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Friday March 31, 2023

Guess the Lede in the Trump Indictment

Here are the ledes that appeared last night from our various national publications when news leaked that Donald Trump had been indicted by the Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg. Can you guess which goes with which pub? Also, who nailed it? It's not like it was truly breaking news, after all. It was anticipated. 

  1. “Donald J. Trump was indicted in Manhattan on Thursday for his role in paying hush money to a porn star, according to five people with knowledge of the matter, a historic development that will shake up the 2024 presidential race and forever mark him as the nation's first former president to face criminal charges.”
  2. “NEW YORK — A Manhattan grand jury has voted to indict former president Donald Trump, making him the first person in U.S. history to serve as commander in chief and then be charged with a crime, and setting the stage for a 2024 presidential contest unlike any other.”
  3. “NEW YORK — Donald Trump has been indicted by a Manhattan grand jury, prosecutors and defense lawyers said Thursday, making him the first former U.S. president to face a criminal charge and jolting his bid to retake the White House next year.”
  4. “Donald Trump is one step closer to being criminally charged, and potentially serving time in prison, after a Manhattan grand jury voted to indict him for his role in the 2016 hush money payout to porn star Stephanie Clifford a.k.a. Stormy Daniels. In a statement, a spokesperson for the Manhattan district attorney's office said: 'This evening we contacted Mr. Trump's attorney to coordinate his surrender to the Manhattan D.A.'s Office for arraignment on a Supreme Court indictment, which remains under seal. Guidance will be provided when the arraignment date is selected.'”
  5. “NEW YORK, March 30 - Donald Trump has been indicted by a Manhattan grand jury after a probe into hush money paid to porn star Stormy Daniels, becoming the first former U.S. president to face criminal charges even as he makes another run for the White House.”
  6. “In America, the freedom of the press is often exercised as the freedom to congregate in exactly the same place at the same time, not doing much. Two Saturday mornings ago, former President Donald Trump posted on his proprietary social-media platform, Truth Social, declaring that he would be indicted by the Manhattan District Attorney three days later—'on Tuesday.' That Monday, reporters from multiple continents and every major news network set up camp outside the seventeen-story Art Deco courthouse in lower Manhattan, where criminal defendants in the borough are taken for arraignment. Television cameras were planted...”

Answers:

  1. The New York Times (I like that NYT doesn't use the NEW YORK dateline. Because New York.)
  2. The Washington Post
  3. Associated Press
  4. Vanity Fair
  5. Reuters
  6. The New Yorker, of course

I'm teasing The New Yorker but any preference among the others? The Post and AP didn't mention the charges, just the fact that he was charged, and the historical nature of that fact. The Times mentioned why he was indicted with the proviso “according to five people with knowledge of the matter,” while Reuters was adept at mentioning the indictment after the probe into the hush money scandal. So it got that in there. Anyway we'll know more soon. 

Later in the evening, The New Yorker also gave us this stellar lede by David Remnick:

“Former President Donald Trump, twice impeached, yet impervious to shame, was indicted Thursday on criminal charges related to the payment of hush money to a porn star. There was a time in American history, almost impossible to recollect now, when such a sentence, such a plot point, would have been beyond our imagining. That has not been the case for a very long time.”

I think about that a lot. I imagine 2003 me reading 2017-2023 headlines and thinking, “What bullshit dystopian fiction did that come out of?” Sadly, the one we're living in. 

Again, yesterday was a good day for rule of law. I hope to celebrate March 30 until the day I die.

Posted at 06:18 AM on Friday March 31, 2023 in category Media   |   Permalink  

Thursday March 30, 2023

TRUMP INDICTED!!

I went to BaBar this afternoon for a late lunch and Pho Hanoi—I've been under the weather and this is my “get better soon” comfort food—and when I returned home I saw, on Spoutible, one of the new social sites I'm trying out, a post about “karma.” “For who?” I wondered. “Oh, the Central Park Five. Why?”

And then I read this: ...following the indictment of Donald Trump by...

I tried to hold my emotions in check. Did that just mean “the eventual indictment of...?” So I went to the New York Times site. And no. That's not what it meant. I saw this beauty:

To be honest, that's a later version of what I saw on their website, but I had to go with it because it looked so good

Anyway, it's about fucking time. It's been a long time coming. 

Trump, true to form, railed against being INDICATED [sic].

More later. But it's a good day for America. Rule of law matters. No matter how powerful and illiterate you are.

Oh, and screw you, Steve Inskeep! For this. I will never forgive you for what you did—and didn't do—during what I hope are our worst American times.

Posted at 06:56 PM on Thursday March 30, 2023 in category Law   |   Permalink  

Thursday March 30, 2023

Opening Day 2023: Your Active Leaders


  • SLIDESHOW: Last time I did one of these, the Seattle Mariners had the longest playoff drought in baseball and Albert Pujols led half of all active batting categories. Now the longest drought is a tie between the Tigers and the Angels (neither's been since 2014), while the batting categories are led by a Tiger and an Angel—Miguel Cabrera and Mike Trout. On the pitching side, the usual suspects keep turning up: Verlander, Kershaw, Scherzer, Greinke. So who's retired now? A tough call. Most guys don't get the victory laps Albert did. I assume we've seen the last of Robinson Cano, Justin Upton, Alcides Escobar, Dee Strange-Gordon and Cole Hamels, but, as of now, they assume otherwise. And their assumption trumps mine. 

  • BATTING AVERAGE: This has been Miggy's since 2015 when he was sporting a .320 career mark. He's inevitably fallen off—a cumulative .262 during the last six years—yet no one's taken the mantle. For a time, it looked like Jose Altuve might but he stumbled, too, at a much earlier age. That said, they're still #s 1 and 2 on this hit parade (.308 and .307), while the only other actives above .300 are Mike Trout and Trea Turner (.303, .302). Reminder: In 2021 Miggy's .313 mark was the lowest active batting mark ever, and obviously we keep breaking that record. Feels like banning the shift will get those numbers up again. Hell, someone might actually hit .350

  • ON-BASE PERCENTAGE: If this is Trout's last year as the active OBP leader, I'm assuming his usurper won't be approaching from behind. After a lax (for him) .369 in 2022, Trout currently has a .414 career mark, followed by Joey Votto (.412) and Aaron Judge (.394). But the usurper is already ahead of him: Juan Soto at .424. But it takes 3,000 career plate appearances to qualify and Soto has a magical 333 to go. One assumes he'll get there by mid-summer. 

  • SLUGGING PERCENTAGE: Could Trout get usurped here, too? He's long been the leader, with no one close, but last season Aaron Judge got his qualifying 3,000 PAs. And then his universe-leading .686 mark upped his career mark from .554 to .583—spitting distance to Trout's .587. So Judge could take over. There's also another Juan Soto situation but not with Juan Soto. The up-and-comer is Yordan Alvarez, whose career mark is .590, but he's only halfway to qualifying. That'll be a few years yet. BTW, Trout's SLG is 11th all-time, Judge's 13th, and that includes recently added Negro League stars Mule Suttles, Turkey Stearnes and Oscar Charleston.

  • OPS: Four of the top 5 are red caps: Trout, Angels (1.001), Votto, Reds (.925), Goldschmidt, Cards (.917) and Bryce Harper, Phillies (.913). The only non-red cap is Aaron Judge, Yankees (.976), at No. 2. Juan Soto, a current brown cap, and with a .950 mark, will come in third when he qualifies. And yes, Trout is way up there, alone. It's the old Prince/Sinead song. Nothing compares to him.

