Jimmy, we hardly knew ye. I'd wish you well, but ... Yankees.
Tuesday November 20, 2018
My Father's 1975 Stan Lee Article
Here's my father's 1975 article on Stan Lee that I alluded to last week. My earlier blog post on Stan was basically the story behind the story. This is the story. For Nov. 15, 1975 anyway.
(Click here for the bigger, more legible version.)
Ever the critic (apple/tree), I remember complaining about Dad's third-paragraph: “Daredevil versus the Hulk? Dad, that's not even a contest. You should‘ve said the Thing versus the Hulk.”
I also thought he got the ending wrong. From my perception of Stan’s talk during the interview—half of which I missed, admittedly—I thought Stan was saying that in the past, as in the Frederic Wertham 1950s, he would go to parties and tell people he was a writer, rather than a comic book writer, because he was embarrassed to be known as a comic book writer; because it was totally looked down upon. But after he ushered in the mighty Marvel age, this changed, and he'd just say it outright: I write comic books.
I like Stan's comment about not writing down to the audience—about writing “as if they were college professors. ... I figured if some kid didn't understand a word, he'd get it by osmosis. After a while, mothers would write us and say, ‘My Johnny’s beginning to talk like a genius. God bless Marvel Comics.'”
This was true even during the interview. As stated, he gave me a bullpen nickname: Erudite Erik. I went home and looked it up. I was probably one of the few 12-year-olds who knew what it meant. God bless Marvel Comics.
Monday November 19, 2018
Movie Review: Last Letter (2018)
WARNING: SPOILERS
“Last Letter” (Chinese title: “你好 之华” or “Hello, Zhihua”) is a quiet, contemplative, post-longing movie that nevertheless relies upon one gigantic suspension of disbelief. Maybe two.
The movie begins in stoic sadness, with the funeral of Zhilan, a suicide, whose distraught teenaged daughter, Mumu (Deng Enxi), asks to take her mother’s ashes home. Aunt Zhihua (Zhou Xun, our star), nods. But where’s home? Since the father is out of the picture, Mumu and her younger brother, Chenchen (Hu Changlin), now live at Grandma’s. Except Chenchen wants to go to the city with his aunt and uncle, where the wi-fi is better. So a temporary swap is made: Zhihua’s daughter, Saran (Zhang Zifeng of “Aftershock” and “Detective Chinatown”), keeps Mumu company at Grandma’s, while Chenchen goes where the wi-fi is better. As they’re out the door, in the mailbox, Mumu finds an invitation for her mother to attend her 30th high school reunion. Zhihua smiles and promises to take care of it.
That’s the seeming nothing comment that will propel the rest of the movie.
没有手机
At the reunion, everyone mistakes Zhihua for her sister, and she doesn’t correct them. Later, she’ll tell her husband there wasn’t time. He: “It’s just one sentence.” Initially we think Zhihua is just too polite, but there’s more at work.
She leaves the reunion early but is followed out by Yin Chuan (Qin Hao), a struggling novelist scraping by in Shanghai. He talks to her, asks her out for tea, she begs off saying she’s got a long busride home. There, both Chenchen and her husband, Wentou (Du Jiang), are sitting in the living room looking at their cell phones. (I like that bit.) She goes to shower, her phone remains behind, and she soon receives a text from Yin Chuan proclaiming his love. Wentou sees it and he’s not happy. Even after Zhihua explains about the mistaken identity, he’s not happy. He winds up breaking her cell phone in anger.
In the days that follow, he continues to take it out on her in a passive-aggressive manner. He presents her with a new cell: a string phone with an Apple logo on the cups. (Chenchen, with all the tech in the world at his fingertips, is genuinely amazed at how it works—another good bit.) Wentou also brings home two big dogs; then he lets his mother stay with them. Zhihua feels like she’s being tortured. She says so much in letters she writes to Yin Chuan. Physical letters. She no longer has a phone, she’s worried about Wentou snooping on her computer, so she resorts to this pre-internet way of communication. It’s charming and fits the movie’s pace, which is leisurely and contemplative.
But there’s more to Zhihua's letter-writing than merely avoiding a digital footprint; there’s a backstory.
Back in middle school, the young Zhihua (also played by Zhang Zifeng of “Aftershock,” etc.) had a crush on Yin Chuan, who had a crush on her older sister, Zhilan (also played by Deng Enxi). Classic love triangle. Yin Chuan even writes letters to Zhilan but Zhihua doesn’t pass them on. She’s trying to win him for herself. Eventually she does pass them on, even as she declares her love for Yin Chuan; but it's not reciprocated. In not correcting the mistaken impression at the high school reunion, she was, in effect, doing what she always wanted to do: replace her more beautiful older sister.
But there’s backstory even Zhihua doesn’t know. Yin Chuan wound up helping Zhilan with her commencement speech (she was class valedictorian), and at university they became friends and possibly lovers. He lost her to—or she left him for—Zhang Chao (Hu Ge), with whom she started a family. But he was a bad drunk, a bad husband, a bad man. He beat her. Eventually he left. Meanwhile Yin Chuan wrote a novel about and named after the love of his life: “Zhilan.” He didn’t have her but he had that. And eventually she had that. We find out that later in life she clung to it, and to the old letters he wrote her, and the love he had for her. Mumu is the one who tells the adult Yin Chuan all of this. She also tells him her mother would’ve been better off with him.
All of which provides a kind of closure for Yin Chuan (who feels he’ll be able to write again), for Zhihua (who still has a muted crush on Yin Chuan), not to mention Mumu (whose mother, after all, chose death over her). Meanwhile, the wi-fi-loving Chenchen is not as shallow as we think. He winds up involved in desperate acts of escape: for a pet bird and for himself.
The last letter of the (English) title is the letter Zhilan wrote to her children, which we see in a drawer in the first act, and which is read in the third—to not much effect. On purpose? Maybe that’s the idea. There are no answers.
你脏鼠
As for the suspensions of disbelief I mentioned in the lede?
The lesser is one of casting. You know the “Public Enemy” casting story? Initially Edward Woods was going to play the lead (Tom Powers), but they decided the second-billed James Cagney (as Matt) had more pizzazz, so they had them switch roles. But the childhood scenes had already been filmed, so the kid who’s a dead ringer for Cagney (Frankie Darro) grows up to be Edward Woods, while the tall slim boy (Frank Coghlan, Jr.) grows up to be the short, squat, pugnacious Cagney. So wrong.
We get a bit of that here. Zhang Zifeng, who plays both the younger Zhihua and Zhihua’s daughter, is fine but she’s no great beauty. She's the first face in the poster above. But the movie would have us believe she becomes Zhou Xun, one of the most beautiful women in the world. (The third face in the poster.) Indeed, when I first saw Mumu (second-to-last face in the poster), I assumed she was playing Zhou Xun’s daughter since they looked alike. Instead, she’s the niece, as well as a younger version of the older sister. All of which at least makes the mistaken identity at the high school reunion more plausible; but it's still so wrong it takes us out of the picture.
What else takes us out of the picture? This long-standing problem: The movie industry attracts beautiful people who then often want to play ordinary people living ordinary lives. It's the “Michelle Pfeiffer can't get a date” syndrome. Here, too. In “Last Letter,” we have to believe that Zhou Xun—again, one of the most beautiful women in the world—plays second fiddle to her more beautiful older sister. 真的吗?
After the reveals, a few questions remain. Yin Chuan claims he knew it was Zhihua at the reunion. If so, why the text message proclaiming his love? Was he teasing her? Testing her? And if Zhihua went to the reunion to see Yin Chuan, why turn down his offer of tea and conversation?
Another puzzle: “Last Letter” is Japanese writer-director Shunji Iwai’s first Chinese-language film, but he’s already filming a Japanese version, also called “Last Letter,” which will be out next year. I’ve never seen that before. Is it simply a remake? An improvement? Are the two versions a comment on the cultural differences between China and Japan? Or did he just want to take it home?
I might have to see it. I like the feeling this one left with me. I felt opened slightly, wiser slightly. I carried the movie’s delicate humanity with me as I left the theater.
Sunday November 18, 2018
The Never-Ending Campaigns, Inc.
In case you were wondering why the world is the way it is, here's part of the answer via Jill Lepore's “These Truths: A History of the United States.”
We‘re up to the 1930s now, and Lepore is describing the effect mass communication and propaganda—from Edward Bernays to Josef Goebbels—have had upon democracy. Then she gets into a topic she wrote about in The New Yorker a few years back: CAMPAIGNS, INC., “the first political consulting firm in the history of the world, founded by Clem Whitaker and Leone Baxter in California in 1933.” It mostly ran campaigns for big businesses, such as Standard Oil and Pacific Telephone and Telegraph. Critics called it “the Lie Factory.”
