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 July 29, 2022
Movie Review: Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022)
WARNING: SPOILERS
For the longest time superhero creators have insisted, “We’re not schlock, our stuff should be taken seriously,” and the movement has been in this direction—away from its cheesey, strongman-underwear origins and toward darkness and seriousness. It’s worked so well that Marvel is now confident enough to trot out something called “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness,” which, if it had been made in the 1950s, would’ve starred Vincent Price and been presented in Emergo-Vision. It would’ve been schlock.
This isn’t schlock. But is it any good?
Maybe within the multiverse there’s a critic named Erik Lundegaard who likes movies set in the multiverse. I just think Marvel is overdoing it. The bad guy used to be somebody robbing a bank. Now it’s someone shattering the fabric of reality. Again.
Déjà vu all over again
The beginning of the movie, I assumed, was a recap of the multiverse craziness in “Spider-Man: No Way Home.” Then I realized, “No, it’s a different adventure. In media res. Cool.” Except my secondary assumption was that this was some other Doctor Strange adventure, set in that weird Neutral Zone-y realm, and it would soon end and the proper story would begin. But this was the proper story.
Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) and a Latina teenager, America Chavez (Xochitl Gomez), are being pursued by a demon-monster who wants the girl’s power, and they need to reach the Book of Vishanti, which is glowing on a rock in the Neutral Zone-y place, but the demon is too powerful. So Doctor Strange, our hero, says he needs to take the girl’s power himself. And he tries to do this against her wishes. So obviously something is up. Then the demon spears him, the girl is almost torn apart, and he wakes up. Ah, it was just a dream.
Or was it?
That day, after attending the wedding of Dr. Christine Palmer (Rachel McAdams), the woman he loves, Strange sees an octopus monster tearing up Midtown and springs into action. And that’s where he meets the Latina girl he dreamed about.
You see, according to the film, our dreams are often (or always?) visions of other versions of the multiverse. I kind of liked that idea. It reminded me of when I lived in Taiwan, hearing a theory that in our dreams we can travel through time, and that déjà vu is simply arriving at a moment in time you’ve already visited in a dream.
Anyway, because he sees some witchcraft markings, Strange goes to see his Avengers pal, Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen), to see if she can't interpret. Turns out, whoops, she’s the one making all this happen. The reveal is lame (she says America’s name even though he hasn’t), but isn’t a hero in one movie becoming the villain in the next kind of unprecedented? Can’t remember that ever happening with such a prominent recurring character before.
She’s the villain in this one because she’s nuts. Her brother Pietro was killed in, I guess, “Avengers: Age of Ultron,” and I think she had to kill the Vision, her love, during the battle with Thanos in “Avengers: Infinity War,” and all of this took a toll and now she has PTSD. On the “WandaVision” TV series this meant she used her powers—apologies, I’m sorting this out as much for me as you—to create various sitcom-like worlds where she and Vision were happy and domestic and raised a family, including two boys, Tommy and Billy (Jetty Klyne and Julian Hilliard). And apparently that fictional life actually exists in one of the universes of the multiverse. And that’s why she wants the Latina girl. America’s power is the ability to traverse the multiverse—though she hasn’t figured out how to control it yet—and Wanda wants the power for herself. So she can go to that universe, kill her other self, and raise a family. Like heroes do.
Oh right, I guess she’s also been corrupted by the “Darkhold,” a book of sorcery, which has turned her into the all-powerful Scarlet Witch.
How all-powerful? Super all-powerful. Doctor Strange teams up with the Sorceror Supreme (Benedict Wong), and all his disciples at a monastery in Nepal, dozens of them, and she blasts through them like they’re Swiss cheese. Strange and America escape into another universe, where that Doctor Strange is dead and a hero—honored in statue form. Except, whoops, we learn, by and by, from a group called the Illumanati (Mordo, Captain America, Captain Marvel, Black Bolt, Mister Fantastic and Prof. X), that that universe’s Doctor Strange used the Darkhold to beat back Thanos but created an “incursion” into another universe, which destroyed it. So he’s actually a destroyer of universes. That’s why he himself was destroyed and the Illuminati created. This Illuminati distrust all Doctor Stranges. They think they’re all bad. Which is an interesting form of prejudice the movie doesn’t delve into. I mean, couldn’t Strange say, “In my universe, Captain America is male, Captain Marvel is white, and Mister Fantastic works at a paper-supply company in a small town in Pennsylvania. Maybe I’m different. Maybe give me a chance.”
Alright, let me delve for a second. Marvel’s multiverse started out as a way to bring together different characters (“Into the Spiderverse”), or different actors who’ve played the same character (“Spider-Man: No Way Home”), and sure, in this one, we finally get Patrick Stewart’s Prof. X in the MCU; but otherwise all the Doctor Stranges look like Bendedict Cumberbatch and all the Wandas like Elizabeth Olsen. Because? Because the Tobey-Garfield-Holland triumverate is unnecessary. Because most Marvel characters don’t have the cinematic legacy of a Spider-Man.
But Marvel also uses the multiverse concept to make itself more multicultural and inclusive without any real heavy lifting: the Captain Marvel we see here is Black (played by Lashana Lynch, or Maria Rambeau), and the Captain America we see here is female (played by Hayley Atwell, or Peggy Carter). But even trying to be inclusive and politically correct, they still fuck it up. When the Illumanati face off against Wanda, landing in a kind of V formation, guess who’s at the front? I mean, if you’re them, wouldn’t you lead with Captain Marvel—one of the most powerful characters in any universe? Nope. They put Silly Putty Man in front. In what universe does that make sense? No universe.
And it goes as poorly as you’d think. He brags on Black Bolt but Wanda removes BB’s mouth and he blows up his own brain. Then she fillets Mr. Fantastic and—pop—there he goes, too. Only then do the women think to spring into action. A bit late, girls.
“Sure, the Black chick is one of the most powerful figures in the universe, but let's lead with Silly-Putty Man.”
The horror
If Mr. Fantastic being filleted and Black Bolt losing his mouth sound horrific, well, yes. The horror elements in the movie keep getting stronger until Doctor Strange, in that other universe, “dreamwalks” as the Frankensteinian corpse of another universe’s Doctor Strange in our own. (Don’t try to unpack that.) It’s a nice homage to Cumberbatch’s stage work as The Monster in “Frankenstein,” but a bit unnecessary. Once I realized Sam Raimi directed this, though, it all made sense. That's his bag. Horror homages + a Bruce Campbell comedic cameo: I should’ve realized Raimi was involved sooner.
I do like how they finally defeat Wanda. Not by battling her but by giving her what she wants. In control of her power now, America transports her to that other sacharine universe, where the kids she covets see her as a monster. Which is when she realizes what she’s become. And how she has to close the Darkhold so no one can ever blah blah blah. I think she sacrifices herself, too. At least she’s buried in the rubble she creates. Hey, maybe we should erect a statue to her.
You’d think Marvel would at least give Doctor Strange a shawarma moment at the end but no. We see him fix his broken wristwatch—a metaphor, I believe, for moving past his lost love—then he walks along the street, practically whistling a tune, when he’s struck down in pain … and develops a third eye! Which means … somethingorother. And in the mid-credits sequence, Charlize Theron shows up to take him … somewhere or other.
Give him a rest, Marvel. Give us a rest. In the multiverse, I’m sure there’s an Erik Lundegaard who gives a shit. Just not this one.
Wednesday July 27, 2022
Mariners Beat the Heat, Rangers
For the first time in a long time, I showed up at the park early just to hang out.
At first I thought the magic was back. And then I thought, OK, maybe not. Then it was. Or was it? Umps? Guys? Pause... Pause...
That was the roller-coaster ride at last night's Mariners game, played in the 90-degree heat against Texas.
Reminder: Before the All-Star break, the Mariners, my Seattle Mariners, the only franchise in baseball without a pennant and the professional sports team that has the longest active postseason drought (21 years of fun), had been on a roll, winning 14 in a row and 22 of 25. We'd swept Toronto, we'd swept San Diego. We couldn't be contained.
And then our young, fun superstar, Julio Rodriguez, center field, #44, showed up on the national stage for the Homerun Derby and blew everyone away. He didn't win—he lost in the final round to Juan Soto—but he hit more homeruns than anyone; and he lit up the stage. Everyone was like, “Who's this guy? And where can we get some of that.”
And when we returned from the All-Star break, for a weekend series against the Houston Astros, we didn't have any of that. Julio was out. Wrist soreness. From the game last Sunday and probably exacerbated by all those HR swings. And we got swept by the 'Stros: 5-2, 3-1, 8-5.
On Monday, Texas rolled into town and we eked out a victory against them. But no sign of Julio.
Until last night when my friend Jeff and I went to the game. Julio was leading off.