  • GAMES: Amid the fun of Albert's final season, including becoming just the fourth man in baseball history to hit 700 homers, Albert's games-played milestone went virtually unmentioned. On June 4, he joined Rose, Yaz, Henry, Rickey, Ty, Eddie, Stan, Willie and Cal as the only players in MLB history to play in 3,000 games. He wound up fifth all-time at 3,080. The active torch has now been passed to Miggy at 2,699 games, and if you can name the next four in order, kudos. They are: Nellie Cruz, Joey Votto, Elvis Andrus and Evan Longoria. It's Elvis in the building that's surprising to me. I still think of him as a kid. 

  • HITS: Last April 23, Miguel Cabrera became the 33rd player to reach 3,000 hits, and it looks like we won't get another for a while. Assuming Cano is done, the next active leaders are Joey Votto (2093, 38 years old), Nellie Cruz (2018, 41), Elvis Andrus (1997, 33), and Andrew McCutchen (1948, 35). Then it gets a little interesting, two 32 year-olds still at the top of their game: Jose Altuve (1935) and Freddie Freeman (1903). For a time, Altuve seemed particularly likely, but the shift and maybe the trash-can scandal haven't been kind. He bounced back last year, hitting .300, but still managed only 158 hits. Freddie's just gotten better and led the Majors last year with 199 hits. Would be an interesting bet between the two. I might still go Altuve, to be honest.

  • DOUBLES: Albert retired fifth all-time (686), Miggy stands at 14th all-time (607), and then the active gap again: Joey (453), Evan (422), and Freddie (414). Last season, Freeman led the Majors with 47, as he'd done in 2020 (23, Covid) and 2018 (44). He's one of the few guys that thrived in the shift era. Will be interesting to see how he does post-shift. One assumes better. 

  • TRIPLES: The lowest active leader in triples during the 20th century was a tie between George Brett at the start of the '87 season (when he took the mantle from a retiring Pete Rose) and Paul Molitor in '98 (when Brett Butler retired). Both men had 114 triples. That was the lowest. Those were the days. In recent years, the active triples leader has been Ichiro (96), then Dexter Fowler (82), and now ... Charlie Blackmon with 58. Yeah, Blackmon. I wouldn't have gotten him, either.

  • HOMERUNS: Who's the next to 500? Miggy did it last (08/21), Ortiz before him (09/15) and Pujols before that (04/14). I'm rooting for Nellie Cruz (459) but does he have 41 more in him? He only hit 10 last year. There's Giancarlo, 32 years old, and at 378, but one wonders how much he'll play if he keeps hitting near .200. Trout, 32 and 350, will do it barring career-ending injuries. Nah to Votto (342), Longoria (331), and Goldschmidt (315). BTW, if you're wondering where Aaron Judge's name is, he's still a ways down. Despite his monster seasons, he only has 220 career. George Springer and Eugenio Suarez actually have more HRs than him. 

  • RBIs: Albert retired No. 2 on the all-time list (2218), active leader Miggy is currently 14th (1847), and then there's a bit of a gap. Next is Nellie Cruz, tied for 115th, with 1302. Then it's Longoria (198th, 1131), Votto (212th, 1106), Goldschmidt and Freeman (261st/262nd, 1042/41). Where have all the RBI men gone? Most are below 1,000.

  • RUNS: Same deal, with less of a gap. Miggy at 1530, then Votto (1145), McCutchen (1118), Freeman (1086). Freddie keeps showing up, doesn't he? I never thought of him as a Hall of Famer but I'm beginning to think of him as a Hall of Famer. Same trajectory I had with Adrian Beltre. 

  • BASES ON BALLS: Can anyone name the top 5 actives? It goes Votto (1338), Miggy (1227), Carlos Santana (1148), Andrew McCutchen (983), Mike Trout (919). OK, I guess it's mostly Santana that's the surprise. Santana has almost as many BBs as Miggy, with about 4,000 fewer plate appearances. Career, he has almost as many BBs as Ks—1148 vs. 1246—a rarity these days. Votto, meanwhile, is tied for 36th all-time with A-Rod.

  • STRIKEOUTS: Last season, Miggy became just the seventh player in MLB history to reach 2,000 Ks. Who will be eighth? If Justin Upton catches on with anyone, he's not a bad guess—he's 29 shy, and last season he struck out 23 times in just 17 games with Seattle. But will a team take a chance on a .100/.200/.200 guy? Then there's Nellie Cruz. He's at 1870. Giancarlo Stanton seems as good a bet as any. He's 33 and has 1696 career Ks. Basically he strikes out every three at-bats. Oddly, he's never led the league in the category. Or maybe not oddly: Two other 2,000-ers, Miggy and A-Rod, never led the league in the category, either. 

  • STOLEN BASES: I'm assuming Dee Strange-Gordon (336 career SBs) is done, which means the active leader is Elvis Andrus (335). Then it goes Billy Hamilton (324), Starling Marte (314), and Jose Altuve (279). The most SBs among 20somethings? Trea Turner, 29, with 230. Turner is also near the top in SB% with 84.5%, but the active leader in that category is the oft-injured Byron Buxton with a stellar 88.5%. May the bigger bases and throw-over limits restart our Brockian engines. 

  • HIT BY PITCH: Turns out the area where Anthony Rizzo excels is not in hitting but in getting hit. He's never led the league in any positive offensive category but he's led the Majors in HBPs three times. His 201 careers dings are ninth all-time, ahead of Frank Robinson (198), A-Rod (176) and Jeter (170)—not to mention Willie Mays (45), Babe Ruth (43) and Jackie Robinson (72). And teams were trying for Jackie. Second among actives is Starling Marte with 146. What's the all-time record? Hughie Jennings with 287. Rizzo's got a shot.

  • GROUNDED INTO DOUBLE PLAYS: We lost the all-time leader when Albert retired last season (w/426 two-fers) so I guess we'll have to settle for No. 2 all-time, Miggy, with 353. Tail-end of last season, he surpassed the previous champ, Cal Ripken Jr., who ended his career with 350. No. 2 on the active list? Evan Longoria, way down there, with 198. Piker. 

  • DEFENSIVE WAR: Andrelton Simmons is still way out in front with 28.5, 12th all-time, followed by Nolan Arenado (18.8), Kevin Kiermaier (17.7), my man Lorenzo Cain (16.8) and Cain's former teammate Salvador Perez (15.3). Surprises, to me, among the top actives: Nick Ahmed (12.0), 11th; Trevor Story (11.6), 12th; and Martin Maldonado (10.3), 17th. 

  • WAR FOR POSITION PLAYERS: Mike Trout, at 30, is already the 37th greatest player in MLB history by bWAR standards. He's at 82.4, ahead of Rod Carew, Pete Rose, Joe DiMaggio, Brooks Robinson and Johnny Bench. The most interesting guys on the active list, to me, are the ones in the 50s: Paul Goldschmidt, 58.5 (at age 34), Mookie Betts, 56.4 (age 29), Nolan Arenado, 52.2 (31) and Manny Machado, 52.0 (29). Who's a Hall of Famer among those guys? We'll see what the next seasons bring. 

  • WINS: Last season, Justin Verlander, who had 226 career wins and had won exactly one game over the previous two seasons, and was 39 years old, loudly promised to become the 25th man in baseball history to win 300 games. I kind of shrugged but I guess never doubt the man who won the Kate Upton sweepstakes. He promptly went out and led the league with 18 wins. If 300 is still a ways away, he certainly looks positioned to become the first 250-game winner since C.C. Sabathia in 2019. The rest of the actives list goes: Zack Greinke (223), Max Scherzer (201), Clayton Kershaw (197). A lot of high-value Scrabble tiles in those names.