Here’s where they really broke through. The 1934 California campaign for governor involved the former muckraker Upton Sinclair, who was—initially—hugley popular:
Two months before the election, they began working for George Hatfield, a candidate for lieutenant governor on a Republican ticket headed by the incumbent governor, Frank Merriam. They locked themselves in a room for three days with everything Sinclair had ever written. “Upton was beaten,” Whitaker later said, “because he had written books” ...
The Los Angeles Times began running on its front page a box with an Upton Sinclair quotation in it, a practice the paper continued every day for six weeks, right up until Election Day. For instance: SINCLAIR ON MARRIAGE: THE SANCTITY OF MARRIAGE. . . . I HAVE HAD SUCH A BELIEF . . . I HAVE IT NO LONGER. The passage, as Sinclair explained in a book called “I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked,” was taken from his novel “Love's Pilgrimage” (1911), in which a fictional character writes a heartbroken letter to a man having an affair with his wife.
“Reading these boxes day after day,” Sinclair wrote, “I made up my mind that the election was lost.” ...
“Sure, those quotations were irrelevant,” Baxter later said. “But we had one objective: to keep him from becoming Governor.” They succeeded. The final vote was Merriam, 1,138,000; Sinclair, 879,000.81 No single development altered the workings of American democracy so wholly as the industry Whitaker and Baxter founded.
They basically set the stage for everything that's been ruining politics, and thus our lives, ever since:
Whitaker and Baxter won nearly every campaign they waged. The campaigns they chose to run, and the way they decided to run them, shaped the history of California and of the country. They drafted the rules by which campaigns would be waged for decades afterward.
The first thing they did, when they took on a campaign, was to “hibernate” for a week to write a Plan of Campaign. Then they wrote an Opposition Plan of Campaign, to anticipate the moves made against them. Every campaign needs a theme. Keep it simple. Rhyming's good (“For Jimmy and me, vote ‘yes’ on 3”). Never explain anything. “The more you have to explain,” Whitaker said, “the more difficult it is to win support.” Say the same thing over and over again. “We assume we have to get a voter's attention seven times to make a sale,” Whitaker said. Subtlety is your enemy. “Words that lean on the mind are no good,” according to Baxter. “They must dent it.” Simplify, simplify, simplify. “A wall goes up,” Whitaker warned, “when you try to make Mr. and Mrs. Average American Citizen work or think.”
Make it personal, Whitaker and Baxter always advised: candidates are easier to sell than issues. If your position doesn't have an opposition, or if your candidate doesn't have an opponent, invent one. Once, when fighting an attempt to recall the mayor of San Francisco, Whitaker and Baxter waged a campaign against the Faceless Man—the idea was Baxter‘s—who might end up replacing him. Baxter drew a picture, on a tablecloth, of a fat man with a cigar poking out from beneath a face hidden by a hat, and then had him plastered on billboards all over the city, with the question “Who’s Behind the Recall?” Pretend that you are the Voice of the People. Whitaker and Baxter bought radio ads, sponsored by “the Citizens Committee Against the Recall,” in which an ominous voice said: “The real issue is whether the City Hall is to be turned over, lock, stock, and barrel, to an unholy alliance fronting for a faceless man.” (The recall was defeated.)
Attack, attack, attack. Said Whitaker: “You can't wage a defensive campaign and win!” Never underestimate the opposition. Never shy from controversy, they advised; instead, win the controversy.
This is still the Republican model. It was Trump's model.
The key to the success of CAMPAIGNS, INC. is also in this ominous line:
They succeeded best by being noticed least.
Make sure you get Lepore's book. It's essentially about how our truths became less than self-evident.
Saturday November 17, 2018
The First Top 10 Movie List of 2018
We are the champions?
And so it begins. The first top 10 movie list of the year—from Stephanie Zacharek of Time magazine—was released on Thursday.
I usually dread these since they‘re full of movies I’ve heard about (via the festival circuit) but won't be able to see for another month or so. Or longer.
Not here. Of Zacharek's top 10, I‘ve already seen five, and only three haven’t been released in U.S. theaters yet. It's a good eclectic collection. She's a movie booster:
Every year, there's someone around to say, “This seemed like a bad year for movies,” to which I invariably say, “I think it's been a great year for movies!” This has been going on for decades now, so the problem—if you want to consider it one—is clearly with me. What stuns me each year isn't how many bad movies get made, but how many good ones do.
No wonder she got the Time gig.
She adds, “Naturally, there's a broad middle ground of mediocrity” (oh yeah), and “I go to the movies not to be impressed, but to be overwhelmed” (who doesn‘t?). She ends thus: “So here is a list of 10 movies that didn’t impress me so much as they brought me an exquisite and sometimes formidable kind of joy.”
Then we get to Stephanie's list:
- 10. Paddington 2
- 9. Bohemian Rhapsody
- 8. If Beale Street Could Talk
- 7. A Star is Born
- 6. Can You Ever Forgive Me?
- 5. The Favourite
- 4. Eighth Grade
- 3. First Reformed
- 2. Won't You Be My Neighbor?
- 1. Roma
I like a good eclectic collection that leans toward popular fare. But joy? Of the five movies I've seen in her top 10, I admire some (“Eighth Grade”) but was generally disappointed in the others.
Of course, this has been a year of real movie disappointments for me. I keep being unimpressed with the movies critics love (“BlacKkKlansman,” “First Reformed,” “Can You Ever Forgive Me?”) and wonder why no one talks up the movies that I loved (“Wajib,” “Love Education,” “The King”). I know. That could be any year for any of us. Just seems more pronounced this year.
Friday November 16, 2018
As You Wish
Friday November 16, 2018
William Goldman (1931-2018)
- “You just keep thinkin', Butch, that's what you‘re good at.”
- “Rules? In a knife fight?”
- “Are you crazy? The fall will probably kill ya.”
- “You think you used enough dynamite there, Butch?”
- “Who are those guys?”
- “Follow the money.”
- “The truth is, these aren’t very bright guys, and things got out of hand.”
- “Now don't tell me you think that all of this was the work of little Don Segretti.”
- “You haven't got it.”
- “Is it safe?”
- “Nobody knows anything.”
- “Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”
- “No more rhymes now—and I mean it!” “Anybody got a peanut?”
- “INCONCEIVABLE!”
- “You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.”
- “This is true love. You think this happens every day?”
- “As you wish.”
Thursday November 15, 2018
Collusion, Collusion, Wear a Gas Mask and a Veil, Cont.
From Jonathan Chait's piece, “Forget Impeachment. Mueller's Real Threat to Trump Is in 2020” on the New York Magazine site:
The breadth of Trump's legal exposure exceeds that of any president in American history. It is so vast that it is hard to comprehend. Some, and possibly all, of the following appear to have colluded with Russia on behalf of the Trump campaign: Michael Flynn, Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Donald Trump Jr., and Michael Cohen. Trump has been doing business with the criminal underworld in Russia and elsewhere for years, the secrets of which may be revealed by Mueller, or by House Democrats obtaining his tax returns. Federal prosecutors are investigating whether he violated campaign-finance laws by directing hush money to various mistresses. The state of New York is investigating the Trump Foundation for alleged misappropriation of funds and the Trump Organization for decades-long tax fraud. He is being sued for violating the Constitution's Emoluments Clause. He is also being sued for fraud.
And this is just the information we know so far, which has come out despite a Congress dedicated to protecting him from investigation, a benefit he will enjoy for only a few more weeks.
As for what the headline means: Chait says it's unlikely Mueller can indict a sitting president; and for impeachment you need 2/3 of the Senate or (currently) 20 Republican Senators. So the real battle will be in 2020 when the voters can do something about it.
Unfortunately that brings up the scariest line in the piece, According to Chait, a poll from last spring “found that nearly three-fifths of the public is unaware that Mueller has uncovered any crimes at all.”
Thursday November 15, 2018
Movie Review: The St. Louis Kid (1934)
Ellis and Cagney looking comfortable, despite the awkward math.
WARNING: SPOILERS
The movie is 67 minutes long and feels like it took 67 minutes to make.
It still has its charms. I like looking at the old gas stations and drug stores. The small-town magistrate is named Jeremiah Jones (Arthur Aylesworth), and for some reason his name is hyphenated on his office door: Jeremiah-Jones. Was that a thing? Meanwhile, with his cut-off shirt sleeves and old-time truckers/postman cap, Cagney looks like an early template for a rejected member of the Village People.
But at least he’s Cagney. He's got verve, energy, and a lightness in his step. Just don't expect “Angels with Dirty Faces.” Or even “Picture Snatcher.”
Tit for tat
He plays Eddie Kennedy, a truck driver forever getting tossed into jail with or without his buddy, Buck (frequent Cagney foil Allen Jenkins). Generally: Buck starts a fight he can’t finish, Eddie can, Eddie winds up in jail for a night or so.