I expected not much. There's talk that the Homerun Derby ruins guys for the second half, it messes with their swing, and besides he'd just missed four games. Well, really, almost 7-8 games. He played a week ago Sunday, did the HR Derby Monday, played a few innings on Tuesday's All-Star Game, and that was it until last night. He'd been out a week. So I assumed rusty.
And in that first at-bat in the bottom of the 1st, he looked rusty. Texas pitcher Dane Dunning got two quick strikes on him, and Julio just seemed off. He worked the count to 2-2, fouled off a pitch, and then rocketed a linedrive homerun into the left-field seats. The magic was back.
The rest of the inning was near magic. With two outs, we drew two walks, the Texas mucky-mucks closed in around Dunning, probably telling him to challenge us, and the Mariners rose to the challenge. Kyle Lewis, our frequently injured 2020 Rookie of the Year, also finally back in the lineup, rocketed a single to left for a run. Then team leader J.P. Crawford rocketed a single to right, but he rocketed it too much and Jesse Winker couldn't score from second. And we left the bases loaded. But we were up 2-0.
And that's how it stayed for six innings. And some part of me kept thinking, “We really should've scored more in the 1st when we had the chance.”
In the 8th it was 3-1, and the game kind of seemed over. We had Paul Sewald on the mound, our kinda closer, who got two quick outs. Then he walked two guys. “Sewald never does good when I'm here,” I warned Jeff. Which is when Adolis Garcia dribbled a ball just inside the bag at 1st and down the right-field line for a WTF 2-run double.
And they weren't done. In the top of the 9th, iit went single, sac, single, and they had the lead. And it felt like the magic had left the room.
Until J.P. Crawford led off the bottom of the 9th with a single, and catcher Cal Raleigh followed with a double in the center-right gap, and J.P., our man J.P., tore around the bases and scored. Then it was our turn to sacrifice. Which brought up Julio again.
“It began with him and maybe it'll end with him,” I said.
Nope. They intentionally walked him. Him and Ty France. “They're walking all of our All-Stars,” I said. That brought up Carlos “Not that Carlos Santana” Santana, who, in a month with the team, has come up with a lot of big hits, and who could hit a deep fly ball in his sleep.
But why did we still have Cal Raleigh at third? That's what I wondered. Didn't we have anyone on the bench faster than our catcher?
“We used our pinch runner in the 8th,” Jeff said.
Yes, in the 8th, after a two-out walk to Winker, we'd brought in Sam Haggerty to pinchrun and Abraham Toro to pinchhit. “Our pinchrunner is hitting 100+ points higher than our pinchhitter,” I said. “That make any sense to you?”
“Maybe it's a lefty-righty thing,” Jeff said.
And now the speed of Cal Raleigh was putting the game on the line.
“If he hits a sac fly,” I said, “I hope it's deep.”
It wasn't. It was midrange, center field. Raleigh began chugging home ... the throw came in ... SAFE! Excitement. Jubilation. Full-throated cries from the people around ... Wait, what was this? ... Why were the Mariners pausing in their celebration? Why were the Rangers not exiting stage right? Why were the umpires conferring? Was there a challenge? Whose? The Rangers were out of challenges.
But there was a challenge. Did someone say Raleigh left early? Did someone say he didn't touch the plate? Or that the throw beat him? Whatever it was, it went for naught. Play stood, Mariners won, and Julio picked up Santana in celebration. I'll take it. I'll take delayed magic rather than none. I suppose Raleigh chugging home was part of the magic. With Haggerty, we wouldn't have been in doubt. With Cal, we had nothing but doubt. It shouldn't have happened but it did. That's what magic is.
I found this interesting: One of the lead stories on ESPN.com is about the game. Except not really. This was the hed: Julio Rodriguez back in Seattle Mariners' lineup, homers in first at-bat. It's been a while since any Seattle Mariner created headlines like that.
Wednesday July 27, 2022
Paul Sorvino (1939-2022)
Question: Why, before I ever saw “Goodfellas,” did I think Paul Sorvino was not right for mob boss Paul Cicero? I mean, I guess I know why. I thought he was too nice. I didn't think he was scary enough. But where did this idea come from? How did I know him? I'm looking over his credits on IMDb and wondering what I ever saw him in as a kid. “Day of the Dolphin”? Just that?
I wouldn't be surprised if it was through commercials. Not like ads for dishwashing detergent or whatever, but commercials for the shows he was on: the Alan Alda-created “We'll Get By,” in which he played a suburban dad and a husband, and which lasted 13 episodes in the summer of '75; and “Bert D'Angelo, Superstar,” in which he played the titular maverick cop, and which lasted 11 episodes in '76. I never watched either but maybe some of it seeped in. Maybe some part of me thought “Bert D'Angelo, superstar, as a mob boss? Whatever, Marty.”
Of course he was great in “Goodfellas”: calm, understated, handy with a razor blade and a piece of garlic. I assume he's closer to the real thing than, say, Brando in “The Godfather.” Don Corleone is what mob guys imagine themselves to be; Paul Cicero is closer to what they are. And even then...
When news broke of his death on Monday at age 83, one thing that was passed around on social media, which I loved seeing, was video from when his daughter Mira won the Oscar for “Mighty Aphrodite:” how she thanked her family, and her parents, and her father “who has taught me everything I know about acting”; and how he, in the audience, already tearing up, just crumpled. Reminds of a series of photographs from, I believe, Life magazine from like the 1940s or '50s: another burly Italian father, walking down the aisle at his daughter's wedding, about to give her away, and breaking down with each step.
We're losing all of our cinematic mob guys all of a sudden: Liotta, Caan, Sorvino. It's like last fall when we kept losing 60-something standup comedians. It's like we're in the middle of a mob war.
Tuesday July 26, 2022
John Jordan
I've been so excited about Twins making the Hall I neglected to talk about Buck O'Neil. Well, why say anything when you've got Joe Posnanski around. As I mentioned yesterday on Twitter, after posting his latest, “One day Joe will write an article about Buck O'Neil that I'll be able to read without tears welling up in my eyes. But not today.” Here's a sample.
Lynn Novick met Buck O'Neil shortly after she started at Florentine Films, working with Ken Burns on “The Civil War” documentary. Ken and Lynn's next project was to tell a different kind of baseball story — one that would show how the game's history and American history intertwine and interweave and mirror each other. This meant telling the story of the Negro leagues as it had never been told before.
But how? Many of the greatest Negro leaguers — Paige, Gibson, Charleston, Cool Papa — were gone. ... Someone told Lynn that she might want to talk with Buck O'Neil. She'd never heard of Buck, but she called, and he seemed amenable, so she showed up at his door in Kansas City with a camera crew behind her. She had absolutely no expectations; she just hoped that he would have some interesting memories.
And what followed was an interview unlike any she has had in her entire life.
“It must have been hard playing in the Negro leagues,” she said to him at one point.
He looked at her with amusement.
“No, it wasn't hard,” he said. “It was wonderful.”
It was wonderful. There was Buck O'Neil in three words. Lynn looked at him in astonishment. Buck was the grandson of enslaved people. He was not allowed to attend Sarasota High School. He was never given a chance to see if he was good enough to play in the major leagues — and he was good enough. He was never allowed to manage in the major leagues — and I have no doubt he would have been an extraordinary manager. He drank from separate water fountains and was turned away from white hotels and was forced to eat in the kitchens of restaurants that would even allow him in. He saw crosses burned and children spit at and once walked into a crowd of white sheets when he confused a ballpark with a KKK rally.
“It was wonderful,” he said.
And he talked about all the wonderful things, the wonderful players, the wonderful games. He told her stories, incredible stories, about Satchel Paige, about Josh Gibson, about Cool Papa Bell. He told her about walking into the Streets Hotel in Kansas City or the Evans Hotel in Chicago or the Woodside Hotel in New York and being treated like a star, and running into Cab Calloway or Count Basie or Ella Fitzgerald. ...
When “Baseball” came out, it had any number of eloquent characters, historians, musicians, some of the best ballplayers who ever lived. But all of them were supporting characters to John Jordan “Buck” O'Neil, who in his own distinctive way captured not only the spirit of the Negro leagues, but of baseball, too.
After it came out, Buck's life would change. For years, he had been largely ignored — people had learned that the story of African-American baseball had begun when Jackie Robinson crossed the line, and they weren't interested in hearing any more. But after “Baseball,” people began listening to him. People began asking him to tell more stories. He wrote a book. He appeared on “Letterman.” He traveled the country.
Lynn Novick was with us in Cooperstown this weekend.
So was her son. His name is John Jordan.
Monday July 25, 2022
Now We Are Six: Tony Oliva and Jim Kaat Inducted Into Baseball Hall of Fame
The Minnesota Twins increased its Hall of Fame count by 50% yesterday. We went in with four and came out with six.