  • ERA: I like looking at the 24 photos at the top of the career Baseball Reference ERA page. It's just a lot of old-timey deadball-era white guys along with Mariano Rivera at No. 13. I think Clayton Kershaw made this wall of fame when he got his career mark down to 2.36 in 2017, good enough for No. 24 all-time, but now it's back up to 2.48—which is still about as rarefied as they come. No full-time starter has finished his career with a sub 2.50 ERA since maybe Walter Johnson. Right on Kershaw's tail is Jacob DeGrom at 2.52. Then it's Chris Sale at 3.03, Max Scherzer at 3.11, Gerrit Cole at 3.23.

  • STRIKEOUTS: For a long time, the 3,000-strikeout club consisted of one man: Walter Johnson. Then Bob Gibson joined in 1974. Then Gaylord Perry and we were off to the races. It's still a fairly exclusive club, just 19 members, with the newbies being Justin Verlander (joined Sept. 2019) and Max Scherzer (joined Sept. 2021). Verlander was our active leader in 2021, Scherzer last year, and now it's Verlander again. Will the exclusive club soon get company? Zack Greinke is 118 just away, Kershaw 193 away.

  • BASES ON BALLS: The list of pitchers with more than 3,000 career strikeouts and fewer than 1,000 careers walks used to be pretty short: just Ferguson Jenkins. This century, Greg Maddux joined him—barely (999 walks). Then Curt Schilling and Pedro Martinez, comfortably (711, 760). A couple of active pitchers have a good shot, too. Both Verlander and Scherzer are north of 3k, and while Verlander is the active leader in walks, it's just 880, while Scherzer is way back there at 701. What to make of all this? Hitters strike out way more and walk way less. For the entire 20th century, the only seasons where the league leader in walks didn't have triple digits were work-stoppage years: 1981 and 1994. Now that doesn't happen. No one's thrown triple digits in BBs since 2012.

  • WHIP: The all-time list has an interesting mix of modern and dead-ball. It goes Addie Joss (.967), Jacob deGrom (.998), Big Ed Walsh (.999), Mariano Rivera (1.00), Clayton Kershaw (1.00), Chris Sale (1.04), John Ward (1.04), Pedro Martinez (1.05), Christy Mathewson (1.06) and Trevor Hoffman (1.06). What's missing? Anyone who pitched between 1918 (the year after Walsh retired) and 1991 (the year before Pedro's debut). A lot of great pitchers in that mix. None of them here. We don't get a midcentury guy until Juan Marichal with a 1.10 mark, good for 24th all-time.

  • COMPLETE GAMES: The last pitcher with 400+ career complete games was Grover Cleveland Alexander (retired: 1930), and the last with 300+ was Gaylord Perry (1983). No one's been above 200 since Nolan Ryan retired in 1993, nor above 150 since Jack Morris retired in 1994. The last 100+ guy was Randy Johnson (2009), and the last 50+ was Roy Halladay. We'll never see that like again. The current leader is Adam Wainwright (28), followed by Justin Verlander (26) and Clayton Kershaw (25). The good news for CG fans is we actually had a league leader with +5 for the first time since 2016: the Marlins' Sandy Alcantara completed twice as many games (6) as his nearest rival (Framber Valdez, 3). 

  • INNINGS PITCHED: Two active pitchers have 3,000+ career—Greinke at 3247 and Verlander at 3163—which is good for 101st and 116th all-time. So it seems this category is similar to complete games, a long-gone relic, but it's not. As recently as Greg Maddux we had a pitcher with north of 5,000 IP, which is good for 13th all-time. That said, I doubt we'll ever see 4,000 IP again. Put it this way: Sandy Alcantara has led or been near the top in IP the last two seasons: an average of 217. If he does that for another 15 seasons, or until he's 42, he'll still be a handful short.

  • HIT BY PITCH: Which active pitcher is among the top 20 career leaders in HBP? How many would guess Charlie Morton, who's done it 156 times, good for 16th on the all-time list. Three more and he passes Nolan Ryan. Four more and he passes Roger Clemens. Six more and he leaves Cy Young in the dust. The all-time top 25 is again fascinating: It's full of 19th century guys, erratic knuckleballers like Tim Wakefield and Charlie Hough, soft tossers like Jamie Moyer who needed to own the inside of the plate, and hurlers with fuck-you attitudes like RJ, Nolan, Drysdale and Bunning. What's also fascinating is who isn't on the active list. Clayton Kershaw has the fourth-most IP among active pitchers but he's 58th in HBP. I guess that's not how he rolls. 

  • SAVES: The top 3 switched caps this offseason. No. 1 Craig Kimbrel (394 saves), who made his mark with the Braves and then imploded with Boston, left the Dodgers for the Phillies, while one-time Dodger mainstay Kenley Jansen (391), who saved 41 games for the Braves last season, signed with Boston. Meanwhile, No. 3 Aroldis Chapman (315), after a bumpy seventh season with the Yankees, is letting his facial hair grow in Kansas City. Despite his youth, Edwin Diaz is sixth on this list with 205 career saves but looks to be out for the season after tearing his patellar tendon during a WBC victory celebration.

  • WAR FOR PITCHERS: Four active pitchers have a bWAR north of 70: Verlander (78.1), Kershaw (73.1), Greinke (71.4), Scherzer (70.7). I assume all are going to the Hall. Are there up-and-comers? Hard to see. Among the under 30s, Aaron Nola (30 in June) has the highest WAR at 29.9, and among the top 100 actives there's no one under age 25. Are we about to enter a hitter's era?

  • EXIT MUSIC (FOR A SLIDESHOW): We're getting a lot of changes this year: pitch timer (good), shift ban (hmm), throw-over limits (maybe), bigger bases (weird). Most are at least geared toward what's missing from the game: hits and steals. They're all designed to make the game go faster (in game time) and play zippier (in action), and I'm all for that. I still think ghost runners in extras is an abomination but I'm willing to see how the rest of it works. But if Trea Turner is hitting .450 in June with 100 steals we might have to recalibrate. See you at the park. I'll be the one wearing a Julio jersey. *FIN*
Posted at 07:58 AM on Thursday March 30, 2023 in category Baseball   |   Permalink  

Wednesday March 29, 2023

When?

NPR has an article on the Nashville school shooting earlier this week, in which former student Audrey Hale, 28, who identifies as male, killed three adults and three 9-year-olds. It's entitled “4 Big Questions about the Nashville School Shooting,” and those big questions are:

  • What was the shooter's motive? (Seemed to be targeting the school but no individual within it)
  • Could police have confiscated the suspect's guns? (Not in Tennessee. Because Tennessee.)
  • Is it a hate crime? (The Josh Hawley trope. The school is Christian, so it's a way of deflecting from the discussion about “access to weaponry.” Which feels like the more important discussion.)
  • Will lawmakers pass gun control measure? (Spare me)

Classically NPR, all of their questions are within the parameters of what the NRA and GOP make permissible. There's no thought outside that.

Which is why they leave out the real question. I call it the Jon Stewart question

Earlier this month, for his Apple TV+ show, “The Problem with Jon Stewart,” he interviewed Oklahoma state senator Nathan Daum, a Second Amendment absolutist, about gun matters. And Stewart went right to the heart of a longstanding NRA/GOP talking point. Whenever a mass shooting occurs, these guys say the problem isn't guns; it's too few guns. More guns were needed to keep us safe. It's the good-guy-with-a-gun thing. Some thinktank asshole thought that BS up, and the GOP's been running with it ever since. 

Stewart addressed it early. He looked at Sen. Daum and said this: 

“You're saying more guns make us more safe. So ... when?”