Question the movie never raises: Why does this always happen to them?
Answer: They’re sort of assholes.
As the movie opens, Buck is bailing Eddie out again; then they drive their truck back to company HQ, but box in a guy in his car. He complains, they taunt him. Seems unnecessary but that’s what they do. Turns out the guy is their new boss, who now has it in for them, and gives them the route between St. Louis and Chicago. I guess it’s a bad route? Cubs fans on one side, Cards on the other.
And we‘re off and running. Outside the small town of Ostopolis, Eddie is forced to brake abruptly and they’re rammed by the car behind them, driven by feisty Ann Reid (Patricia Ellis, “Picture Snatcher”). She gets mad, insults them, they do the same (Cagney with a leering grin). Then a would-be shining knight, Brown (Addison Richards), shows up, and it’s like with the boss all over again. He decks Buck, Eddie headbutts him, prison.
It turns out Brown works for a company that’s shortchanging dairy farmers, so Cagney concocts a story before the magistrate—also a dairy farmer—that that’s what the fight was about. Why, if he were a dairy farmer, Eddie says, he wouldn’t take any of that crap. Several things happen as a result of this story: 1) Eddie gets released; and 2) he inspires the dairy farmers to go on strike and set up blockades to prevent the trucking company from bringing in out-of-state milk. And one of those truckers is Eddie.
At the same time, Eddie is involved in a tit-for-tat battle with feisty Ann, who runs a diner in Ostopolis. Eddie insults her, she douses his ham and eggs with Tabasco sauce. He rams her delivery truck, she makes him pay for the wasted eggs. It's meet felonious.
Then it gets a little creepy. After he gets 10 days for a fight with a striking dairy farmer, Eddie slips out of his cell—it’s like Mayberry if Otis ran the jail—and confronts Ann at the diner as she’s closing up. She’s obviously afraid but he sticks around with his leering grin. It’s way creepier than the movie seems to realize. But they wind up a couple. Because Hollywood.
This is where the plot finally kicks in. To protect its trucks and profits, the company hires goons who threaten the striking farmers with guns. Then late one night, Farmer Benson (Robert Barrat) stands up to them. He’s shot and killed. Which is just when Ann drives by in her car after her first “date” with Eddie. The next morning, Ann is missing, her car is next to Benson’s body, and everyone knows she was out with Eddie—who had it in for the farmers. So the cops charge Eddie.
If this were a Paul Muni Warner Bros. movie, he’d get railroaded and it would end on a downtrodden downbeat note. But it’s Cagney, so he and his trucker pals find the real killer, free Ann, and suddenly he and Ann are signing a hotel register as Mr. and Mrs. Eddie Kennedy. But when the hotel clerk doubts their nuptials, both take offense, and both wind up behind bars. Buck says Eddie might get 10 years. Eddie wraps his arms around Ann and says, “Can you make it 20?” Fade.
Not a bad end to an otherwise lame movie.
16 going on 17?
You know who impressed? Barrat as Farmer Benson. He has a slow dignity to him—like something out of a Dorthea Lange photograph. He was in everything from “The Life of Emile Zola” with Paul Muni to “Mr. Ed” on television. Plus seven Cagney pictures. He died in 1970 and is buried in Martinsburg, West Virginia, near where my mom lived.
And as good as Patricia Ellis is, as with “Picture Snatcher” there’s some awkward math there. According to IMDb, she was born in 1916, which means she was 18 at best during the making of this picture. (She was 17 at best, more likely 16, romancing Cagney in “Picture Snatcher.”) And while her contemporaries continued acting until the ’70s or ‘80s, her acting career was over by 1939 when she was 23. “I was just getting into a rut in Hollywood,” she’s been quoted as saying. “I want to start a new career—singing.” She did, for two years, then according to her obit in The New York Times, “gave up her career in 1941 when she was married to George T. O’Maley, now president of Protection Securities Systems, Inc., a subsidiary of Interstate Securities.” The obit is from 1970. She was 53. Cancer.
Or was she 51? Wikipedia says she was born in 1918, which makes the above math even more awkward.
Anyway, not much to “The St. Louis Kid.” Just history.
Wednesday November 14, 2018
U.S. to Mexicans 100 Years Ago: Come In, Don't Stay
From the “The past isn't dead, it isn't even past” dept., via Jill Lepore's “These Truths: A History of the United States”:
After the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, large growers had turned to Japanese laborers, but a so-called gentleman's agreement between Japan and the United States ended their migration in 1908, after which growers began sending employment agents over the border and into Mexico to recruit workers. In an era when the regime of scientific management maligned Hungarians, Italians, and Jews as near-animals who needed to be ruled not by the lash but by the stopwatch, business owners and policymakers tended to describe Mexican immigrants—desperately poor political refugees—as ideal workers. In 1908, U.S. government economist Victor S. Clark claimed that Mexican immigrants were “docile, patient, usually orderly in camp, fairly intelligent under competent supervision, obedient and cheap,” and, in 1911, a U.S. congressional panel reported that while Mexicans “are not easily assimilated, this is not of very great importance as long as most of them return to their native land after a short time”...
This did not quiet nativists, the American Eugenics Society warning: “Our great Southwest is rapidly creating for itself a new racial problem, as our old South did when it imported slave labor from Africa. The Mexican birth rate is high, and every Mexican child born on American soil is an American citizen, who, on attaining his or her majority, will have a vote. This is not a question of pocketbook or of the ‘need of labor’ or of economics. It is a question of the character of future races. It is eugenics, not economics.” Congress, pressured by eugenicists and southern and western agriculturalists, in the end exempted Mexicans from the new immigration restriction regime, while also requiring not only passports but also visas for anyone entering the United States. Thus it erected hurdles that allowed Mexicans to cross the border to work temporarily but denied access to citizenship.
Tuesday November 13, 2018
Canó Faces Consequences?
Ken Rosenthal has a piece on The Athletic about off-season trade questions, including: Should Arizona trade Zack Greinke? How much research are the Yankees doing on Manny Machado anyway? And which execs are going to lead Baltimore into the future?
Plus this:
And what about Canó?
Yeah, what about Canó?
It's basically: Are the Mariners going to tear down and rebuild? Even if they do, suggests Rosenthal, who wants the scraps? Both Felix and Kyle Seager have big contracts and are in the midst of seemingly unstoppable downhill slides. Then there's Robinson Canó, who was busted for taking a banned PED-masking supplement, missed half the season, and still has another five years and $120 million on his contract. Not many teams want to pick that up, even with a boost/bribe from the M‘s.
More, the M’s just traded for Mallex Smith, a centerfielder, which means Dee Gordon's experimental season there might be at an end. But if he goes back to second, his natural spot, where does Canó go? To first base? Where he doesn't want to go?
Rosenthal ends the section on a surprisingly ominous, almost vindictive note:
Canó surely wants to salvage his legacy, but his path to Cooperstown might be as difficult to forge as his path out of Seattle. He made his choices. Now he faces the consequences.
My thought: What exactly are those consequences, Ken? Playing first base? Or just playing in Seattle?
Monday November 12, 2018
Stan Lee (1922-2018)
Stan at the Avengers premiere in 2012. His tongue was in his cheek when he called it “The Marvel Age of Comics,” but that's what it's become.
I got to meet Stan Lee in November 1975 when I was 12. I‘ve written about it before. Here’s the longer version.
I'd been collecting comics for about two and a half years and Stan was legendary to me. He was “Stan the Man,” credited as “Editor in Chief” in the front of every issue, with “Stan's Soapbox” in the back of every issue. Plus his outsized personality permeated the Marvel world. It was a kind of tongue-in-cheek braggadaccio, chest-thumping but with a wink. He'd say “ish” for “issue,” “Excelsior!” as a sign-off. I loved it all. I was a “true believer” who was ready to “face front” in the “Mighty Marvel Age of Comics.” ‘Nuff said!
One Sunday night, my father, a reporter for The Minneapolis Tribune, called my brother and I into his bedroom. I think I went grumpily—or warily. Was I in trouble? There was memorabilia—books and calendars and things—on the bedspread, and I didn’t think much about it until I noticed they were all Marvel comics characters.
“Whoa!”
It was like Christmas in November. We jumped onto the bed with him. I grabbed a calendar, “The Mighty Marvel Bicentennial Calendar,” and began flipping through it. January was “The Invaders,” an attempt to reboot ‘40s-era superheroes like the original Human Torch and Toro, Captain America and Bucky, and the Sub-Mariner. They were all standing on the deck of a Revolutionary-era clipper ship. I groaned: “Frank Robbins,” I said.
“Which one is Frank Robbins?” Dad asked.
“No no. The artist.”