Chronologically, it goes like this:
- 1984: Harmon Killebrew (fourth ballot)
- 1991: Rod Carew (first ballot)
- 2001: Kirby Puckett (first ballot)
- 2011: Bert Blyleven (14th ballot)
- July 24, 2022: Jim Kaat (Veteran’s Committee)
- July 24, 2022: Tony Oliva (Veteran’s Committee)
Five of those guys were playing on the 1969-71 team I grew up on. I knew not what I had.
Actually, I kind of did. I knew it was special. And I remember when it went away.
It’s interesting to see how we lost each of them. In mid-August 1973 the Twins placed Jim Kaat on waivers, where he was selected by the Chicago White Sox, for whom, over the next two full seasons he went 21-13 and 20-14, with ERAs around 3.00; he pitched for 10 more years. We released Harmon Killebrew in January 1975 and a week later he signed with the Kansas City Royals for his final season. In June 1976, we traded Bert Blyleven (and shortstop Danny Thompson) to Texas for four guys (Roy Smalley, Mike Cubbage, Bill Singer, Jim Gideon), plus $250k, and he pitched for another, what, 15 years? Including four more with the Twins: 1985-88. His last season was 1992. Wow. Rod Carew became our 1970s superstar, but then owner Calvin Griffith opened his piehole at a Lions Club gathering in the fall of 1978, saying he moved the team from D.C. to Minnesota “when we found out you only had 15,000 blacks here.” Carew asked to make that number 14,999. In January 1979 we traded him to California for Dave Engle, Paul Hartzell, Brad Havens and Kenny Landreaux. He would play another seven seasons and retire with a .328 lifetime batting average.
Oliva never left. He retired after the ’76 season due to knee injuries but stayed with the organization in other roles. As the Star-Tribune mentioned today, he’s a 61-year employee.
I have to say, the new plaques aren’t bad. OK, so maybe Oliva's eyebrows are too thick, while Kaat looks more combative and chin-heavy than he should. He could pass for Thanos' kid brother here. Yet, I don't know, something in the eyes is exactly right. Bronze relief is always an iffy proposition. It’s not a medium that captures likenesses well. Of our six, the Killebrew one is probably best, Carew the worst. Never show them smiling would be my motto. Teeth don’t work well in bronze.
I still find it fascinatingly wrong that the best player on that team, by career bWAR, is Bert Blyleven, and it’s not even close. By career bWAR, Blyleven is the 38th greatest player in baseball history, pitcher or player, sandwiched between Roberto Clemente and Cap Anson, and ahead of, among others, Bob Gibson, George Brett and Ken Griffey Jr. Either we missed a lot or bWAR is.
Here’s how our guys do by other HOF measures. You get points for black ink when you lead the league in a noteworthy category, gray ink when you’re in the top 10.
PLAYER | WAR | BLACK INK | GRAY INK | HOF MONITOR |
Harmon Killebrew | 60.3 | 48 | 193 | 178 |
Rod Carew | 81.2 | 42 | 148 | 243 |
Kirby Puckett | 51.2 | 22 | 122 | 160 |
Bert Blyleven | 94.5 | 16 | 237 | 121 |
Jim Kaat | 50.5 | 16 | 125 | 130 |
Tony Oliva | 43.0 | 41 | 146 | 114 |
AVG. HOF player | n/a | 27 | 144 | 100 |
AVG. HOF pitcher | n/a | 40 | 185 | 100 |
Our two pitchers were guys that lasted, our two most recent position players, Puckett and Oliva, had short careers. They were comets across the sky—Oliva in particular. In a career shortened by knee injuries, he led the league in hits five times, doubles four times, batting average three times, slugging percentage once, total bases once, runs scored once. He dominated American League pitchers in a pitchers' era.
By all those measures, he's a Hall of Famer. Glad he finally got his due. Glad to see he is where he should be.
May I present the latest member of the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Saturday July 23, 2022
Movie Review: The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1932)
WARNING: SPOILERS
What’s startling isn’t the racism (c’mon) but the fact that the movie sometimes moves beyond the racism. I mean, it’s a 1932 love story between a white woman and a Chinese man. And sure, the Chinese man is played by a Scandinavian actor, Nils Asther (born Denmark, raised Sweden), but still: It’s a 1932 love story between a white woman and a Chinese man.
Is there another similar movie from this period? The reverse certainly: Asian woman, white dude. White dudes were making these movies, after all. That's their fantasy. The other is their nightmare.
Although isn’t Valentino’s “The Sheik” similar? A warlord is amused by, then smitten with, a feisty white woman, abducts her, holds her prisoner without forcing himself upon her, and gradually they fall in love. Both movies were based upon novels by women, too: Edith Maude Hull there, Grace Zaring Stone here. One difference: At the end of “The Sheik,” he reveals he’s not really an Arab but British/Spanish; that means the couple can stay together. Here, he is in fact Chinese. That means he has to die.
Even removing race from the equation, I found “Bitter Tea” kind of fascinating. At bottom, it’s about a brutal leader who falls in love, follows the woman’s lead toward mercy, and then loses everything as a result. It feels like a lesson: about what women want the world to be; about what the world really is.
Fu Manchu vs. the Masked Marvel
It begins with the chaos of war, with these titles projected on the screen at various intervals:
- CHINA
- SHANGHAI
- BURNING OF CHAPEI
- REFUGEES
If you don’t know Chapei (I didn’t), it’s a suburb of Shanghai, now spelled Zhabei, and was much in the news in early 1932. (Filming for this began in July of that year.)
Amid the chaos, we get shots of guests arriving in the rain for the wedding of Megan and Bob (Barbara Stanwyck and Gavin Gordon) at the home of Mrs. Jackson (Clara Blandick*). “Everybody in China is here,” the hostess says. “Literally everybody.” Nice to know that people back then didn’t know how to use “literally,” either.
(*If Blandick looks familiar, there’s a good reason: She played Auntie Em in “The Wizard of Oz.” Overall, she has 124 credits—from a 1911 short to a 1951 TV series—and during her career she played an aunt 19 times, including Aunt Polly from “Tom Sawyer” three times in the ’30s alone. She died in 1962, age 85, so maybe had a glimmer that one of the seven movies she made in 1939 was becoming legendary.)
Mrs. Jackson also embodies the casual racism of the time: “They’re all tricky, treacherous and immoral,” she says of the Chinese. “I can’t tell one from another. They’re all Chinamen to me.”
We get something more nuanced, but equally troubling, from Bishop Harkness (Emmett Corrigan):
I’ve spent 50 years in China. And there are times when I think we’re just a lot of persistent ants trying to move a great mountain. Only last month, I learned a terrible lesson. I was telling the story of the crucifixion to some Mongolian tribesmen. Finally, I … I thought I’d touched their hearts. They crept closer to my little platform, their eyes burning with the wonder of their attention. Mongolian bandits, mind you—listening spellbound. But alas, I had misinterpreted their interest in the story. The next caravan of merchants that crossed the Gobi Desert was captured by them and … crucified. [Gasps from his listeners.] That, my friends, is China.
At this point the camera whirls away, almost 180 degrees, and lands on an ancient Chinese face. I suppose you could read this as either “Here’s one of the inscrutable devils!” or “Look at this poor bastard having to listen to this bullshit.” I lean toward the latter. Maybe because the director is Frank Capra, or because the screenplay was written by Edward E. Paramore Jr., who, I believe, leaned left. But mostly because of the way the rest of the movie plays out.
The bride shows up after a rickshaw accident with the titular general, tall and French-speaking, while the groom, a kind of hapless Samaritan, shows up only to say he’s going to leave. He needs to help orphans get out of the line of fire. (A civil war is implied rather than the Japanese one.) To do this he goes to, yes, the titular Gen. Yen, where we get the following exchange:
Bob: I’m sorry to intrude like this, General, but it’s a matter of the utmost importance.
Gen. Yen: Naturally. Everything you do is important.
Such a great, cutting line. And such a nice line-reading from Asther.
Yen, cold-blooded, then dismisses orphans as people without ancestors, and tries to entice the foreigner with “singsong girls”—a new phrase for me, but one which goes back to the 19th century. Basically, they’re Chinese geisha girls. When Yen learns that Bob actually bolted from his wedding for this good deed, the note he writes—which will supposedly help Bob get across nationalist lines—calls him a fool, and the first gang of soldiers he meets mock him accordingly. They laugh at him, steal his car, ogle Megan (she’s with him because: feisty). To get the orphans to safety, they now have to make their way on foot to the train station, where Bob and then Megan are knocked out. When she awakens, she’s in the train car of Gen. Yen, who’s with his concubine Mah-Li (Toshia Mori).

We don’t know it yet, but that’s it for Bob. He lives, but we never see him again. He’s out of the picture.
The rest of the movie is Megan, trying to escape Gen. Yen’s headquarters/estate while slowly succumbing to his charms. At one point, drugged, she has a dream of a rapacious Fu Manchu figure straight out of the pulps, with long claws for fingernails; and then—early superhero alert!—a masked figure appears in the window and beats back the Chinese devil. We assume Yen is Fu Manchu and the hero is Bob, but when the hero takes off his mask it’s Gen. Yen. When Megan wakes up, she’s so, so confused. And intrigued.