It's the best argument I've heard on the topic. And the whole 8-9 minute interview is fantastic: reasonable while still being very, very angry. It puts the onus on them, which is where it belongs. It's remind them that we create order out of chaos everywhere else, so why are we're not doing it here. It reminds them that for the most fundamental right in an American democracy, the right to vote, you still have to register. And they don't want that done for owning a killing machine?

That should be the slogan anytime we get a mass shooting. When? Anytime anyone in the NRA or GOP opens their piehole on the topic. When? Everytime more children are killed. When? You say we're getting safer. That doesn't seem to be the case. So ... when?

Posted at 03:11 PM on Wednesday March 29, 2023 in category Politics   |   Permalink  

Friday March 24, 2023

Movie Review: Outside the Law (1930)

WARNING: SPOILERS

It’s 1930, sound has just come in, and you plan to remake a 10-year-old gangster flick featuring an actor who became emblematic of the decade: Lon Chaney. Except Chaney is dying of throat cancer so you need to recast the role. Who do you choose? An actor who would become emblematic of the next decade: Edward G. Robinson. 

I love it when that happens. (Cf., Brando/De Niro as Vito Corleone.)

How else does Tod Browning’s “Outside the Law” (1930) differ from Tod Browning’s “Outside the Law” (1920)?

Instead of a jewel heist it’s a bank heist, and instead of the gangster setting up the thieves out of some bizarre vendetta, Robinson’s gangster, Cobra Collins (shades of “Hairspray”!), just wants his cut. I like that. It’s not personal, it’s business. We also lose Chinatown and Nob Hill and really any sense of place. Don’t like that. But at least there’s no yellowface here. Collins’ mother appears to be Chinese but there's no effort to make Robinson appear half-Chinese. It’s just, “Yeah, good enough.” Or is she not his mother? Maybe she's just a lookout named “Mother”? Either way, the racial embarrassment for this version is the maid across the hall (Louise Beavers), who, after rocking the kid to sleep with a tale of baby Jesus, calls downstairs to get some gin from some partying Black folks—which is why the kid is alone at the crucial hour. 

As for what’s the same? Sadly, the dull, unlikable couple at the center.

Innocence
The movie begins with some scenes that require asterisks today. An actor in a bank window draws a crowd playing a kind of mechanical man pointing out various sales items: “Our Vaults are Burglar Proof!” and the like. Was this a thing back then? In banks? One of the crowd is Cobra Collins, who knowingly, slyly, writes a message on the window: “Hello Fingers.” Initially I thought maybe Fingers (Owen Moore) was on the lam, and now found, but it turns out he’s a yegg—a safecracker. Cobra Collins figures he’s going to rob the bank. Since it’s his town, he wants his cut.

Then we get more odd gawkery: At Cobra’s club, PALACE OF FINE ARTS, the peep shows are done up in homage to great works of art. Basically it’s an excuse to present near-naked women for male perusal—but, you know, classy. There’s a large gilt frame, and a curtain, and a barker with a cane. Love the mix of high and low culture as the barker makes his pitch:

The original painting is valued at 5 million francs and youse slugs are getting the chance to lav it* for 15 cents. Now hold yer breath: Da Carryin’ Away of Psyche.**

* Could not figure out what the verb is. Anyone? Bueller?
** Was Robinson already an art collector? He certainly became one of Hollywood’s more famous ones, so the venue here is interesting.

Connie (Mary Nolan), the woman acting the painting Innocence, turns out to be far from it. She’s partners with Fingers, makes a play for Cobra, but he’s wise. Back at her place, they plot it out. We see Fingers, nattily dressed, and hear her off camera with the sounds of bathtub splashing. But no, it’s not her; she’s just giving the dog a bath. Browning keeps doing this—tricking us with sound. Having fun with the new tech.

Eventually Fingers robs the bank and they lam it—as much from Cobra as the cops. After that, the movie plays out as before. They’re getting on each other’s nerves, he’s going stir crazy, but he occupies himself by playing with the kid across the hallway (Delmar Watson), whom she can’t stand. The gender dynamic that felt oddly unmentioned in 1920 gets called out here. “I can’t figure you out,” he says. “You’re the first dame I met that didn’t like kids.”

We also get dialogue based on the jokes of the day:

Fingers: Say, if I had a wooden whistle that wouldn’t whistle, could I blow it? Ha! Joke.
Connie: [Sarcastic, affected] What a riot you’d be on Broad-way!

Another update is when stir-crazy Fingers decides to go out—risking being spotted—he now returns with a radio. That was less of an option in 1920, but by 1930 it was everywhere.

While he’s away, as in the original, the door turns slowly, she gets out her gun, but it’s just the kid across the hall with a puppy. Then more puppies! The kid almost shoots her, she gets the gun back, yells, the kid cries, and her hard heart softens. Same as before. Plus the battered kite casts the sign of the cross on the floor. Same old.

In a nice touch, the kid’s cop-dad, Capt. Fred O’Reilly, is played by silent film’s original gangster—Rockliffe Fellowes of “Regeneration” (1915). Meanwhile, the one casting through line in Browning’s films is John George playing Humpy, a dwarf sidekick to the Chaney/Robinson gangster. He’s uncredited in the original, credited here, even though the part is much smaller. In the original, he fingers both the girl’s father and the male lead traipsing through town. In the remake, we barely see him.

So how does Cobra figure out their hideout? It just seems like he’s suddenly on their doorstep. (The version I watched wasn’t exactly high res.) Capt. O’Reilly recognizes him, there’s a shootout, and much of the rest of the film is Fingers and Connie trying to save O’Reilly’s life while Cobra tries to get away with the loot. He winds up dying on the landing a floor down, money scattered around his corpse. A lesson for the kids.

More lessons: Despite saving O’Reilly, our leads get 1-5 of hard labor. In the original, everything was forgiven. The moral force there was Confucius; here, it’s the rule of law. Not to mention the Production Code.

See?
This is pre-“Little Caesar” but Robinson's patter already seems a parody of what it’d become. In one scene, he’s called before the cops and sits down with his cigar:

Alright, alright, that’s enough, that’s enough. You fellas better put on a new record. You ain’t got anything on me, see? Now what I came over to tell ya, see, is to tell ya how I feel about it.

It already feels like Billy Crystal’s imitation of him.

I like that Browning never shows us the cops in the above scene. Same as, in the end, not showing faces, just hands. It’s the judge’s gavel and his hands, and our leads wringing theirs. Browning’s artistry is apparent even when the movie isn’t worth much.

This Minneapolis newspaper ad does a lot of heaving lifting for the plot.

Posted at 08:25 AM on Friday March 24, 2023 in category Movie Reviews - 1930s   |   Permalink  

Monday March 20, 2023

Movie Review: The Widow from Chicago (1930)

And a swastika satchel shall save her.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Commissioner Gordon is in the middle of molesting a young dime-a-dance girl when he spots his Nazi-emblazoned leather satchel in the corner of her bedroom and realizes something is up.

OK, so a few misleading parts to that sentence.

Yes, about a half hour into “The Widow from Chicago,” actor Neil Hamilton—who would memorably and comically play Commissioner Gordon in the 1960s TV series “Batman,” and who here plays mobster “Swifty” Dorgan—spots his satchel in the bedroom of dime-a-dance girl Polly Henderson (Alice White). And yes, it does have two prominent swastikas emblazoned on one side. But this was 1930, several years before the Nazis came to power in Germany, and, at the time, the swastika in the U.S. was basically a Native American good-luck symbol. Per the outer rim of these symbols, in fact, we see the satchel came from the “Swastika Hotel,” which was a chain, or at least a name, that really existed. There were many Swastika hotels and lodges throughout the western United States at the time. Other things were named for or emblazoned with swastikas as well: towns, avenues, companies. This began changing in the late 1930s—as this 1938 headline says—for obvious reasons:

The one thing that’s not misleading about my sentence above? “Swifty” Dorgan is about to rape Polly. He backs her into her bedroom saying “Chick-chick-chick-chick, shoo shoo” (super creepy), then grabs her and kisses her against her will. It’s only when he sees the swastikas that he stops. Thank god for swastikas.