“You can tell who drew it?”
“Sure.”
“How?”
I shrugged. “Looks like Frank Robbins.”
Dad had been going through “Sons of Origins of Marvel Comics,” Stan Lee’s much-anticipated (by me) follow-up to “Origins of Marvel Comics,” a trade paperback which had featured reprints of the debut issues of characters like the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Spider-Man, and Thor, along with Lee’s memories of their creation. The sequel would focus on Captain America, Iron Man and X-Men.
“I’m interviewing this guy tomorrow,” Dad said.
“What guy?”
“Stan Lee. You know him?”
It was like asking if we knew Jesus. Chris and I actually shouted with joy. We couldn't believe it.
“So do you want to meet him?” Dad asked.
And that's when I suddenly felt nervous. Meet Stan Lee? What would I say to him? What if he turned out to be an asshole? What if he didn't like me? What if Dad embarrassed me? Oh god, Dad was going to embarrass me.
Their interview took place during a late lunch at a swanky downtown restaurant. I got out of school early and took the unfamiliar bus to the unfamiliar location. A maitre d’ led me to a dark back table where my older brother already sat next to my father, both listening to an older guy with graying hair, sunglasses, and a moustache. I think I was initially disappointed. I don't know what I thought Stan Lee looked like (Reed Richards?) but I didn't imagine a hood from “Baretta.”
My father asked him how old he was and he said 52, then added, “Does that sound too old? How old would you like? Make it 50.” He gave great quote. He talked up the secret to his success. “We took the one-dimensional cardboard figures that had inhabited comic books until then and breathed life into them. The good guys weren’t all good and the bad guys weren’t all bad.” When the interview was over, staff photographer Mike Zerby asked me to stand on a chair and hold a light for him. Stan posed. He did the classic strong-man pose. Zerby loved it. The next day when the article appeared, the photo looked dark and I thought I'd screwed up in some way. “No,” Dad told me. “That's the way it's supposed to look.”
As for meeting Stan? It was amazing and incredible and fantastic and uncanny. After the interview, he didn’t turn off. I don’t know if he had an “off.” He invited Chris and I over and drew us out. He drew a cartoonish Captain America holding a banner up to his nose—like Kilroy. Beneath, he added the usual semi-ironic Marvel braggadaccio: “Another practically priceless Stan Lee original!” He signed our books and gave us bullpen nicknames in the Mighty Marvel Manner. “To Charismatic Chris,” he wrote in Chris’ “Sons of Origins of Marvel Comics.” “To Erudite Erik” he wrote in my copy of “Origins of Marvel Comics.” He may have been the nicest famous person I ever met.
It's interesting contemplating what it would‘ve been like for him then. A dozen years earlier he was a middle-aged dude working for a dying company in a disprespected industry. Then his boss, Martin Goodman, told him to create a team of superheroes like DC did with “Justice League of America.” Apparently it was Lee’s wife who suggested he do with the characters what he'd long said he wanted to do:
The characters would be the kind of characters I could personally relate to; they'd be flesh and blood, they'd have their faults and foibles, they'd be fallible and feisty and—most important of all—inside their colorful, costumed booties they'd still have feet of clay.
The team turned out to be the Fantastic Four, of course, and they were followed by Hulk and Spider-Man and Thor and Iron Man and X-Men, and the rest is both history and not history, since it's ongoing; since the biggest movies in the world are based on those characters that Stan and Jack and others created for a dying company in a disrespected field more than 50 years ago.
Thanks, Stan. Excelsior.
Practically priceless.
Monday November 12, 2018
Movie Review: The Phantom (1943)
WARNING: SPOILERS
I never dug the Phantom. None of my comic book-buying buddies did. Probably because he wasn’t a comic book guy but a comic strip guy—born in those pages in 1936, two years before Action Comics #1 introduced Superman to the world. After I began collecting in 1973, I recall being vaguely intrigued by the Phantom’s daily strip, since, at the time, he was as close to a superhero as you could find in the funnies. But no, he was boring. I kept waiting for him to do something super. I kept waiting for him to return from the jungle until I realized, “Oh, he’s supposed to be there.” He was what we now call a transitional superhero: mask and skintight suit, yes, but everything else spoke to boys adventure stories of the 1910s: the jungle, “magic,” signet rings, subservient natives, a German Shepherd sidekick. He was your grandfather’s superhero and creaked like it.
The 1943 Columbia serial, “The Phantom,” is that turned up to 11.
It’s a movie serial so it’s going to be cut-rate and clumsy; and it’s set in the jungle (Africa, South America, we’re never sure), so it comes loaded with the usual racial landmines. The filmmakers manage to trip them all:
- Natives kowtowing before a white man (our hero), who is proclaimed a god
- Flabby white dudes, wearing leopard-skin diapers, playing the natives
- Flabby white dudes saying things like “Boola boola cahoola” and “Ubba gonga tonga” as examples of the native language
This last is like what “Gilligan’s Island” would be two decades later. I also got a whiff of “Star Wars.” At the end of Chapter 10, “Chamber of Death,” the Phantom falls through a trap door and into a pit, where a metal panel opens revealing ... a rancor! Kidding, it’s a tiger. But it’s still very much like Luke in Jabba’s lair in “Return of the Jedi.” Yet another reminder that these things hugely influenced filmmakers like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, who hugely influenced everything else. “The Phantom” and other serials are like the ur-texts of what’s playing at your local multiplex.
Boola boola cahoola.
That old cistern
What’s the story here? Glad you asked!
Prof. Davidson (Frank Shannon) and his team, including his spunky niece Diana Palmer (Jeanne Bates), arrive in the town of Sai Pana, on the edge of the jungle, hoping to find the fabled “Lost City of Zoloz” and its various riches.
Meanwhile, a gang of thugs, led by Dr. Max Bremmer (Kenneth MacDonald), needs the area to construct a landing strip in the jungle—for war, one imagines, but the why is never stated—so they try to throw the Professor’s team off the scent. Then they try to keep everyone out of the jungle by riling up the natives. Best way to do that? Kill the Phantom.
The Phantom, you see, is the reason there’s any peace in the jungle at all. He demands it. And he’s revered and kotowed to as a god because he can’t be killed. He’s “The Man Who Never Dies” and “The Ghost Who Walks.” But it’s a trick; he’s just been played by different men through the years—20, as the serial opens.
The first Phantom we see is played by actor Sam Flint, born in 1882, who looks every bit of his 61 years. (I was reminded of Alfred dressing up as Batman in the ’66 TV series.) Thankfully, as he makes an appearance before the natives, sitting in a rising stone throne behind a smokescreen, he’s shot by a poisoned dart blown from one of Bremmer’s men. He knows he’s a goner so sends word to his son, Geoffrey Prescott (Tom Tyler), to take over. Geoffrey, who just happens to be part of Prof. Davidson’s team, arrives just in time to get Phantom 101 lessons and meet the natives on their side: Suba and Moku.
There’s also a treasure in jewels and gold, “a tomb of your ancestors,” an oath, and a signet ring. Like any boys club. Then, when Phantom XX dies, our newer younger version rises in the stone throne behind a smokescreen to make his proclamations.
My thoughts at this point:
- Why wasn’t he trained in sooner? Seems a bit last minute.
- Why a skintight purple suit and black mask? That’s not really ghostly. Nor good camouflage. Not to mention breathable. He is in the jungle, after all.
- Why do Suba and Moku go along with the ruse?
- How come, when the new Phantom emerges, no one says, “Hey, doesn’t he look 30 years younger to you?”
Bigger point: Our hero is someone who uses literal smokescreens to trick the natives. “There’s nothing that so sways the native mind as a few simple tricks and illusions,” Phantom XX tells him. That’s our hero. Did they know back then how bad this sounded? One wonders. In episode 9, the Phantom tells Diana about the ancient legend of the Fire Princess: How she arrived, helped them rule, then disappeared with a promise to return.
Diana: But surely you don’t believe that legend.
Phantom: Heh. Of course not. But the natives do. That’s why whoever calls herself the Fire Princess now can take advantage of them.
Uh, dude? You’re basically describing you. It’s one of the better examples of projection I’ve seen from a so-called hero. One wonders if it wasn’t a wink from the screenwriters.
Speaking of: I expected them to use the “man who never dies,” conceit more than they do. The problem with superheroes and serials is that each chapter has to end with a cliffhanger, and it’s absurd that: 1) the superhero gets into so much trouble, and 2) keeps surviving. “The man who never dies” conceit, at the least, gives a plausible explanation to the other characters for that survival. Except they never use it. Instead we get:
Rocco: Great news, Chief! We knocked over the Phantom!
Bremmer: The Phantom? But Long and Chris told me they took care of him at Rusty’s shack.
Rocco: Well, we’re not responsible for what they say.