Mah-Li, it turns out, has her own lover, and when Megan doesn’t give her away the two become close. Or close-ish. At one point, Mah-Li convinces her to go to a formal dinner, and Megan gets all dolled up for it; then she thinks of kissing Gen. Yen, is shocked by the desire, and takes off the makeup.
At the dinner, we meet Jones (Walter Connolly), Yen’s corrupt but forthright western money man. I love this exchange we get later in the film when Jones realizes Yen is actually interested in Megan.
Jones: Listen, I’ve never interfered in your private affairs before. But don’t forget, this is a white woman.
Gen. Yen: That’s alright. I have no prejudice against the color.
Again: ahead of its time.
Perfumed silence
The merciful thing Megan convinces Yen to do is to spare Mah-Li even though she betrays him. And so Mah-Li betrays him further, sending out a secret message via temple gong to enemy forces, which leads to a daring railroad raid. And there goes all of Yen’s money and influence and power.
At this point he knows he’s dead, and the rest of the movie is his slow death—suicide by poison or opiate, or a combination therein. This is the bitter tea of the title. It goes on too long, to be honest.
I like that the movie, via Jones, rightly blames Megan for Yen’s death:
Well, Miss Davis, you certainly gummed up the prettiest set-up I ever saw. I had visions of making General Yen the biggest thing in China, but you sure queered that beautifully. I hate your insides, Miss Davis, but you’re an American and we’ve got to stick together now…
What great language from Paramore: gummed up, queered, hate your insides.
Stanwyck barely says anything in response, or really for the last 10 minutes of the film. Maybe because there’s nothing to say? She and Jones are on a slow boat away from China, and Jones keeps jawing away: about Yen, about trees, about reincarnation.
The reception the movie received is interesting. Most of the 1932-33 reviews I’m seeing via newspapers.com are positive (though the phrase “perfumed silence” is so overused I get the feeling the critics were cutting and pasting press-agent copy); and when Radio City Music Hall decided to include feature films with its live stage shows in January 1933, “Bitter Tea” was the first one tapped. But it didn’t last. Disinterest or racist backlash? Stanwyck claimed the latter. Who knows? We do know that when Columbia tried to re-release the film in 1950, the Production Code Administration wanted so many cuts Columbia gave up. A reminder that, politically and culturally, we can take giant steps backwards, too.
Friday July 22, 2022
#TheSnyderCult
Zack Snyder is the Donald Trump of moviedom. Everything about him is horrible but somehow he has legions of rabid fans demanding more horribleness and attacking anyone who gets in the way. Snyder doesn't destroy lives the way Trump does, he just destroys culture. Twice I picked films he directed as the worst movie of the year (“Sucker Punch” in 2011, “Batman v. Superman” in 2016), and it was just the two because I wasn't making “worst of” lists in 2009 (for “Watchmen”) and 2007 (for “300”).
He so botched the much-anticipated “Justice League” movie that Warners took it away from him and gave it to “Avengers” director Joss Whedon to finish. He did more than finish it, he kind of remade it, and it was a bit oil and water (OK, it was very oil and water), but my immediate thought was, “Well, it's better than 'Batman v. Superman.'” Anyway, that seemed the end of it.
In another time, it would've been.
In our awful time, we kept hearing from Snyder's legions of fans. They showed up on social media, hashtag-ready, demanding a #ReleaseOfTheSnyderCut, and incessently attacking anyone who disagreed. Apparently they threatened people. Apparently they threatened lives.
Eventually it worked. Warners gave Snyder the money ($100 million?) to finish his version of “Justice League,” it premiered on HBO last year, four hours long, and with his name at the top of the title. He got top billing: “Zack Snyder's Justice League.” But it was considered better than the oil-and-water-version: 71% to 39% via Roten Tomatoes.
Except now Rolling Stone has just published an investigative piece indicating that the Zackbrats, the #ReleaseTheSnyderCut cult, might not have been as organic as it claimed. Snyder might have orchestrated it. With bots.
I wish I could tell you more about it but the article is under a pay wall. Good for them. I mean, I'd pay for the article, or even a physical copy of the magazine if I knew where to buy one, but I don't need another subscription. I'm inundanted as is.
So I'm relying on a website called slashfilm that has summed it up. Some key lines:
The article by Tatiana Siegel (with additional reporting from Adam Rawnsley) reveals that Warner Bros. was so suspicious of the “organic” fan movement that was somehow coordinated with military precision that they hired outside cyber security firms to investigate their legitimacy and found that at least 13% of the #ReleaseTheSnyderCut warriors were bots or fake accounts. Rolling Stone also consulted with social media tracking firms and they came to the same conclusion: not all the Snyder Cut accounts were fake, but there are a whole lot more fake accounts than is standard for this kind of movement. (Daily active spam accounts on Twitter usually track at around 5%, for comparison.)
Zack doesn't come off well. With each attack, he'd claim ignorance, inability to control fans, etc., but, as slashfilm writes:
It just so happens they're always mad at the exact people who stood in his way between “Batman V Superman” and the release of the Zack Snyder Cut of “Justice League.” These are executives who nobody knew before this movement yet everybody sure seemed to know to target at the same time.
Apparently some Snyder cultists still want him to return to the DCEU and fix everything, or “300”-ize everything, but that ship might've sailed. He's over at Netflix now—which is having its own problems, of course. He made an “Army of the Dead” movie (67%), which is appropriate, and has been announced as the director of another adaptation of Ayn Rand's “The Fountainhead,” which is even more appropriate. It's two of my least-favorite things in one package. Can a reboot of “Triumph of the Will” be far behind?
Monday July 18, 2022
Movie Review: Elvis (2022)
WARNING: SPOILERS
What’s the tragedy of Elvis?
The man sold more records than any solo recording artist in history and remade our culture. He opened it up racially and sexually. He supercharged it. He landed like a fucking bomb in middle-American living rooms and thrilled kids and perplexed and frightened and angered adults. He crossed lines he didn’t know existed. The generation gap became a chasm.
He also died drug-addicted and overweight on a toilet seat at age 42.
So what's his tragedy?
Baz Luhrmann’s answer is that Elvis wound up in the Mephistophelean clutches of a fat Dutch prick of a carnival barker named Col. Tom Parker (Tom Hanks).
My answer would be different.
Devil in Disguise
Just as reactions to Elvis in 1956 veered wildly, so, in the run-up to its release, reactions to “Elvis” veered wildly. I’d heard it got a 12-minute standing ovation at Cannes. I also heard it was awful, unwatchable, over-the-top crap. And then, counter to the counter, I heard it was the must-see movie of the summer.
To me, it’s neither unwatchable nor must-see. But I'm glad I saw it.
“Elvis” is kind of like Elvis’ career. It’s fun early, and yes, over-the-top and operatic (it’s Baz, baby), and then gets bogged down in the later years. It gives us Elvis ’56, zips through the Army and movie years to the ’68 comeback special, and then it’s all about the how and why of Vegas. Post-’68, we keep getting the same tragic note. Elvis works up the courage to defy the Colonel, and he’s about to go out and do it, and finally tour the world, baby, until the Colonel starts talking. Then we get the snow job, and Elvis buys it, and he winds up back in the penthouse suite of the International Hotel, trapped, pill popping, an old, Howard Hughes figure before his time, with the inevitable sad end on the toilet on the horizon.
You’d think one of those times, after he’d declared himself free, that his Memphis mafia friends and bandmates, Red or Scotty or Bill, would tell everyone, “OK, keep the fucking Colonel the fuck away from him!” Nope. Instead, Elvis is heading out the door, maybe into the parking garage, and there’s the Colonel again, and he begins talking again, and Elvis begins listening again. And everyone else just stands around and lets it happen.
So it’s a bit one-note. And is it tragic? He’s not caught in a trap, as he sings, because there’s a very easy way out. The Colonel gives him and his dad a bill for $7 million? Talk to a fucking lawyer. Shit, a good lawyer would just wipe this shitstain away—out of your life and probably out of the country. He’d wind up owing you $7 mil.
I think the tragedy of Elvis is this: He was wholly unique, a sexy, gender-bending sponge of blues and R&B and country and gospel music, loving all of it, and yet in his heart he wanted to fit in with the dullest people in our culture. When he first went to Sun Records, he was doing standards, he was doing what he thought people wanted, and it was others, notably Sam Phillips, who realized that his true passion—what became rock ‘n’ roll—was the path. I think when he emerged on the scene, he was shocked by the shock he caused. He was just doing what his body did, singing what it wanted to sing, and half the country thought he was a menace or a joke or a freak. The north mocked him as a hillbilly and the hillbillies condemned him for singing race music. He was viewed as a rebel but never reveled in it. He never had the “Fuck you” gene like John Lennon did. Can you imagine if he’d had that? With Lennon’s wit? Holy shit.