Oh, he’s not the villain of the movie, either. He’s its romantic lead.

The charade
Edward G. Robinson, who does play the movie’s villain, Dominic, didn’t think much of “Widow.” A Broadway star of the 1920s, he’d made a few silents and had been courted by MGM’s Irving Thalberg but turned him down. “His eyes showed me that an actor was beneath contempt,” Robinson wrote in his 1973 autobiography. Instead, Robinson signed with Warner Bros., and “The Widow from Chicago” was his first film under that five-year deal. 

It wasn’t exactly he wanted. Edward F. Cline, he said, was nice enough but no real director, star Alice White was “almost entirely without acting ability,” and he was full of doubts about himself. “What the hell did I know about a vice baron with a passion for nightclubs?” he wrote. Since his next picture, “Little Caesar,” made him famous for playing such “vice barons,” I assume that line is tinged with irony. It’s wrong, too. He’s great in this: measured, calculating, in charge. I’d add he was also wrong about Alice White. I don’t know if she could play Ophelia, but she’s great as a big-eyed, tough-talking flapper. Most of the actors in this movie are rather flat. The only ones that pop are White, Robinson, and Frank McHugh playing a comic-relief, Harold Lloyd-ish gangster. He’s so good in a silent film kind of way, it made me wonder if talkies came too early for McHugh. He might’ve been bigger earlier.

The story starts out convoluted and then gets nonsensical.

Two cops investigating Dominic’s gang confront a visiting Chicago gangster, Swifty, on a train, but he bolts over the side and into the river. Since no one in Dominic’s mob has ever seen Swifty, one of the cops, Jimmy Henderson (Harold Goodwin), pretends to be him. He keeps bragging to his sister, Polly (White), and talking himself up in the third person. “Something tells me I’m gonna get a big earful,” he tells her. He does. He’s shot in the street. 

Already, problems:

  1. What do the cops have on Swifty that he’d risk his life rather than simply talk to them?
  2. Does Dominic know he just killed a cop? (He does)
  3. Do the NYPD? They seem pretty blasé about losing one of their own. (Until the 11th hour)

Anyway, that’s why Polly goes undercover as Swifty’s wife, the titular widow from Chicago. But on the same day Dominic hires her as a dime-a-dance girl, guess who shows up? Swifty. Oops.

Except at this point she’s the known commodity—no one’s ever seen him—so in a way Dominic uses her to I.D. him, and Swifty plays it cool until he figures out what her game is. Back at her place, she says she’s just taking Dominic for a ride, which is when we get the “chick, chick, chick” scene; but after he sees his satchel (which he calls his “grip”), she comes clean. He wants to come clean, too—to Dominic—but doesn’t. Why? “It’s a lucky thing for you that you ran across a good guy like me before you stubbed your toe,” he says. Right. Near rape notwithstanding.

Suddenly, for no reason, she’s holding all the cards. He wants her to scram but she figures Dominic will need to see them together so they’ll need to maintain the charade. Not by living together, of course. She tells him to get a room someplace, and then use the back staircase to take her to breakfast every morning. After listening to her orders, he says, “This is just like being married.” Badda-bum.

Much of the subsequent tension is about the charade. Does Dominic suspect? Is he onto them? Meanwhile, Swifty goes undercover as a waiter at the nightclub of rival mobster Chris Johnson (Lee Shumway)—which is surely the blandest name of any Hollywood gangster ever. Dominic plans a midnight heist/hit on Johnson, but Johnson is warned away by Jimmy Henderson’s old partner, Finnegan, (John Elliott), who then puts a gun on Swifty. Polly to the rescue. She kills her brother’s old partner, and everybody lams it. Then she dismisses Swifty as a small-timer. Now Dominic makes a play for her but she’s wondering if he isn’t small time, too. It's all a ruse, of course, to get him to brag about the people he’s killed—including Jimmy—since the phone is off the hook and the cops are listening on the other end. When they descend (with Finnegan, very much alive, that was part of the plan, too), Dominic douses the lights in the joint, they search for him via spotlight, and when they finally spot him he grabs Polly—who for no reason is rushing through the nightclub. Then Swifty to the rescue.

Bozo with indigestion
Dominic is oddly jaunty in his farewell:

Oh, handsome. Don’t forget to invite me to the wedding. You better make it soon, I might not be here very long. [Salutes] Up the river!

That last part just means going to prison—as in “They sent him up the river”—but I’ve never heard it as a stand-alone salutation before.

I don’t know if playing Dominic helped Robinson land “Rico” Bandello—I’m sure it didn’t hurt—but the movie’s a mess. Apparently there were musical numbers, most likely in the nightclub, that were cut for the American release, because pre-“42nd Street” Warners decided Americans didn’t like musicals much. Those scenes are still extant in the European version. I saw the U.S. version, trimmed to a tidy 64 minutes.

But that’s not why the movie is a mess. It often doesn’t make sense from line to line. At one point Swifty is trying to get into Polly’s apartment, she discovers her door is unlocked, he tells her, “Well, think over what I told ya,” which is him basically saying “Bye!” and her response is: “Not tonight, Romeo. Go on.” Right, he was already going on. She does the same later with Dominic.

Dominic: You just bumped a cop, didn’t ya? Ever hear of a thing called an alibi? Well you better have one. Hmm. We all better have one.
Polly: You better get one yourself. Somebody might want to know where you were around midnight.

That’s what he just said. Was Alice White adlibbing nonsensically or was it just a shitty script by Earl Baldwin? In the same talk with Dominic, she also implies that she’s leaving New York and “heading for the big town…” Not sure what the big town is if New York isn't it.

At the same time, we do get good dialogue. The scene where Dominic constructs his alibi with the nightclub bartender is Michael Mann-ish in its economy:

Dominic: Hey, Benny, what time ya got?
Bartender: Twenty minutes after twelve.
Dominic: A little fast, aren’t ya?
Bartender: [Pause] You been here all evening, Mr. Dominic. 

I also like this early back-and-forth as Dominic’s right-hand man Mullins (Brooks Benedict) is trying to get close to Polly, while Polly wonders over Dominic:

Polly: Who’s the little bozo with indigestion?
Mullins: Sssh. Not so loud.
Polly: What’s the matter—do ya know him?
Mullins: Yes. And he’s got a very bad temper.
Polly: [Laughs] Who wouldn’t have with a face like that?

A second later, we get an early movie reference. She says Dominic “looks like the heavy in ‘Way Down East,’” a famous D.W. Griffith film from 1920. Initially I was wondering if it wasn't supposed to be self-referential—“East is West,” Robinson’s previous film, in which, yes, he plays the heavy. Probably not. Both were different studios and “Way Down East” was much more successful.

James Cagney often talked up the comic chops of his friend Frank McHugh, and I’ve usually been like “Sure, whatever,” but, as mentioned, they really shine through here. A favorite moment is when the cops are running that spotlight through the darkened nightclub and land on Slug sitting alone at a table. He looks around, more embarrassed than caught, eyes blinking, hands fidgeting, and Keaton-like, puts on his bowler hat and exits. I laughed out loud.

And I love me some Alice White. Shame her career was truncated.