And:
Flunky: Hey Doc! We sure got the Phantom in a pocket. He’s trapped in that dead-end tunnel.
Bremmer: I thought he’d drowned in that old cistern.
Flunky: He must’ve gotten out of that somehow, but he’s a sure goner now.
I think at one point Bremmer does wonder if maybe there’s something to “The Man Who Never Dies” legend, but it should’ve been integral throughout the serial. Missed opportunity.
(Sidenote: Daka, the Japanese villain in “Batman,” another Columbia serial from 1943, assumes with Batman what’s actually true with the Phantom. Since Batman keeps surviving, he decides there must be many Batmen, “all members of the same organization,” and if one goes down another takes his place. Probably no coincidence that the serials share two screenwriters: Victor McLeod and Leslie Swabacker.)
For those who care, these are the cliffhangers/escapes:
- The Phantom is stuck in a swamp with an alligator approaching ... but Devil, his German Shepherd, chases the alligator away then pulls Phantom out.
- A lion attacks him ... but is killed by a native’s spear.
- A grenade blows up a hut ... but Phantom had escaped beforehand.
- He’s being gassed to death ... but Devil warns his friend, Rusty, who pulls him to safety
- A rope bridge breaks ... but he survives the fall.
- A booby trapped is rigged ... but Devil saves him.
- The bad guys collapse a well ... but Phantom crawls through a tunnel.
- He falls into a canyon and there’s an explosion ... but survives.
- He seems to succumb to fire-dance flames ... but is pulled to safety by Moku and Devil.
- He falls into a pit and a tiger is released ... so he lights a flare and escapes through the tunnel the tiger emerged from.
- A metal gate portal is brought down ... but he rolls to safety.
- In a pit, he’s forced to fight an ape ... and kills it.
- In a cistern, water is dumped on him ... but he survives.
- An explosion in a cavern ... doesn’t kill him.
How does he survive? Either somebody helps, he did something beforehand we weren’t shown, or he just shakes it off. The best escape is really from the tiger. At least that involved some ingenuity.
Devil (played by Ace the Wonder Dog) is an interesting addition—he certainly beats the boy sidekick—but it creates an added absurdity. He wasn’t Phantom XX’s dog but Geoffrey Prescott’s. I.e., there’s Geoffrey with Devil; then Geoffrey disappears and Devil is suddenly the Phantom’s dog. In Chapter 8, “In Quest of the Keys,” Diana, who’s been wondering over the disappearance of Geoffrey, calls the Phantom on this. She asks: Why do you have Geoffrey’s dog? “I found him wandering in the forest,” he responds.
Smooth, bro.
‘Bring sparkling burgundy!’
Tyler, who also played the first live-action superhero ever (Captain Marvel in 1941), is a good fit for the role. He’s strong-looking, athletic, and dull. As dull as I remember the Phantom being.
This is one of the serials in which we know the villain from the get-go and our hero doesn’t; so we wait for him to catch up. We wait 15 chapters—300 minutes. The villain is good in the sense that he’s infuriating—a liar and a scoundrel—and we can’t wait for the moment of comeuppance. So guess what they do?
They handle it off-screen.
For like the 10th time, Bremmer assumes the Phantom is dead, so he concocts a not-bad scheme to control the natives: He has one of his henchman dress as the Phantom. They do the whole nine yards: smokescreen, stone throne, but now phony Phantom just stands there; it’s Bremmer who does the talking. He’s in the midst of this when one of the natives, the long problematic Chief Chota (Stanley Price), takes this moment to reenact what the bad guys did in the first episode: He shoots a dart at the (phony) Phantom, who goes down. Chota is killed, and then there’s more smoke. When it clears, the real Phantom is standing there with .... Bremmer dead.
How does he die? Who knows? What of the fake Phantom? Got me. But that’s it. Not much of a payoff after five hours of drivel.
Oh, and the treasure from the lost city of Zoloz? The Phantom has it. He’s always had it.
There are many absurdities—snow-capped mountains in chapter 8, for example—but my favorite is the sideplot to the Genghis Khan-like castle of Tartar (Dick Curtis). It’s like the screenwriters ran out of ideas and so went the Khan route. At one point, impressed by the Phantom’s survival skills, Tartar calls for a celebration. “Bring sparkling burgundy!” he cries.
More lines like that might’ve made “The Phantom” worth watching.
Sunday November 11, 2018
Armistice Day + 100: 'I do not believe that any of us loves a blustering nationality'
More kismet with Jill Lepore. I'm up to WWI in her book, “These Truths: A History of the United States,” and read the following this morning—on the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I:
The scale of death in the American Civil War, so staggering at the time—750,000 dead, in four years of fighting—looked, by comparison, minuscule. Within the first eight weeks of the war alone, nearly 400,000 Germans were killed, wounded, sick, or missing. In 1916, over a matter of mere months, there were 800,000 military casualties in Verdun and 1.1 million at the Somme. But civilians were slaughtered, too. The Ottoman government massacred as many as 1.5 million Armenians. For the first time, war was waged by airplane, bombs dropped from a great height, as if by the gods themselves. Cathedrals were shelled, libraries bombed, hospitals blasted. Before the war was over, nearly 40 million people had been killed and another 20 million wounded. What sane person could believe in progress in an age of mass slaughter?
U.S. involvement by way of the Zimmerman telegram—a German promise to Mexico that it would regain the lost territories of Texas, New Mexico and Arizona if it fought us—also led to our first federal propaganda department, the Committee on Public Information, which was “headed by a baby-faced, forty-one-year-old muckraker from Missouri named George Creel, best-known for an exposé on child labor called Children in Bondage. Creel applied the methods of Progressive Era muckraking to the work of whipping up a frenzy for fighting.”
Lepore reminds us of the backlash against civil rights during the era. After Congress passed the 1918 Sedition Act, the Justice Department charged more than 2,000 Americans with that crime—particularly socialists. The leader of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), Bill Haywood, was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Former presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs was sentenced to 10 for delivering a speech, Lepore writes, in which he'd told his listeners that they were “fit for something better than slavery and cannon fodder.”
As for now? Yesterday, our current president traveled to France to participate in 100th anniversary ceremonies to honor the war dead; but then he decided not to. The White House said bad weather was the reason but didn't extrapolate, leaving everyone guessing. From the Washington Post: “The cemetery is 50 miles from Paris. Perhaps the president was planning to travel on Marine One, which is occasionally grounded by the military.” Today, other world leaders rebuked Trump's nationalism. Pres. Macron: “Nationalism is a betrayal of patriotism by saying, ‘our interest first, who cares about the others?’”
Which brings us back to “These Truths.” Wilson's 1916 re-election campaign slogan was, of course, “He kept us out of war,” which Teddy Roosevelt, still fomenting, called an “ignoble shirking of responsibility.” Wilson's repsonse: “I am an American, but I do not believe that any of us loves a blustering nationality.”
I'll let Paul Simon take us out.
Friday November 09, 2018
WSJ: ‘The U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan has gathered evidence of Mr. Trump's participation in the transactions'
Today, the Wall Street Journal reported that in 2015 Donald Trump sat down with media mogul David Pecker, who runs The National Enquirer, among others, about quashing potential allegations of sexual misconduct directed at then-presidential candidate. Pecker would buy the stories, sign the principles to an NDA, then never run them.
We‘ve known about some aspect of this story for a while now. What’s new, in the WSJ piece, is Trump's direct involvement:
Taken together, the accounts refute a two-year pattern of denials by Mr. Trump, his legal team and his advisers that he was involved in payoffs to Ms. McDougal and a former adult-film star. They also raise the possibility that the president of the United States violated federal campaign-finance laws.
The Wall Street Journal found that Mr. Trump was involved in or briefed on nearly every step of the agreements. He directed deals in phone calls and meetings with his self-described fixer, Michael Cohen, and others. The U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan has gathered evidence of Mr. Trump's participation in the transactions.
More more more, as the lady sang.
Friday November 09, 2018
Movie Review: Bohemian Rhapsody (2018)
WARNING: SPOILERS
Queen’s performance at Live Aid, July 13, 1985, before 100,000 people at Wembley Stadium and millions watching worldwide, is often called one of the great live performances in rock history. And not just by its fans. Backstage, Elton John supposedly told the band, “You bastards, you just stole the show.” Dave Grohl, who’s played his share of stadium concerts, and knows a thing or two about how that can distance you from your audience, has said this:
Every band should study Queen at Live Aid. If you really feel like that barrier is gone, you become Freddie Mercury. I consider him the greatest frontman of all time.
It wasn’t just the vocals and the strut, it was the interaction with the crowd: the whole DAY-oh! thing. He got them going and moving and a part of it. It’s become legend.
“Bohemian Rhapsody,” the new biopic of Freddie Mercury, smartly ends with that concert.