The comeback special is considered this great triumph—Elvis is singing in front of us again!—but to me it’s a little sad. It’s Elvis being embraced by all the elements that were horrified in ’56. Because by ’68, he’s the comfortable one. He’s a good ol’ boy singing good ol’ songs, not like those LSD-takin’ hippie freaks singing about revolution.
No, it’s easy for the Devil to tempt you if he’s giving you what you want. And what Col. Tom offered was a lot of what Elvis wanted. That’s the tragedy.
Heartbreak Hotel
I wish Baz had stayed on the Louisiana Hayride longer. I’m a sucker for the thing becoming the thing, and that was the Louisiana Hayride. He was singing worlds into being. He was singing the future into being.
I wish Baz had gone deeper, too. I learned a few things—the Capt. Marvel Jr. fixation, for one—but he never gave us a deep Elvis. Maybe there wasn’t one? I could’ve stayed on Beale Street longer, too. We get Shonka Kukureh as Big Mama Thornton singing the bluesy “Hound Dog” and Alton Mason as the truly gender-bending Little Richard singing “Good Golly, Miss Molly,” and we get inklings of a friendship with B.B. King (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) but not much else. Was there resentment? “They’re taking our music. He’s talking our music.” And what was the deal about the funeral he couldn’t attend? And did Elvis ever give three seconds’ thought to the Civil Rights Movement or was he too busy trying to fit in with the worst elements of our society?
The kid is great. Austin Butler doesn’t quite look like Elvis, but the longer the movie goes on the more he does. And his moves are dead-on. Apparently the singing is partly him, too. It’s tough to take on a much-imitated role like this and not slide into impersonation, and he succeeds in making him seem as much of a person as the script allows.
Not so Hanks’ Col. Tom. He’s so grotesque you wonder how he could sweet-talk anyone.
I also learned about Elvis’ fear of assassination—after MLK and RFK in ’68—but I thought it was going to lead to the meeting with Pres. Nixon and his junior G-man badge, or whatever the fuck he was given. Baz doesn’t go there. He shows us Elvis becoming obsessed with guns and security but not how karate fits into all that. Elvis feared some outsider coming to take it all, but that person was on the inside, and it wasn't even really Col. Tom Parker. It was Elvis himself. We're always our own worst enemies.
The Blytheville, Ark. Courier News: Jan. 19, 1955
Saturday July 16, 2022
Dreaming of Being Bad at My Job
I had a job at a hip tech company that I hadn’t been going to much. I’d been doing my own thing. Which was what exactly? Some kind of big writing project I’d never finished. There was dissipation associated with it.
The job was to come up with humorous tweets for the company Twitter account but I felt woefully unprepared for the role. Also not right: I hadn’t figured out the tone but mostly I wasn’t funny. I was sitting at a desk next to several other people, including the friend who had gotten me the job and another guy who felt way wittier, way sharper than me. Shouldn’t he have gotten the job? He didn’t seem covetous of it, though. He just kept making witty remarks.
I had older items on my desk and was sifting through them and reading them aloud to try to get through them. My friend reminded me that other people were working. “Oh, right,” I said, and read them silently. Later, on a TV set, there was some interview with Tom Cruise playing, and I tried to turn it off, or at least down, and my friend tried to help, but his help led to the volume suddenly rising, and we scrambled to mute it. Then I imagined people walking by and wondering, “Why does he always have Tom Cruise playing on mute in the background,” and we thought this so funny we couldn’t stop laughing. I tried to figure out how to parlay that kind of thing into the tweet thing but didn’t see a connection.
“What about interviews?” I said to my friend. “I could interview people at the company and get their stories.” “That’s not a bad idea,” he said, with a tone that implied otherwise. “You’re good at interviewing,” he said, with a tone that implied I wasn’t good at what I was doing.
In another location, some mucky-muck came up to me to explain about the dialogue of the movie scene they were working on. The company was branching out into movies and this was the first. Someone else stood nearby, anxious I wouldn’t saying anything wrong to the mucky-muck, who seemed to need my approval. Did he know who I was? My movie critic background? And did he know I didn’t matter at his company? Later, my sister—who also worked for the company—came by. Some people seemed confused by our familiarity, so I introduced her: “This is my mister—I mean, my sister.” A witty, company woman, dark-haired and pretty, teased me when reintroducing us to others. “She’s his sister … or his wife, they haven’t figure out which yet.” I began to point out that “mister” hardly implied “wife” but figured it wasn’t worth it. I figured ignoring it was the best path forward.
Friday July 15, 2022
The Public Enemy Knows Best
I like this shot of the bad kids of 1930s cinema during the Eisenhower era.
It's from “These Wilder Years,” a forgettable 1956 flick from MGM starring James Cagney and Barbara Stanwyck, shot on a dime, and pairing them with up-and-comers who didn't pan out: Don Dubbins and Betty Lou Keim. It's not worth watching. But I like imagining the warped 1950s sitcom that could've been made from the above shot. Are they parents? Do they have kids? Teenagers? Maybe Betty Lou is pregnant again. Oh, that Betty Lou. Cue laughtrack.
Wednesday July 13, 2022
Copacabana, 1942
Here's Bette Davis and Paul Henreid in 1942 in “Now, Voyager”:
A quarter-century later, Barry Manilow would prove him right. Kinda. There's certainly an ear-worm in the word. But Manilow's song only rose to No. 8 on the U.S. charts? Damn, it sure as hell played enough back then for a No. 1.
Monday July 11, 2022
James Caan (1940-2022)
In mid-1970s, leading man form.
This is how much of a prude I was as a kid. I watched “Brian’s Song,” about the friendship between Chicago Bears running backs Gale Sayers and Brian Piccolo, and the death of the latter from cancer at age 26, when it premiered on television in November 1971. I was just 8, which is what, second grade? I think this was my intro to football, in fact. I wasn’t a fan yet and became one shortly thereafter. The movie, of course, wrecked me and my entire generation of boys. We were still living in insensitive times, when boys weren’t supposed to cry, when they were mocked for doing so; but if some kid said he never cried we’d go “What about ‘Brian’s Song’?” and he’d usually admit, “Yeah, OK, ‘Brian’s Song,’ sure. Who didn’t?” I still can’t hear the theme music without something stirring. For that role, James Caan was basically the patron saint of our generation: the full-of-life dude that died way too young.
Which explains my prudeness: how I was disappointed in Caan when I saw he was starring in a movie called “Rollerball” that was actually Rated R.
To the world he’ll forever be known as Sonny Corleone, the hothead brother and heir apparent to the Godfather throne, but he almost didn’t get the role. For the past few weeks I’ve been reading “Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli,” about the making of “The Godfather,” and while I knew there were disagreements on casting, I didn’t know how bad it got. Paramount and its president, Robert Evans, initially said they should go with unknowns and a smaller budget (because mob movies didn’t make money), then switched and said, “Hey, how about Robert Redford? How about Ryan O’Neal? Dustin Hoffman?” All were considered for Michael. Yeah, Michael. Director Francis Ford Coppola, meanwhile, had this idea from the get-go:
- Brando
- Pacino
- Caan
- Duvall
John Cazale was found off-Broadway.
Anyway, the studio didn’t want who he wanted, and eventually they spent nearly half a mil on screen tests to prove him wrong. Evans didn’t want Pacino in particular, who was an unknown and whom Evans dismissed as a shrimp, and so for a time Caan was tapped to play Michael rather than Sonny. But at the 11th hour, Coppola got his way and the rest is cinematic history. Pacino became a star, Caan became a star. He makes no sense as a Sicilian but we tend to gloss over that because he’s so good: angry, personable, fun, bada-beep bada-boop.
He was a man’s man who cut quite a figure with the ladies. In his heyday, he was broad-shouldered, thin-waisted, light on his toes, with a tick-tock walk and a look that often said, “Why the hell are you talking to me?” without heat. The other night we rewatched Michael Mann’s “Thief,” that ultimate Mann (and man) movie, and Caan in his early 40s looks fantastic: trim and handsome, quiet and sharp. (The New York Times obit says he plays a “not-too-bright ex-con” in the film, which is a not-too-bright description.)
I haven’t seen many of his other ’70s flicks and hope to rectify that soon, but I remember him always there as I was growing up. And then he was gone. I assumed he took a break after a long period of starring roles—like Will Smith from 2008-2012—or maybe he just didn't like the way they were making movies in the early-to-mid-80s as opposed to the auteur '70s; but it was actually a bad cocaine habit. He didn’t make a movie for five years, wound up in debt, and when he returned, in Coppola’s “Gardens of Stone” in 1987, he looked much older. He was a young 41 and an old 47. I remember the ballyhoo about the return, and I went to the movie hoping for greatness. Has anyone seen it recently? Is it anything? Then “Alien Nation,” which I missed, and “Misery,” which I also missed.