Posted at 09:09 AM on Monday March 20, 2023 in category Movie Reviews - 1930s   |   Permalink  

Saturday March 18, 2023

'Duke Snider, Besides Being an Actor...'

I think I came across this particular IMDb absurdity when I was doing research for my review of the Willie Mays doc a few months back. Mays was one of several baseball stars—usually Dodgers or Giants—who made appearances on family-friendly sitcoms in the 1950s and 1960s, and, on IMDb, I was checking exactly who was on what.

I was first struck by this bio:

So IMDb thinks Duke Snider was an actor? Known for that one episode of “The Rifleman”?

But of course not. IMDb doesn't think. The above is just a template IMDb/Amazon uses for lesser bios since apparently it's too cheap to hire anyone to write or police any of this. The template goes:

  • [Name] was born on [date] in [place].
  • He [is/was] an actor, known for [top 3 known fors].
  • He is/was married to [wife/former wife].
  • If applicable: He died [date] in [place].

That's how IMDb does the bios for Don Drysdale and Willie Mays, too. It's not how they do the bios for other sports stars like Joe Namath (“The son of a steel worker from...”) or Jim Brown (“Often mentioned as the greatest player in NFL history...”), but then both men actually starred in movies. They didn't just make a guest appearance on “The Donna Reed Show.”

Wait, I just checked a couple more. It's also not how they do the bios for Reggie Jackson (“Reggie Jackson is a baseball Hall of Famer nicknamed 'Mr. October'...”) or Ken Griffey Jr.  (“Ken Griffey Jr. is considered by many experts to be the best player in baseball...”). And why is Junior's in the present tense, as if he were still playing? As if it were written in 1998 and no one's bothered to update it in IMDb's Amazon era? 

Sigh.

Anyway, that's not the part I wanted to bitch about. This is. It's in Duke Snider's trivia section:

Besides being an actor, Duke Snider somehow played baseball, too? Wow. And apparently at a pretty high level!

Seriously, no one's minding the store. 

Posted at 12:02 PM on Saturday March 18, 2023 in category Baseball   |   Permalink  

Thursday March 16, 2023

Check, Please

For years Twitter had a blue checkmark system to verify “name” accounts. Basically it was Twitter telling us that this famous person—Barack Obama, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Meryl Streep—is who they say they are. It's not some parody account or scammer. They're verified. That's why they have a blue checkmark next to their name. 

When Elon Musk took over Twitter, he decided this vertification system smacked of elitism rather than common sense and announced that he was charging for the service. His original offer of $20 per month was lowered (during a hilarious real-time Twitter exchange with Stephen King) to $8 a month, but here's the thing: Anybody could buy itAnybody could be verified. Anybody. Elon's Twitter did zero due diligence on the accounts, just took the money and ran. The checkmark verified nothing. That wasn't the reason I left Twitter but it was happening around the time I left Twitter.

Today, at work, I got the message below from Twitter about our work account.

You've turned off two-factor authentication for [account]
This means you'll no longer have this added protection when you log in to Twitter. Your account will be more vulnerable to compromise. You can turn on two-factor authentication any time in the Account > Security section of your Twitter settings.

I forwarded the message to our social media liasion, who informed me that it relates to the blue checkmark. Now, if you don't pay for the checkmark, you lose this extra layer of security that Twitter's own team put in place (pre-Elon) to protect us all from hackers.

What an absolute shithead this guy is. What a turd. First, he makes the verification system useless while simultaneously charging for it. Then, when not enough people jump, he says if you don't pay for my now-useless verification system we'll make your account “more vulnerable to compromise.” It's penny-ante extortion is what it is. The dude is just begging to be regulated. I hope it happens soon. I hope it leads more people to jump—off the platform. Permanently.

For what it's worth, you can find me on these platforms:

I'm a little bored with both, to be honest, since not enough people I know are on them. It feels like I arrived too early to a party and I'm just standing there with a drink wondering what the fuck. But at least I don't have to deal with the whims of that little turd anymore.

Posted at 06:59 PM on Thursday March 16, 2023 in category Technology   |   Permalink  

Wednesday March 15, 2023

Movie Review: Chicago (1927)

WARNING: SPOILERS

To the obvious question: How does it differ from the musical?

For one, Velma Kelly (Julia Faye) is barely in it—maybe five minutes. She calls Roxie “Peroxide” and the two get into a catfight until the female jailkeeper finally pulls them apart with a good line: “This is a decent jail—you can’t act here the way you do at home!” And that’s pretty much it for Velma. No second act. No “All That Jazz” or “Nowadays.” 

Meanwhile, Amos Hart (Victor Varconi), Mr. Cellophane, might have a bigger part than Roxie herself. He’s the film’s sad-eyed moral authority.

But I’d say the biggest difference is this: We never really root for Roxie Hart (Phyllis Haver). She’s just too awful.

Last year’s hat
Why? Why do we root for Roxie in the longrunning Broadway musical, and in the 2002 best picture winner, but not here? 

“Chicago” is based on a real incident—the murder of Harry Kalstedt by Beulah Annan in 1924. They were lovers, he was leaving her, so Beulah shot him in the back and then listened to a phonograph record, “Hula Lou,” for several hours before phoning her hapless husband, Albert, and crying burglar/rape. With the help of a high-priced lawyer, paid for by Amos, and a yellow press touting her as the most beautiful murderess in America, she was acquitted. Immediately afterwards, she dumped Amos and married another guy. A few years later, age 28, she died of tuberculosis.

In 1926, Maurine Dallas Watkins, who covered the trial for The Chicago Tribune, turned the story into a play, “Chicago,” and Beulah became Roxie Hart. Much of Watkins' drama played out as in life. She got away with it, she wasn’t sorry, justice didn’t prevail. 

This 1927 silent film toes that line except she’s made to pay a little.

It opens on the Harts’ bedroom with its separate beds. I’m curious if this was a Production Code thing—fairly toothless in the 1920s—or a comment on their hapless marriage. Either way, Amos rises, looks lovingly at Roxie, then notices the underwear and high heels strewn on the floor. He gives a loving “Oh, you” look before picking things up. In the kitchen, he sees all the dirty dishes in the sink, shakes his head (it’s less “Oh, you” now), but still rolls up his sleeves. Then he serves Roxie breakfast in bed before going off to work.

Roxie can't stand him.

In real life, the man was a mechanic; here he runs a tobacco shop. One customer, an Al Capone-looking mug named Rodney Casley (the gravel-voiced Eugene Pallette, our future Friar Tuck), says he’s going to give his girl “the air”—i.e., dump her—and hey, he just happens to have the same kind of garter-with-a-bell-attached that Roxie wears. Does Casley know he’s talking to the man he’s cuckolding? I didn’t get that sense. It’s just happenstance. Either way, Casley visits Roxie, they fight over her spendthrift ways, he’s about to leave her, blam blam. And the player piano plays on.

When she calls Amos home, he recognizes his former customer, and, despite her line about a burglar/would-be rapist, begins to suspect her of both infidelity and murder. At the same time, he’s still willing to take the fall. When the law comes, he says he did it. Except the DA is suspicious, gets them in separate rooms, and he tells Roxie her husband pinned the blame on her. She runs into the next room and berates him: “You swore you’d stick!” A second later, she realizes she’s been had. “You couldn’t even trust the man who loves you,” sad-faced Amos tells her.

How scared is Roxie at this point? Not as scared as Renee Zellwegger would be in 2002. Mostly, she's just excited seeing her name in headlines.

Amos: Do you realize that you just killed a man? Are you even sorry?
Roxie: You’re just sore ‘cause I’m getting all the publicity!