Not so smartly? They try to tie up all the loose ends and anticipate the next six years of Freddie’s life before his death of AIDS in 1991 at the age of 45.
I’m not talking about telling the other members of the band he has AIDS in 1985 rather than 1989. I’m not even talking about the rationale for Queen’s late entry into Live Aid. For the movie, Freddie’s nefarious assistant, Paul Prenter (Allen Leech of “Dowtown Abbey”), wasn’t relaying messages to Freddie, keeping him in a bubble, and away from friends and family. This included tearing up a desperate message that Queen was wanted at Live Aid. Except it wasn’t. In truth, the concert’s organizer, Bob Geldof of Boomtown Rats fame (“I Don’t Like Mondays”), didn’t even want them. Queen kept playing venues that were being boycotted by everyone else: Argentina in 1981; Sun City, South Africa in 1984. They were politically toxic. That’s why the late entry. Little Paulie’s machinations had nothing to do with it.
But—again—I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about how the movie presents Freddie’s day, July 13, 1985.
He gets up, feeds his cats, goes out. To Wembley? For the afternoon concert? No. According to the movie, this is the day Freddie finally tracks down Jim Hutton (Aaron McCusker), with whom he would spend the rest of his life. In the movie they meet at a raucous party in ... 1980? Freddie’s naughty, Jim gives him a dressing down, Freddie acts the chastened schoolboy and is intrigued. Then he spends five years or whatever tracking Jim down. And he finally does it on this day: July 13, 1985.
And then Freddie goes on to Wembley to make rock history.
Actually, no. Though Freddie and Jim haven’t seen each other in however many years, they’re immediately a couple. Like that. So much so, that Freddie picks this day of all days to then visit his parents, stalwart immigrants, and to introduce Jim as his partner. And he’s not just introducing Jim; he’s coming out to his family. And guess what? They’re immediately accepting of him! Because of course they are. Father hugs son, mother is teary-eyed, son promises mom he’ll blow here a kiss during his performance, and everything is made right on this day, July 13, 1985, just before Freddie heads to Wembley for an afternoon concert to make rock ‘n’ roll history.
In the audience, I kept shaking my head.
Oh, and then the movie implies that no one gave a shit about starving kids in Africa until Queen started playing. Not sure who’s more insulted by that: the other bands at Live Aid, or all of us.
Is this the real life
The tagline for “Bohemian Rhapsody” is:
FEARLESS
LIVES
FOREVER
Which I misread at first. I read “lives” as a noun rather than a verb—as in “He led a fearless life.” Either way, it doesn’t quite fit. Freddie was fearless in being flamboyant and original. But he was still a gay Parsi kid named Farrokh Bulsara who spent most of his life hiding his heritage and his homosexuality. Apparently he wanted to both stand out and fit in. That’s the wish of most of us, really. That’s where the dilemma is, but the movie makes a muddle of it.
The movie’s a muddle generally. You wait for the great songs (“Killer Queen,” “Bohemian Rhapsody,” “Somebody to Love,” “Crazy Little Thing”), and you thrill at Rami Malek’s dead-on impersonation of Freddie’s unique, strutting stage presence. But in between these moments, we get conflicts that are either cliché or contradictory.
So there’s the fictional record exec (Mike Myers, in a nod to “Wayne’s World”’s Queen scene) who can’t see the point of a six-minute single 10 years after “Like a Rolling Stone” and “Hey Jude” broke the barrier. He gets his. So there’s the nefarious underling who pulls Freddie away from family and friends and toward decadence. (Pull Freddie toward decadence? From what I’ve heard, he leapt.) And they can’t even do this right. When the schemer, Paul, assistant to manager John Reid (Aidan Gillen of “Game of Thrones”/”The Wire”), tells Reid that maybe Freddie should break from the band for a solo career, and then Reid suggests this to Freddie in the back of a limo, Freddie is so incensed by the suggestion that he fires Reid on the spot. So Paul becomes the manager. Then Freddie agrees to do the very thing he fired Reid for even suggesting. Why? How did Paul change his mind?
I don’t know how many times Freddie talks up the fans in the back row, the ones who don’t fit in, the freaks who are different—as he was, called “Paki” (for his heritage) and “Bucky” (for his teeth). And yet what are some of their biggest songs? Jock anthems: “We Will Rock You,” “We are the Champions,” “Another One Bites the Dust.” Each has been adopted by some sports team or another. The World Series-winning 1981 LA Dodgers even performed a horrible rendition of “We are the Champions” for posterity. I would’ve loved 10 seconds on that incongruity. Seeing jocks singing it at a futbol match: “These arsholes would’ve beaten me up at St. Pete’s.” Something.
Here’s the biggest question: Where did it all come from? The singing, the talent, the strutting? To the movie, it’s just suddenly there. He’s a shy kid working baggage at Heathrow and admiring a band, Smile, who’ve just lost their lead singer, Tim Staffel; and then he’s onstage and he’s Freddie. In real life, according to Slate, they all knew each other much earlier:
Mercury, who had drifted through other groups as a keyboard player, always wanted to be the band’s lead singer, sometimes shouting, “If I was your singer, I’d show you how it was done,” from the audience and already offering unsolicited advice on image and performance, telling them, according to May, “You’re not dressing right, you’re not addressing the audience properly. There’s always opportunity to connect.” In fact, by the time Staffell quit, May, Taylor, and Mercury (then still Bulsara) were sharing an apartment, so when the vacancy arose, Mercury was the natural person to fill it.
I love the thought of Freddie shouting from the audience. Would that we could’ve seen it.
Is this just fantasy
Great casting. I’ll give it that. Dead on. Everyone looks the part.
But “Bohemian Rhapsody” doesn’t live up to its tagline. It’s not fearless. It’s a typical rock biopic. It’s ordinary. It’s what Freddie wasn’t.
Thursday November 08, 2018
Movie Review: First Man (2018)
WARNING: SPOILERS
Shouldn’t it have been more fun?
I love that they make space travel seem hard, and foreign, and existential. It was and is. There’s a moment when they’re closing the metal door on the Apollo 11 capsule, with its metal handle, and I thought, “Someone made that metal handle on that metal door to lock into place, and seal in these men on a four-day flight through space, to the moon, and then back again. Human beings did that. And they did that only 60+ years after we first figured out how to fly in airplanes. My god, what a leap. What a gigantic undertaking. How monumental.”
So shouldn’t the movie have been more monumental?
The eight years “First Man” encompasses, from 1961 to 1969, are serious, driven and haunted. Also ultimately triumphant—but triumph in the minor key. Neil Armstrong (Ryan Gosling) does it, NASA does it, but to what end? A few dead friends, a troubled marriage, a month of quarantine, and many people arguing whether we should’ve gone in the first place. We get Gil Scott-Heron’s “Whitey’s on the Moon” before whitey was even on the moon. Seeing the plethora of American flags, and the idiot left arguing against going (because we have so many problems here on earth), made me flash on today’s idiot right protesting the movie because it wasn’t patriotic enough. They wanted the money shot, the planting of the American flag on the moon’s soil. Without it, apparently, they couldn’t get off.
Both Ryan Gosling and Neil Armstrong have been criticized for being too emotionless, so the part seemed well-cast. Plus Gosling has worked with director Damien Chazelle before—in 2016’s award-winning “La La Land.” That movie was like the arthouse version of the musical. This is like the arthouse version of an adventure story. And I guess I wanted more adventure. Or a better story.
Perspective
As is, the story is a subtle refrain on dealing with grief.
In 1962, Armstrong’s daughter, Karen, dies at the age of 2 from a malignant tumor in her brain stem. Armstrong is clearly devastated but he throws himself into his work. He’s an engineer and a pilot. For NASA? I think so but it’s hard to tell. The movie opens with him test-piloting a plane past the reaches of our atmosphere but having difficulty with re-entry and rocketing up past 140,000 feet before regaining control and landing at Edwards Air Force base. Supposedly this was legendary but it’s not clear why we see it—other than for the perspective it offers: the blue warmth of earth, the cold blackness of space.
He talks about perspective when he interviews for NASA’s Gemini program:
I don't know what space exploration will uncover, but I don't think it‘ll be exploration just for the sake of exploration. I think it’ll be more the fact that it allows us to see things—that maybe we should have seen a long time ago—but just haven't been able to until now.
To me, that perspective is: It’s just us. Whatever “us vs. them” we have going on down here, in the big picture it’s earth vs. a vast nothing. So don’t fuck it up.
In that interview, Armstrong also talks briefly about grief:
NASA official: I was sorry to hear about your daughter.
Armstrong: I'm sorry, is it a question?
NASA official: What I mean is... Do you think it‘ll have an effect?