I kept missing his movies—even the popular ones: “For the Boys,” “Honeymoon in Vegas,” “Mickey Blue Eyes.” The one Wes Anderson movie I’ve never seen is the one he’s in. I’ll have to rectify that. How many times did he play off the mob role? Or the tough-guy persona? That’s part of the joy of “Elf”: that man, that face, having to deal with batshit Santa stuff.
“I’ve been accused [of being a mob guy] so many times,” he told Vanity Fair in 2004. “I won ‘Italian of the Year’ twice in New York.”
He was Jewish, of course. He grew up in the Bronx, where his father was a kosher meat wholesaler. He hung around tough guys. He played football but he didn’t make the cut at Michigan State. Football’s loss was acting’s gain.
The Times obit says he improvised the bada bing part in this famous “Godfather” quote: “You gotta get up like this and—bada bing!—you blow their brains all over your nice Ivy League suit.”
I’ll also remember him for a line he didn’t speak but is spoken about him:
Brian Piccolo is sick, very sick…
Rest in peace.
Sunday July 10, 2022
The Revenge of St. Felix
On Friday night a friend texted me her great view at the Mariners game against the visiting Toronto Blue Jays. The next morning we had the following conversation:
- Nice! And looks like you saw a good game. Or a long one anyway.
- All the games I go to seem to be extra innings these days.
- What was the % of Blue Jays fans to Ms fans? And how annoying was that?
- It was about 70% Blue Jays fans. We passed a pile of 9 stuffed tour busses on the way out! But they’re polite drunks anyway. I’ll take them, happily.
- I don’t go to Mariners-Blue Jays games for that reason. I just find it embarrassing they do that in our park. This was the last time I went. (Link)
- I love fans that will drive 1300 km for a game! You can’t argue with their determination to go to a ball game!
(10-minute pause)
- Aww, just read this… you are a certifiable curmudgeon! 🤣
- Curmudgeon is my default. When all those BJ fans come to town, I become certifiably psychotic.
Indeed, that game in Sept. 2016 is the last time I went to a Mariners-BJs game at our park. I hate them turning it into their park. Drives me nuts. Can't deal.
But this weekend did much to wipe that shame away, with the M's winning 8-3, 5-2 (11), 2-1 and 6-5 for THE SWEEP. Recent pickup Carlos Santana struck the big blow Sat. night and the two big blows Sun. afternoon for the wins. To be honest, I didn't get trading for him on June 27. I looked at his recent numbers and went “Why?” I hope to keep being wrong.
I hope to keep being wrong about the Mariners. At the beginning of the season, my friend Tim over at GrandSalami.com asked a bunch of us to make predictions for the season, and I was the only one who didn't put the M's in the playoffs. Everyone else had them winning 90+ while I figured 84-79 seemed about right. A month ago, that looked horribly optimistic. Right now, after a 16-3 run, the best record in baseball during that time, I seem gloriously wrong. Please let me keep being gloriously wrong.
Over the weekend, including to my above friend, I texted or tweeted that 2016 gif of Felix Hernandez shutting down the BJs in the 2016 getaway game—two days after my horrific experience—and telling the polite, assembled Canadian crowd, “This is MY house!” and I loved him forever for it. But they kept coming. This weekend, despite their presence, it was our house.
Sunday July 10, 2022
Donald Trump and the Doormat Duo: Mark Leibovich's Perfect Essay on GOP Cowardice and Opportunism
There is a great Mark Leibovich essay about Trump and his GOP toadies on The Atlantic site, called “The Most Pathetic Men in America: Why Lindsey Graham, Kevin McCarthy, and so many other cowards in Congress are still doing Trump's bidding,” which ... right? Right from the start—pathetic, cowards—it doesn't pull punches the way much of the press has done for the last seven years. It's a fucking breath of fresh fucking air and everyone should read it. You get the feeling if the press was this honest, or less dishonest, we wouldn't be where we are.
Turns out it's from Leibovich's upcoming book, “Thank You for Your Servitude: Donald Trump's Washington and the Price of Submission,” which I've already ordered.
The essay is both insidery and brutal—a good combo. Leibovich is protecting no source. Here's a standalone graf that'll serve as a primer:
Trump said and did obviously awful and dangerous things—racist and cruel and achingly dumb and downright evil things. But on top of that, he is a uniquely tiresome individual, easily the sorest loser, the most prodigious liar, and the most interminable victim ever to occupy the White House. He is, quite possibly, the biggest crybaby ever to toddle across history's stage, from his inaugural-crowd hemorrhage on day one right down to his bitter, ketchup-flinging end. Seriously, what public figure in the history of the world comes close? I'm genuinely asking.
For the last seven years everyone's pretended that this is a legitimate figure, a legitimate American leader, but this is the world as I see it, the world—I would argue—that's closer to what is actually true. And it's fucking time someone fucking said it.
Then he gets into the lies, and the lying liars: the ones who legitimized this crybaby, the GOP, particularly Lindsey Graham and Kevin McCarthy, whom he dubs “the doormat duo.” He doesn't pretend they're the same. Graham has always had the need to glom onto a father figure, and for the first two decades of his career that was John McCain, and for the last five it's been McCain's opposite, Donald Trump, and this massive contradiction has never seemed one on Graham's little head. McCarthy, meanwhile, comes off as just another sad, dull opportunist, but more so. Both men want power, want to stay in power, want to be relevant. Country be damned.
Both men, in the parlance, get the joke:
“Getting the joke” is a timeworn Washington expression, referring to a person's ability to grasp a shared truth about something best left unspoken. In the case of Trump, the “joke” was that he was, at best, not a serious person or a good president and, at worst, a dangerous and potentially criminal jackass.
“Oh, everybody gets the joke,” Mitt Romney assured me in early 2022 when I asked him if Senate Republicans really believed what they said in public about how wonderful Trump was. “They still are very aware of his, uh, what's a good word, idiosyncrasies.”
Yes, politicians will sometimes say different things in front of different audiences. No big shocker there. But the gap between the public adoration expressed by Trump's Republican lickspittles and the mocking contempt they voiced for him in private could be gaping. This was never more apparent, or maddening, as in the weeks after the 2020 election. “For all but just a handful of members, if you put them on truth serum, they knew that the election was fully legitimate and that Donald Trump was a joke,” Representative Adam Kinzinger, Republican of Illinois, told me last year. “The vast majority of people get the joke. I think Kevin McCarthy gets the joke. Lindsey gets the joke. The problem is that the joke isn't even funny anymore.”
And 80 million people aren't in on the joke. If the Dems don't use this to talk to Republican voters directly, they're nuts. “They're in on the joke and you're not. Maybe, to them, you are the joke.”
Everybody in the GOP “got the joke,” and everybody in the GOP “humored him” after he lost the 2020 election, hoping he would simmer down, or maybe he would eventually just leave the stage and life would return to what it was. Then Jan. 6 happened. Lebovich says what I said/hoped back then: “January 6 had to be the end of the line for Trump, right? Surely, this would be the moment when the fever broke.”
Leibovich tags the moment the fever returned: McCarthy's groveling visit to Mar-a-Lago on January 28:
So, there they were, Donald and his Kevin, side by side again, reunited and it felt so good. In the photo that shot across social media, the old besties held the same clenched smiles and seemed to both be sucking in their tummies like bros of a certain age do. McCarthy's visit set off a parade of ring-kissing pilgrimages. Graham headed down to Florida again and again, so often that his host couldn't help but marvel, “Jesus, Lindsey must really like to play golf”...
And there we were. And there we are.
“When we look back, Kevin's trip to Mar-a-Lago will, I think, turn out to be a key moment,” Liz Cheney told me when we talked again this April. It would, she said, go down as one of the most shameful episodes in one of the country's most shameful chapters. More than anyone, McCarthy ensured that the Republican Party would remain stuck in its 2020 post-election purgatory, still working to placate America's neediest man.
The book comes out July 12.
Friday July 08, 2022
Movie Review: My Favorite Year (1982)
WARNING: SPOILERS
Every once in a while I give this movie another shot because I want it to to work, it feels like it should work, and everyone else seems to think it works. It’s got a 96% on Rotten Tomatoes, 7.3 on IMDb, and in 2006 Premiere magazine voted it one of the 50 greatest comedies of all time.
So we watched it again the other night.
It doesn’t work.
Welcome back, Palumbo
It’s a great idea. In 1954, comedy writer Mel Brooks tries to keep fallen movie star Errol Flynn in line and away from booze and women so he can appear on the hit weekly series “Your Show of Shows” with Sid Caesar. Look at that. How fun should that be? And it was Brooks himself who suggested the story—Brooks at or near his comedic heights.