Much of the middle of the movie is taken up by Billy Flynn (Robert Edeson): How to get him, how to pay for him, his efforts to keep Roxie in line. He has a good early line when she tries to bullshit him: “I’m not your husband—I’m your lawyer!” But he costs 5,000 smackers. In advance. So Amos: 1) empties his savings; 2) takes a loan on his life insurance; 3) pawns his valuables. That’s $2,500. Flynn refuses it. “Installments?” he says. “You must think you’re buying a Ford!” So Amos turns to crime. He smears grease on his face and robs ... Billy Flynn. 

At trial, Flynn dresses up Roxie as an innocent and keeps reminding her to droop. Amos kills it on the stand:

DA: [brandishing negligee] Do you consider this proper attire for a married woman receiving a man visitor?
Amos: [after long pause] I consider as proof that his call was unexpected and unwelcome!

The jury takes four hours to acquit her. She’s free … and famous! Ah, but then the comeuppance. Almost immediately “Two-Gun Rosie” starts shooting up a different courtroom and all the attention goes to her. When Roxie complains, a reporter tells her, “Sister, you’re yesterday’s news and that’s deader than last year’s hat!”

Life sure moved fast 100 years ago.

Karma
Oh right, the subplot.

Two mugs show up looking for the money Amos stole from Flynn and accidentally knock over the potted plant where the rest of it—$2,500—has been stashed. But a nice maid, Katie (Virginia Bradford), to whom Amos had shown kindness, finds it and hides it. When they try to shake down Amos, wondering where his Ingersoll watch is—though what this proves I don’t know—she comes to the rescue, pretending her Ingersoll (which she got with coupons he provided) is his. And the men leave scratching their heads.

So there’s karma in this version. Amos’ good deed with the maid saves him. And Roxie’s wicked ways with everyone doom her. She winds up in the rain, where the headlines about her—the thing she cares most about in the world—are literally washed away into a storm drain. 

I’d like to read the original play someday. The mass-media age was just beginning, but fame was already this huge lure, and there were plenty of moths. The play nails that—that fear that you don’t exist unless you exist in the public sphere. You could almost draw a straight line between Roxie and the various influencers and Kardashians today. 

Anyway, to the question I asked at the top: Why do we root for Roxie in the musical but not here?

It’s partly when the stories were crafted. In the musical, created in aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate, you’re either on the make (Roxie, etc.) or being made (Amos), and who wouldn’t rather be the former? It was the age of antiheroes. Life’s a great gag, baby, get everything out of it you can. Plus the deck is already stacked against women. Men? They had it coming. I think that’s part of it. 

There’s also proximity to the original awful crime. The further away we are from it, the more we can fictionalize it, the less it matters.

But I think the biggest reason may be this: The 1975 musical and 2002 film were written by men (Bob Fosse and Fred Ebb; Bill Condon), while the 1926 play and the 1927 movie were written by women (Watkins; Lenore J. Coffee). And women know how awful women can be. Why, given a chance, they could be almost as bad as men.

Posted at 12:51 PM on Wednesday March 15, 2023 in category Movie Reviews - Silent   |   Permalink  

Tuesday March 14, 2023

Be Like Spielberg

Over the weekend, in “Hollywood: An Oral History,” I read the following about Steven Spielberg:

KATHLEEN KENNEDY: Steven has this ability to bring about an idea and then really open it up for discussion. It doesn't matter who's involved in the process. If they have a good idea, he's going to listen to it and he's going to add on it. When people are in an environment, a creative environment like that, and they realize that that isn't closed off to them, then I think people begin to get very creative and they begin to get very alive in terms of ideas. And he's very good at creating an atmosphere like that, and I think, consequently, it shows in his films.

That should be taught in Management 101 classes. It's the answer to so much. A moment later, we get this recollection from Spielberg's longtime collaborator:

JOHN WILLIAMS: I met Steven Spielberg at Universal Studios when he was a very young man. I think he was about, maybe, twenty-three years old, twenty-four years old. One of the executives there, Jennings Lang, said, “I want you to meet a young director who has a film called Sugarland Express. Would you like to have lunch with him?” I'd never heard of Steven Spielberg. Okay, so Mr. Lang's office arranged a lunch at a very fancy restaurant in Beverly Hills, and I was five minutes or so late to the restaurant. And I went over to the table, and here was this kid, he looked like he was seventeen years old. He stood up, and he said, “I'm Steven Spielberg.” And I felt like an elder, more or less immediately. “Oh!” And he was dressed like a very young person might. And the wine list came over. He looked at it, and I could see—I don't think he'd ever held a wine list in his hand before. And we had lunch and spoke about his film. I had no idea what he had done before, some television, I think. But I discovered five minutes into the conversation that this young gentleman knew as much or more than I did about film music. He started singing the themes of films that I'd written, subthemes, you know, that I'd forgotten about, and everything of Max Steiner or anyone else you wanna pick. He was really quite a scholar, an erudite, almost, in this area. Much more than I. And I loved that about him, of course, instantly. And we could sit and dish about film music, ones that I'd played for, the ones I liked, didn't like: “Well, why didn't you like it?” “Why do you like this?” An insatiable capacity to learn. A glistening intellect, obviously, in the first meeting with this kid.

What's the lesson? Learn as much as you can. Learn so much that when you meet a master he's impressed by how much you know. Hell, in some ways you know more than he does about his own stuff. And then keep going. Don't stop. Keep asking questions. You don't know enough. There's always more.

Posted at 08:27 AM on Tuesday March 14, 2023 in category Books   |   Permalink  

Monday March 13, 2023

‘Everything Everywhere’ Wins Every Oscar Everywhere

Hollywood loves a comeback story. Here's four of them.

Several people asked us if we were hosting an Oscar party this year, and … Well, even if we were leaning in that direction, there was that Movie Night we hosted mid-January—six people arrived, five got COVID—and that leaned us in the other direction. And then Patricia got sick anyway. (She’s negative thus far; probably one of those “cold” things we keep hearing about.) So it was just the two of us and Jellybean. Plus a lot of texting.

It was fun, actually. I thought the show was great. Jimmy Kimmel did a great job, the Will Smith aftermath was dealt with handily and with humor, it was emotional and fun and you had big names singing: Lady Gaga, Rihanna, David Byrne. A lot of underdogs triumphed—particularly Brendan Fraser and Ke Huy Quan—and the whole thing didn’t feel overlong. My sister’s childhood friend Bill “Billy” Kramer is the new CEO of the Academy, and I’m not saying it went smoothly because of Billy, but it totally went smoothly because of Billy.

The post-Oscar coverage has been a little spotty, though. I don’t think enough has been written about how huge this win was for “Everything Everywhere All at Once.”

This is what it won:

  • Picture
  • Director
  • Screenplay
  • Actress
  • Supporting Actress
  • Supporting Actor
  • Editing

How many movies in the history of Hollywood have won Oscars for all of the above? None.

You could remove Editing, Screenplay and Director, and it would still be none. Only two other films have ever won three of the four acting awards—“A Streetcar Named Desire” and “Network,” and neither of those won picture or director. “Streetcar” and Elia Kazan lost out to “An American in Paris” and George Stevens (“A Place in the Sun”), while “Network” and Sidney Lumet lost out to “Rocky” and John G. Avildsen (“Rocky”). Those earlier films only won four Oscars total: plus art direction/set direction for “Streetcar” and plus original screenplay for “Network.” 

So this is unprecedented for “Everything Everywhere.” It’s not a Big Five win—picture, director, actor, actress, screenplay—which has just gone to “It Happened One Night,” “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and “Silence of the Lambs," but it may be deeper.