Armstrong: I think it would be unreasonable to assume that it wouldn’t have some effect.
That’s good. The interview is good. It’s one of my favorite parts of the movie. Which is a little sad when you think about it. A movie shouldn’t hit its high point with a job interview.
During the decade, grief grows. Friends are made, friends die—including Elliot See (Patrick Fugit), Ed White (Jason Clarke) and Gus Grissom (Shea Whigham). With each death, Armstrong seemed more enclosed, more driven, until he’s chosen as commander of Apollo 11, the flight that will send a man to the moon and safely back to earth before the end of the decade, fulfilling JFK’s 1961 promise. Did that promise piss off anyone at NASA? Did anyone go, “Wait, what? We have to do what by when? Are you shitting me?” That would be funny if true. But every movie treats the promise with reverence.
At a press conference before the Apollo 11 flight, Buzz Aldrin (Corey Stoll) is joking around, talking about bringing his wife’s jewelry on the flight. Is the conversation a riff on Gus Grissom’s fuck-up during the Mercury program? Loading himself down with coins, etc.? Anyway, Armstrong is asked, in the same jokey manner, what he’d like to bring, and, in that blank-faced sotto-voce way, replies, “More fuel.” Party pooper.
Even so, at that moment, I flashed on his daughter’s bracelet. After her funeral in 1962, Armstrong puts her bracelet into a desk drawer, which he closes with authority, as if to blot it all out. But it's like Chekhov's gun: a bracelet shoved into a drawer in the first act will reappear in the third. As it does. Armstrong has it on the moon. And as Aldrin is bouncing around with joy, Armstrong, forever serious, glances down at the bracelet, and, as if with a sigh, lets it drop into a nearby crater. And we get closure.
And bullshit.
Apparently it’s educated conjecture but it still felt like bullshit to me. Everything else in the movie is so grounded—ironically so, given the topic. It’s the dreary day-to-day. Then this moment. Would Armstrong really do that? On the first flight? When we didn’t really know how much of it was even possible? When all of it was still educated conjecture?
Vinny’s lament
My wife loved “First Man.” My friend Vinny—a fan of the 2007 documentary “In the Shadow of the Moon”—didn’t, and for many of the same reasons I had a problem with it. On Twitter:
- How did they take an event oriented so strongly around risk, optimism, technology, discovery and imagination, and turn it into a moody grouchfest?
- Why did they need to turn Aldrin into a bad guy?
- Why is 30% of the movie about Armstrong’s wife and kids?
Answers in reverse order:
- Because that’s what Hollywood does. (Cf., the wives and kids in “Apollo 13” and “The Right Stuff”)
- I don’t know. (Although I liked this exchange, as the astronauts stare up at one of Apollo’s rockets. Aldrin: “I’m just saying what everyone’s thinking.” [Long pause] Armstrong (quietly): “Maybe you shouldn’t.”)
- Because that’s what Hollywood does.
I don't mean Hollywood does “grouchfest.” I’m thinking of the daughter. I’m comparing it to “Contact,” the 1997 film starring Jodie Foster. A monumental, fictitious event—first contact with ETs—is reduced, emotionally, to Foster’s character’s closure with the premature death of her father. Hollywood seems to think we can only understand or root for the monumental by reducing it to the personal.
Even so, I did want more fun. At one point, in the mid-60s, Ed White stops by Neil’s home as he’s doggedly going over all the engineering calculations he needs to know for the next phase, and asks him down to his house for a beer. Neil begs off; then he seems to study himself. Or maybe he studies others’ perceptions of him? But he relents. “I could use a beer,” he says.
That's the movie. The movie could’ve used a beer.
Wednesday November 07, 2018
Movie Review: Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018)
WARNING: SPOILERS
As the movie opens, Lee Israel (Melissa McCarthy) is sitting at her desk at 3 a.m., editing copy (magazine copy, I guess?), with an adult beverage nearby, when several co-workers complain: “You’re not supposed to eat or drink here.” Her response? “Fuck off.” Unfortunately she says this to her boss, and out she goes. She’s walking home in the early morning light, when, in the background, high atop one of Manhattan’s skyscrapers, we see these words lit up in red: NEW YORKER.
Yeah, that’s about the size of it, I thought. You’re struggling, you’ve just got knocked down a rung or two on the ladder, and there it is, in the distance, visible but impossibly out of reach. Winking at you.
Or maybe I was reading myself into this too much?
Bottle in front of me
What surprised me is that Israel wasn’t some struggling writer; she was actually successful. She interviewed Katherine Hepburn in 1967 for Esquire (“Last of the Honest-to-God Ladies”). She wrote three biographies. The movie mentions she’d once been on the New York Times bestseller list but not with what. It was her bio of Broadway columnist and ’50s game show regular Dorothy Kilgallen. That seems fun. She seemed drawn to witty women: Kilgallen, Tallulah Bankhead, Fanny Brice. Her downfall, which the movie obscures, was the next book. Her publisher, Macmillan, tapped her for a warts-and-all bio of cosmetics queen Estee Lauder. Lauder supposedly tried to bribe her to drop the project, or at least the warts, but Israel didn’t. So Lauder came out with her own autobiography first. There went the sales. And Israel’s bio was reamed in the press.
The movie, as I said, obscures this. It implies that she’s just generally awful and no one wants to be around her. In this way, it's trying to be like “Tootsie," but without the joy. She’s Michael Dorsey, her agent, Marjorie (Jane Curtain), is George Fields, who has to tell her, “No one will hire you.” Michael’s reaction was to become another person: a woman. Lee’s is to become several of them: dead, hard drinking, literary heavyweights such as Dorothy Parker and Noel Coward. What she’d done with her biographies—hiding herself behind her subjects—she does even more expertly here.
It’s 1991 and she lives in a walkup on the upper west side of Manhattan. Her main companion is her cat—and drink. She owes back rent and money to the vet. She doesn’t even realize how much she’s let herself go.
Despite a resounding lack of interest, she’s still researching her bio on Fanny Brice when, in the library, tucked into the pages of a book, she finds a letter written by Brice. She steals it, tries to sell it, but is only offered $75. It’s just not witty enough. So Israel adds a P.S. that is. The price skyrockets to $400 and she’s off and running—creating such letters out of whole cloth.
Her confidante is all this, and eventually her partner in crime after the feds begin to close in, is Jack Hock (Richard E. Grant). The scenes between the two of them, laughing at the squares at a mid-day dive bar, are fun. My wife has always wanted to have drinks with Richard Grant, so this movie is almost her wish-fulfillment fantasy.
For me, it just wasn't witty enough. Something was missing. Something specific.
You know who was originally tapped for the role? Julianne Moore. You know what both Moore and McCarthy have in common? They’re not Jewish. You look at a photo of the real Lee Israel, who published her memoir about all this in 2008, and died in 2014, and it’s like looking at Golda Meir. Taking away the Jewish thing is just taking away too much. Not that I can figure out who to cast in McCarthy’s place. Natalie Portman? Gal Gadot? Is Jenny Slate too young? Michaela Watkins too obscure? You need a character actress for the role and no one in Hollywood, apparently not even indie Hollywood, is going to bankroll a movie about literary fraud starring a character actress who’s Jewish.
Yet that’s exactly the movie I want to see. That's my wish-fulfillment fantasy.
Frontal lobotomy
“Can You Ever Forgive Me?,” written by both Nicole Holofcener and Jeff Whitty, and directed by Marielle Heller, isn’t bad. It’s just ... too much the dead end. It’s too drab. It should’ve been livelier. More pretensions should’ve been popped. The dead end, by the way, isn’t just Israel’s world but what the literary world had become by then: overwhelmed by other media; relegated to the margins, and to airless bookshops. Israel’s a woman out of time but doesn’t seem to realize it. Or the movie doesn’t.
I did like her swipes at Nora Ephron, with whom she shared an agent. The movie seems to join in on the tweaking by presenting us with Ephronesque images of Manhattan, and Ephronesque standards on the soundtrack, to accompany this very unromantic story.
Israel’s crimes are mostly victimless. Or the victims are snooty, tight-assed book dealers, so we don’t care. But the victims are also literary heavyweights and history. So we should.
There’s a good scene near the end when Israel sees one of her faux Dorothy Parker letters being sold in the window of a bookshop. It’s now up to $1900. She asks the bookseller how they know the letter is authentic, and he says it comes with a letter of authenticity. She asks if this letter of authenticity has a letter of authenticity, then drops a few hints indicating that the letter is indeed a fraud—hers. The bookseller is scandalized. He goes to the window, looks at the letter, is about to walk away with it. But nah. It’s $1900. Back it goes. Back into history.
Tuesday November 06, 2018
Vote As If Your Country Depends on It, Cont.
It often seems that what I'm reading in Jill Lepore's “These Truths: A History of the United States” mirrors what's going on in the national discussion.