It's a roman a clef, of course: Benjy Stone (Mark Linn-Baker) tries to keep fallen movie idol Alan Swann (Peter O’Toole) away from women and booze so he can appear on the hit weekly series “Comedy Cavalcade” with King Kaiser (Joseph Bologna).
And it’s not funny enough. Linn-Baker isn’t funny enough for someone playing Brooks, Bologna isn’t funny enough for someone playing Caesar, and the movie, from first-time director Richard Benjamin, often goes too big to make up for its lack.
Is the script not funny enough? It’s written by Norman Steinberg, whose name is on “Blazing Saddles” but not much else—a crapfest of ’80s comedies that didn’t work: “Wise Guys,” “Johnny Dangerously,” “Funny About Love.” His co-writer is Dennis Palumbo, who did ’70s sitcoms that didn’t work: “The McLean Stevenson Show,” “Flying High,” “Flatbush.” At one point, the showrunner Sy Benson (Bill Macy) tells his writers “Up your hole with a Mello Roll,” and I was like, “What’s that a riff off again? Oh right, ‘Welcome Back, Kotter.’ Nose/rubber hose.” Palumbo wrote for that, too.
OK, the screenplay is definitely lacking. The cute girl, K.C. (Jessica Harper), asks Benjy if there are funny and not-funny people, and he says definitely, and divides the world thus:
On the funny side there are the Marx Brothers, except Zeppo; the Ritz Brothers, no exceptions; both Laurel and Hardy; and Woody Woodpecker. On the unfunny side, there’s anybody who has ever played the accordion professionally.
I wait for the payoff and get the accordion line. And the first part is just a laundry list. And no exceptions on the Ritz Brothers? Please. Benjy’s response is like the movie in microcosm: a wasted opportunity.
Even so, give those lines to funny people and it sometimes works. The scene where Benjy takes the gentile matinee idol to visit his very Jewish family in Brooklyn isn’t bad. Lainie Kazan as his mom makes me laugh. Lou Jacobi as Uncle Morty really makes me laugh. They also do a nice bit with one of the show's writers, Herb Lee (Basil Hoffman), supposedly based on Neil Simon, who merely whispers his devastating ripostes to fellow scribe Alice (Anne De Salvo), who says them aloud. I just wish they were more devastating.
We do get this nice exchange when a very drunk Swann stumbles into the bathroom only to be met by Lil (Selma Diamond):
Lil: This is for ladies only.
Swann: [unzips fly] So is this, ma’am, but every now and then I have to run a little water through it.
But even this didn’t come from Steinberg/Palumbo. It’s a well-known Hollywood tale about John Barrymore and a wardrobe girl in 1939. Barrymore gets no writing credit.
Lundy’s complaint
O’Toole was Oscar-nominated for his role and deservedly. He’s great. You get a sense of the sad soul trapped within the fame and addiction, not strong enough to shed either, relying on both. You also get a sense of his inner swashbuckler even before he displays it at the 11th hour.
There’s a subplot about a Jimmy Hoffa-like figure, Karl Rojeck (Cameron Mitchell), taking exception to Kaiser lampooning him as Boss Hijack, and sending mob/union guys to take care of him, which they attempt to do on live national television. This is the 11th-hour thing. Swann has already run away, panicked by the prospect of a live audience. He says he’s not the hero he so often played and Benjy buoys him by telling him he is; he had to have that in him to be able to portray it so convincingly. So Swann comes to the rescue. He swoops in like Captain Blood (or “Captain from Tortuga”), and together he and Kaiser vanquish the baddies and everyone in the live studio audience stands up and applauds wildly.
And it’s just stupid. What did the people in that studio audience watch? A Boss Hijack sketch in which Kaiser fights some guys and then Swann swoops in and fights some guys, and they win. It's nonsensical. No one says a line—funny or not. But somehow it gets this roar of approval. And it's the movie’s great climax. And it gives Swann the courage to visit his estranged daughter in Connecticut.
You know what I don’t get? Richard Benjamin’s career. They kept casting him as the lead in movies based on bestselling Philip Roth novels that wound up bombing at the box office; and after a decade of that, and his own forgettable ’70s sitcom (“Quark”), he began his directing career. This was his first feature film. It’s also his highest rated. I look at his CV and wonder how he kept making movies. He kept getting big stars and he kept making bad movies. Here’s his Rotten Tomatoes numbers:
- 22%: “City Heat”
- 60%: “Racing with the Moon”
- 50%: “The Money Pit”
- 20%: “My Stepmother is an Alien”
- 57%: “Little Nikita”
- 74%: “Mermaids”
- 31%: “Made in America”
- 12%: “Milk Money”
- 15%: “Mrs. Winterbourne”
And then scene. Mercifully.
Anyway, I keep wanting to be wrong about this movie.
Wednesday July 06, 2022
Dreaming of Holding Hands with Lepers
Patricia, Wendy and I were in a swanky hotel, and, at my behest, Patricia and I went up to the room of someone like Raoul, the Dutch guy I knew in Taiwan, and while he was taking a shower we ran through his room and out onto the balcony and danced in the rain. The point was to be outside and feel the rain on us. Wendy stood back in the hallway, marveling at our bravery. Except I wanted us to be stealthy. I wanted us to zip in and out without Raoul realizing we'd done it and Patricia didn't feel that way. So she didn't run back out into the hallway again with me. She stood near the bathroom door, where Raoul was taking his shower, and made a loud noise. And only then did we slam the door and run down the escalators.
There was someone who'd put up like police tape near a door in the building that led to a parking lot. It was kind of like they were marking their spot? Like a homeless person? No, it was someone I knew from elementary school and high school, Kristin G., and she was a state rep now, and whatever she ws trying to do, the attention she was trying to focus on this issue, had kind of worked. Other people were asking me to help out with the parking lot because I'd done that before—gotten people spots to park. “He works magic on this,” someone said. And I'm like ... OK? I guess? And we're walking through an upper floor of the parking garage, and the others had disappeared, and it was just me and this leper, this literal leper, who wanted to hold hands because he never got to feel human touch. And I understood what he wanted but I was also nervous. I moved my hand away from his because I didn't want to get leprosy. I felt guilty for not caring about him more.
Tuesday July 05, 2022
Fear, Envy, Meanness
From Scorsese's doc on Dylan:
Dylan is quoting Liam Clancy, whom he knew in the early Greenwich Village days, and who was one of the big deals when Bob landed on the folk scene. He even does his Irish lilt. It's a great quote, and obviously meant a lot to Bob, but if I break it down I know I don't do any of it. Of the three, fear has been the biggest constant in my life. Envy was big, too, in my younger days, particularly when it came to writing and success, though there's way less of it now. I'll cut myself that slack. Meanwhile, I don't think I had meanness at all when I was younger but life changes you. I've had moments in my adult years. Not just anger but meanness. But again, cutting myself some slack, it's a rarity. If I had to compare myself to the whole of humanity, and why not, I'd say I've been more fearful, a little less envious and way less mean.
Anyway it's something to aspire to.
Monday July 04, 2022
Movie Review: Top Gun: Maverick (2022)
WARNING: SPOILERS
Watching the original “Top Gun” back in ’86, I remember being surprised at the end when they went beyond maneuvers and actually engaged an enemy. I thought, “What the fuck? We’re not at war with anybody.”
Watching the sequel, “Top Gun: Maverick,” 36 years later, and at the end they engage the enemy, known simply as “the enemy,” who are faceless and voiceless. And I thought, “Makes sense. We’re at war with everybody.”
It’s been a helluva 36 years, hasn’t it?
Canyon run
It’s nice that some of that shows up on Tom Cruise’s face. He’s still in great shape but he’s finally showing his age. Tom, you’re finally showing our age. Both of us were born in 1963, and there’s bags under the eyes and sags by the jawline (at least you have one), and those little puffy indentations by the mouth. Would’ve been nice, of course, if someone in the film had mentioned it. Or if he had. Or if he’d mentioned something about aging. “Acid reflux at zero gs is the worst.” “I really should’ve worn sunscreen during those beach volleyball games.” “I feel the need … the need to pee.”
Instead, Capt. Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, nearly 60 now, still has better stamina and reflexes than the twentysomethings he’s training, such as “Rooster” (Miles Teller), “Hangman” (Glen Powell) and “Phoenix” (Monica Barbaro), all of whom were born a quarter century later. (The actors were all born after “Top Gun” was released.) It’s like pretending Cecil Fielder or Edgar Martinez, two '63 babies, could play better than Mike Trout or Juan Soto right now.
For what it is, though, “Top Gun: Maverick” is a fun movie. They do a good job. In that airless world.
I’d heard good things (Rotten Tomatoes: 96%/99%), but from the raves I was expecting something like “The Right Stuff,” and this doesn’t come close to that.
It does open with a kind of “Right Stuff” vibe, and not just because of Ed Harris. Maverick goes into work to fly his zoom-zooms and he’s told by his team that, since they’d never hit Mach 10, Admiral Chester “Hammer” Cain (Harris) is pulling funding to spend the dough on a different favorite project. Except Cain ain’t there yet. So Mav fires up the bird (no stick of Beeman’s), takes it to 10, then, being him, pushes the envelope. Oops. Down goes the bird. We skip the crash landing and cut to a frazzled Maverick in space-man outfit entering a crowded diner, where he chugs a glass of water and asks where he is. The awestruck boy near the cash register: “Earth.” Great line.
For the insubordination, Mav should be gone, fired, but he’s given another opportunity by his former rival and old pal, Adm. Tom “Iceman” Kazansky (Val Kilmer), to return to the “Top Gun” school and train the best-of-the-best for a new mission. That mission involves flying low and fast through enemy canyons, dropping a pinpoint bomb to blow up some uranium macguffins, then soaring over mountains and hopefully making an escape. It’s like the Death Star canyon run in the original “Star Wars” but without the whole “Use the Force, Luke.” Wait, I guess there’s that, too, since “Rooster” has to learn to trust his instincts. He has to learn to not think.
Oh, if they could only teach that to some of us critics.
“Rooster,” in case you didn’t know, is the son of “Goose” (Anthony Edwards) from the first movie, the pal who dies, the wingman our hero can’t save and who blames himself for the death. As a result, Mav and Rooster have issues. Not because Mav caused Dad’s death. You kidding? Pfft. No, it’s because Maverick initially prevented Rooster from following in Dad’s footsteps. We later find out that he promised the boy’s dying mother (Meg Ryan, unseen except for ’86 footage) to keep the boy from becoming a pilot—that’s why he did it. Also he really didn’t think he was ready. Turns out all these recruits have a thing like that: Rooster thinks too much, Hangman is too reckless and solitary, Phoenix is … No, I guess it’s just Rooster and Hangman. Everyone else is just there. A Benetton ad.
The goal is for the team to do the Kessel Run in under 2 ½ minutes and bond like a team. None of the recruits is able to do the former and the latter only comes in fits and starts. It mostly happens in that give-each-other-shit, sweaty-football-on-the-beach way. The bigger issue, for Mav, is those damn admirals. I keep referencing “Star Wars” but the movie is a little like “Star Trek” in this way. Mav is the balls-out captain without the green alien babes, just a shockingly beautiful Jennifer Connelly running the aviator bar, while Ed Harris, then Jon Hamm as Beau “Cyclone” Simpson, are the admirals who keep getting in the way. And when Iceman dies of cancer, Mav is cut from the project because Jon Hamm has a different idea about the Kessel Run. Why not 4 minutes instead of 2 ½? Right? So much easier. Sure, then the enemy will scramble its jets, etc., and our heroes probably won’t make it back alive. But mission accomplished!
Instead, Mav steals a plane, demonstrates that the run can be done in 2 minutes and 15 seconds, so Jon Hamm appoints him Team Leader for the mission. And for his team, Mav picks pretty lady, black dude, nerd boy and Rooster. And off they go to take it to the enemy.
Psst. They win.
Goose, Rooster, Loon
Admittedly, it’s thrilling. Throughout, director Joseph Kosinski (“Oblivion,” “Only the Brave”) and DP Claudio Miranda film the actors within the F-14s and 18s, and we can feel the difference. We can see the pressure on them. This ain’t green screen, kids. From the IMDb trivia page:
- Cruise's involvement was predicated on the condition that real aircraft be used in the aerial sequences, not CGI.
- Cruise personally designed a three-month aviation course for the new actors to get ready riding in F-18s.
- Three of the actors threw up every day of filming in the jets, per Miles Teller.
All of which accounts for a lot of the critical enthusiasm. The movie is real. It’s about heroes who are super rather than superheroes. And (admittedly again) it's not all sweaty football on the beach. The scene where Mav visits Ice, and they talk, is powerful and powerfully acted, particularly by Cruise. One shot in particular—myriad complex emotions crossing his face. I’m like “Damn, this dude can act when he wants.”
But you could write most of the characters’ personalities on a Post-It note. Connelly as Penny is given almost nothing to do. They’re exes, and she: 1) teases him feistily, 2) teases him softly, 3) leaves the door open for him. When he returns after the mission, she’s off sailing with her daughter. I guess to show she has her own life? Or to provide a thrum of last-minute tension? Right. Imagine if she never returned. Instead, in the final reel, yep, there she is, in magic-hour light standing next to a 1973 Porsche 911 S, like in a car commercial. That said, Connelly looks fantastic. And when was the last time we saw 50-year-olds making out in a movie?
Should the movie have worried more about Rooster? He barely knew his father, yet he: 1) trains at the same academy for the same job that killed the old man; 2) sports the same moustache; and 3) sings the same fucking song at the same fucking bar. Goodness gracious, that’s weird. Plus the whole double-o bird connection. (Was “Loon” taken?) But sure, let’s ignore all that. His issue is he’s “too cautious.” Until he isn’t—during the Kessel Run.
To be honest, hearing about “Top Gun: Maverick,” then seeing it and writing about it, I'm reminded how much I hated “Top Gun” back in the day. I guess I hated what its popularity meant. It meant the cynical period I grew up in was over. We were that much more mindless, that much more jingoistic, that much more ready to buy the bullshit. And every year it’s gotten worse. It’s almost as if we stopped thinking.
Saturday July 02, 2022
Dreaming That Big Broadway Musical
Here's a dream I had the other night. For some reason, my dreams early this week were fairly vivid:
There was this girl who thought I was smart, and who might’ve been sweet on me, and who gave me this part to do in a play. She said just read these lines, it’ll be easy, and I said sure. (I thought I was smart, too.) And then we get to my line and … it’s in a song? And I have to sing it? I look down and the line is:
Exposes exposes exposes
But how does it go? How do I sing it? The person who feeds me the line, the other actor, the main singer of the song, who’s in costume, is looking at me with panic as I haltingly read it off the paper rather than sing it as it should be sung. As I guess everyone knows it should be sung? Because it’s kind of famous? The big hit number in a big Broadway musical? We’re on the set of an old-timey store, an immigrant shopkeeper’s shop, vaguely Jewish, and maybe we’re being filmed for television or something, and this other actor then picks up his lines of the song, hurriedly now, since I’ve put us behind the pace. But there’s still panic because he knows I don’t know anything. We’re walking through the aisles of the shop, and he’s singing, and others are singing, and then everyone turns to me and I have to sing again. The same line? I look down. Yes, the same line:
Exposes exposes exposes
And after a few rounds of this, as it keeps coming back to me, the other guy, and the other cast members, begin mouthing the words at me, as well as the rhythm, and I begin to get it. And it’s not exposes, as I’d first read it and sung it. It’s exposés. And it goes:
Exposés
Exposés
Ex-po-sés!The first two times sung hurriedly, the last time lingering over every syllable.
And while it’s beginning to work, as everyone is kind of pitching in to remake the disaster I’ve made of everything, I’m still hugely embarrassed and keep thinking, “How did I get here? How did we not practice?”
A few things about this.
After I dreamed the above and wrote it down in the middle of the night, then got ready for bed again, I worried that I wouldn't remember the tune when I woke up. I was proud that I'd dreamed up music. I mean, it wasn't Paul McCartney dreaming “Yesterday” but it wasn't bad for me, and I wanted to remember it. So I nudged my wife awake, gave her the Cliff's Notes of the dream, and sang her the chorus. “Will you remember that?” I asked. She nodded with eyes closed. I looked at her and thought, “She won't remember.” Then I realized I could just record it via QuickTime or whatever, which is what I did. A bit later, returning to bed, somewhat mischievous, I nudged her awake again. “Do you remember the song?” I asked. She nodded with eyes closed, 90% asleep, and sang: “Scandal, Scandal, Scaaaan-dal.”
It was only after I wrote down the dream that I realized there was a kind of real life precedent to it. When I lived in Taiwan in my mid-20s, I was private tutor to a Chinese woman who taught at a big ESL school. And she thought I was a great teacher and super-smart, and she may have been sweet on me, and one day or week or something she told me her school needed a new ESL teacher and she asked me to to do it. Are you sure? I said? Didn't you tell me your teachers have to go through like a week's orientation? Because you guys have a certain rote pattern and rhythm to your method? And she said, “Oh, that's just for them, you'll be fine. You won't need it.” Because I was so super-smart, see? So I agreed. And it was a disaster. I didn't know the rules, I was completely out of rhythm with the pace of the class, and at one point, trying to explain the word “dry,” I resorted to the Mandarin, but in my haste I went fourth tone instead of first and wound up saying the “F” word in Taiwanese. Worse, I realized I'd said the “F” word in Taiwanese, and went “Oops” and covered my mouth, while the kids in the class laughed. The parents sitting in the back row weren't too amused by that. I was not asked back.