I'm in the post-Civil War/Reconstruction/Populist-Nativist era now, and read the following this morning:
In the age of popular politics, Election Day was a day of drinking and brawls. Party thugs stationed themselves at the polls and bought votes by doling out cash, called “soap,” and handing voters pre-printed party tickets. Buying votes cost anything from $2.50, in San Francisco, to $20, in Connecticut. In Indiana, men sold their suffrages for no more than the cost of a sandwich. ... In 1871, after the New York Times began publishing the results of an investigation into the gross corruption of elections in New York City under Democratic Party boss William Magear Tweed, [progressive journalist Henry] George, who had spent considerable time in Australia and had married an Australian woman, proposed a reform that had been introduced in Australia in 1856. Under the terms of Australia's ballot law, no campaigning could take place within a certain distance of the polls, and election officials were required to print ballots and either to build booths or hire rooms, to be divided into compartments, where voters could mark their ballots in secret. Without such reforms, George wrote, “we might almost think soberly of the propriety of putting up our offices at auction.” To promote the Australian ballot, George created a new party, the Union Labor Party.
So thank an Australian today.
But as with every step forward there was a step back:
Many of the reforms proposed by populists had the effect of diminishing the political power of blacks and immigrants. Chief among them was the Australian ballot, more usually known as the secret ballot, which, by serving as a de facto literacy test, disenfranchised both black men in the rural South and new immigrants in northern cities.
And then the bastards really got going:
In 1890, Mississippi held a constitutional convention and adopted a new state constitution that included an “Understanding Clause”: voters were required to pass oral examination on the Constitution, on the grounds that “very few Negroes understood the clauses of the Constitution.” (Nor, of course, did most whites, though white men were not tested.) In the South, the secret ballot was adopted in this same spirit. Both by law and by brute force, southern legislators, state by state, and poll workers, precinct by precinct, denied black men the right to vote. In Louisiana, black voter registration dropped from 130,000 in 1898 to 5,300 in 1908, and to 730 in 1910.
Don't let the bastards win. Let's bring some accountability to this sumbitch.
Monday November 05, 2018
Vote As If Your Country Depends on It, Cont.
Monday November 05, 2018
Vote As If Your Country Depends on It, Cont.
Vote like the authoritarian president is a racist sexual predator who colluded with Russia and won't show his taxes and violates the emoluments clause and incites nazi terrorism but the GOP is complicit and the media is distracted so it's up to us to save the god damn country.
— Adam Best (@adamcbest) November 5, 2018
Monday November 05, 2018
Vote As If Your Country Depends on It
I became an American citizen in 2012. I was so excited to vote that year.
— Kumail Nanjiani (@kumailn) November 5, 2018
I didn’t vote in 2014. I regret it.
I voted in 2016.
I pledge to vote in every election until they take that right from me.
Just click here. They’ll show how to do it. Easy.https://t.co/bfRGbEmRYT
Friday November 02, 2018
Willie McCovey (1938-2018)
How many ways was he a giant? In stature (6' 4“ at a time when most ballplayers didn't reach 6 feet); in San Francisco (of course); and ultimately of baseball. There was a musicality to his name. It rhymed. It's now the name of a cove on the other side of the right-field stands at Giants Stadium. SABR, in its tribute, calls this fitting since ”his ferocious swings always sent ripples of fear throughout the National League.“
When my guy, Harmon Killebrew, won the Most Valuable Player award in 1969, just as I was becoming baseball cognizant, McCovey was the first baseman in the other league who did the same. There's actually an interesting parallel between the two. Killebrew was a ”bonus baby,“ a player signed north of $4k who had to remain on the 25-man roster for two years, but his first full year in the Majors, 1959, was McCovey's first year overall. He debuted July 30 and went 4-4 with two triples and three runs scored. He hit his first homer, off Pittsburgh's Ron Kline, three days later. He only played in a third of the games that year, 52, but still won the NL Rookie of the Year. Unanimously. Meanwhile, in the AL, Killebrew led the league in home runs.
Then it was McCovey's turn, believe it or not, to fight for playing time. According to Joe Posnanski in his tribute, the Giants were loaded then and didn't have an obvious spot for McCovey. Or his obvious spot, first base, was taken by Orlando Cepda (another musical name), who was NL Rookie of the Year in 1958, and who led the league in homers and RBIs in 1962. Nice problem to have, Giants. McCovey didn't play a full year until 1963 when he was often in left field. He didn't play a full year at first base until 1965.
But McCovey and Harmon? Some kind of synchronicity there. They were mirror images. NL/AL. Black/white. ”Stretch“/”The Fat Kid.“ Both were quiet. Both had the most powerful swings in their league. They were homers/RBIs/walks guys who hit the thing a country mile. For their MVP years, their lines are somewhat similar:
PLAYER | HR | RBI | BB | BA | OBP | SLG | OPS |
Killebrew | 49 | 140 | 145 | .276 | .427 | .584 | 1.011 |
McCovey | 45 | 126 | 121 | .320 | .453 | .656 | 1.108 |
Ditto their career lines.
PLAYER | G | H | 2B | HR | RBI | BB | SO | BA | OBP | SLG | OPS |
Killebrew | 2435 | 2086 | 290 | 573 | 1584 | 1559 | 1699 | .256 | .376 | .509 | .884 |
McCovey | 2588 | 2211 | 353 | 521 | 1555 | 1345 | 1550 | .270 | .374 | .515 | .889 |
Killebrew hit more homeruns in the 1960s than anyone (393), while McCovey was fifth (300), but that was in part because of limited playing time, a tougher league, and a tougher ballpark to hit it out of. Was this why McCovey seem more respected? He was a first-ballot Hall of Famer while the Hall passed on Killebrew three times before deciding ”What the hell.“
I wish I'd gotten to see McCovey play more. We saw AL teams in Bloomington. But I was certainly aware of him: Topps, NL Leaders, Baseball Digest, and ”Baseball Stars of 196-whatever.“ Not to mention Peanuts.
I'd always assumed this was a random game, and the three feet was what was necessary to hit the ball over the wall. I think I was an adult before I realized, no: Schulz, a Minnesota boy now living in northern California and rooting on the Giants, was lamenting the end of the 1962 World Series. The Giants were playing the hated Yankees and losing Game 7 1-0 in the bottom of the 9th when Matty Alou led off with a pinch-hit bunt single. Ralph Terry struck out the next two batters, but then Willie Mays hit a double to right. Some part of me wonders, without seeing the footage, how Alou didn't score on that. Two outs, double to right, speedy baserunner? But he didn‘t. Some part of me also wonders why Terry stayed in, but that was baseball then. He stayed and faced McCovey, who hit a screaming line drive ... right at second baseman Bobby Richardson. Game, series, season over. Cue Charlie Brown’s lament. Was it McCovey's most famous at-bat? Probably. Cue Shelley: Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
I suppose he's lucky he saw a pitch during that at-bat. Nobody wanted to pitch to him. Killebrew led the AL in intentional passes three times, with 18, 15 and 20. McCovey? Four times: 45, 40, 21 and 25. The 45 IBBs were during his MVP year, and they set a record. The 25 were in 1973, after his black-ink days, when he was 35. And they still didn't want a part of him.
Walter Alston: ”When he belts a home run, he does it with such authority it seems like an act of God.”
Sparky Anderson: “If you pitch to him, he’ll ruin baseball.”
Thursday November 01, 2018
NP Fucking R
Do I even bother?
Yesterday, NPR's “Morning Edition” spent seven minutes on a piece about a young woman from Minnesota, who claims a liberal background, voted for Hillary, and realizes, after two years of Trump, what bullies liberals are.
Her evidence:
- The ICE workers she works with are nice.
- Though she's been sexually assault herself, and believes Dr. Ford, she thinks it wasn't Brett Kavanaugh who assaulted her.
- Democrats disturb people at dinner.
Basically she's following the GOP/Fox News line.
That would be my follow-up whenever anyone presents misleading or false claims during an intereview with a reporter: Where do you get your news? Of the above, 1) is misleading (ICE is just a gov't agency, full of people like you and me; you need to look at who's giving the orders); 2) is GOP/Fox spin on those events; 3) is true in a handful of cases.
I'd also be curious where NPR came upon this story: who pitched whom? And how much due diligence was done? What really stood out for me: The young woman, Alexa Gruman, never says “Democratic party.” She always says “liberal party.” Which isn't a thing. At all.
Seven minutes. The week after pipe-bombs were sent to Trump opponents, including former Pres. Obama; the week after 11 people were killed in a Pittsburgh synagogue over immigration issues; and the day after Trump announced his intention to executive-order the 14th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, we get seven minutes of this woman's cheerful idiocy. It's presented to us like it's news.