And does Brooks Barnes mention any of this in The New York Times? Of course not. He leads with the shift to “New Hollywood” in the late 1960s and how maybe we’re in the “New New Hollywood” era, which … I don’t get why exactly. What is that based on? Then he adds one of the oddest asides in the history of the paper of record:

The Daniels, the young filmmaking duo behind the racially diverse “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” won Oscars for their original screenplay and directing. (The Daniels is an oh-so-cool sobriquet for Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert. They are both 35.) 

As an editor, I would’ve struck “an oh-so-cool” and replaced it with “the.” Either say what you really mean in an Op-Ed or give us the news, Brooks. Stop hiding behind parentheses.

Sadly, there’s also been controversy about some of the names/faces that weren’t mentioned in the In Memoriam section, but I have to say—again—I thought that segment was handled well. John Travolta gave an emotional intro—for Olivia Newton-John, but one imagines he was also thinking of his wife Kelly Preston, who died in 2020—and the song Lenny Kravitz sang, “Calling All Angels” (his, not Jane Siberry’s), was quiet and powerful. Yes, some names were left off. And yes, I would’ve included Paul Sorvino, Tom Sizemore and Anne Heche. I would’ve given fewer seconds to Kravitz and more to the dead. But maybe that says something about my age. The telecast included a QR code/link for a more extensive list, and I checked it out, and holy shit, the names. And the faces. So many faces I instantly recognized that were not mentioned in the broadcast. Here. None of these people were mentioned:

  • Taurean Blacque, the coolest dude with the coolest name from “Hill Street Blues”
  • Robert Clary, who survived Nazi death camps to participate in a comedy about Nazi concentration camps
  • Charlbi Dean, the shockingly beautiful model/actress from the Oscar-nominated “Triangle of Sadness”
  • Melinda Dillon, the most put-upon comedic wife/mother in one of the best Christmas movies ever
  • Bert Fields, one of the biggest entertainment lawyers ever
  • Clarence Gilyard, Jr., who played the annoying computer-nerd terrorist in “Die Hard” (“Oh my God, the quarterback is TOAST!”)
  • Gilbert Gottfried
  • Clu Gulager
  • Philip Fucking Baker Hall
  • Estelle Harris, George’s mom
  • Mike Hodges
  • Bo Hopkins
  • L.Q. Jones
  • Burt Metcalfe, “M*A*S*H”
  • Robert Morse
  • James Olson, the put-up father in “Ragtime”
  • Henry Silva
  • Tony “Paulie Walnuts” Sirico
  • Stella Stevens
  • Larry Storch
  • Joe Turkel, the bartender in “The Shining”
  • Fred Fucking Ward
  • David Fucking Warner
  • Cindy Fucking Williams

I mean, these are the people they left off who meant something to me. And I don’t even work in the industry.

So I think we should all take a deep breath. In the end, the sadness is not how many people were left off but how many people have left us.

FURTHER READING:

Posted at 07:39 PM on Monday March 13, 2023 in category Movies - The Oscars   |   Permalink  

Saturday March 11, 2023

Bud Grant (1927-2023)

Is there a more Minnesota moment than 88-year-old Bud Grant trotting out for the coin toss in the 2016 playoff game between the Seattle Seahawks and the Minnesota Vikings? It was Jan. 10, outdoors in Minneapolis, so the gametime temperature was -6 degrees. And Bud was out there wearing a short-sleeved shirt.

Again: It was minus six degrees.

Bud Grant's 1970s Minnesota Vikings were famous for not showing off. They didn’t spike the ball, didn’t touchdown dance, and their coach on the sidelines never betrayed an emotion. But an octogenarian trotting out in a golf shirt for the third-coldest playoff game in NFL history? Yeah, that’s how Minnesotans show off. It’s not “Hold my beer,” it’s “Hold my jacket.”

As a kid, I thought Bud Grant was ancient, but, like Sparky Anderson, he was simply prematurely gray. He was in his early 40s when I began watching the team in 1971. Everything about him was steel: His hair, his eyes, his demeanor. Although according to the obits, he didn’t coach that way. He was not a martinet. He didn’t yell, he didn’t get into faces, he didn’t show players up. If he had thoughts to give it was mano-a-mano rather than a dressing down in front of the entire team. He believed in guiding but not dictating. He let the players find their path.

“We loved to play for Bud because he knew when to work us hard, but let us have fun at the same time,” Paul Krause told The New York Times in 1990.

This is an odd transition because it’s about a martinet. When I was a kid I remember reading a story about a baseball player for the New York Giants who was told by manager John McGraw to bunt but the guy saw a pitch he liked and swung away—and hit a game-winning homerun. His reward? Fined $50 for not following orders. Fran Tarkenton tells a similar story about Bud Grant here: Charlie West catching a punt on the 4-yard line—a no-no—and going 95 yards for a touchdown and the game. While the place is going crazy, Bud Grant quietly let him know: “Charlie, if you ever do that again, you’ll never play another down for the Minnesota Vikings.” What I like about that? There was no fine. And it wasn’t because West disobeyed a command. It was because he did something fundamentally unsound. And Bud told him so quietly.

He was a bit like Clint Eastwood, wasn’t he? Not just the stoic stare but the way he coached. Let’s be professional, let’s have fun, let’s be done by 5 PM.

He was also a helluva athlete. He played two seasons of professional basketball (Mpls. Lakers), two seasons of professional football (Philadelphia Eages), then something like 10 season of professional football in Canada, before coaching there, and then being coaxed back to the States to coach a moribund NFL franchise in Minnesota. Three years later, they were in the Super Bowl. They went to the Super Bowl three more times on his watch.

Yeah, yeah, I know: 0-4. It’s in the subhed of the Times obit: “…although he lost each time.” Classy, NYT.

He also played baseball. My father says that Bud once said he made more money playing town ball around Minnesota than he did for those two seasons with the Lakers.

Bud retired from coaching in ’83, came back for the ’85 season, finished with a 158-96-5 record. He was elected to the Canadian Football Hall of Fame in 1983 and the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1994.

Seriously, who was more Minnesotan? When he wasn’t hanging out in shirtsleeves in -6 weather, he was sitting in a duck blind in the snow, or out on a lake, fishing. Godspeed. Raise a glass. Skol.

Posted at 05:30 PM on Saturday March 11, 2023 in category Sports   |   Permalink  

Friday March 10, 2023

The New Timer, the Absence of the Clock, and a Great Pirates Comeback

As soon as I heard about the concept of a “pitch clock” I was against it. Baseball doesn't do clocks. Baseball doesn't do time. Didn't Roger Angell say that? But better?

He did:

“Since baseball time is measured only in outs, all you have to do is succeed utterly; keep hitting, keep the rally alive, and you have defeated time. You remain forever young.”

He also said this:

“Baseball's clock ticks inwardly and silently, and a man absorbed in a ball game is caught in a slow, green place of removal and concentration and in a tension that is screwed up slowly and ever more tightly with each pitcher's windup and with the almost imperceptible forward lean and little half-step with which the fielders accompany each pitch. Whatever the pace of the particular baseball game we are watching, whatever its outcome, it holds us in its own continuum and mercifully releases us from our own.”

That's beautiful. And now the current lords of Baseball are messing with that beauty. They want to make sure batters step into the box within a certain number of seconds (or get an automatic strike) and pitchers pitch within a certain number of seconds (or get an automatic ball). They tried it out in the minors and this year they're trying it out in the Majors. They're ruining the game!

That's what I thought.

And then I read Joe Posnanski's piece, “Baseball and Time,” in which he was very much in favor of the pitch-clock change. And he won me over. I'm looking forward to the change now.

No. 1, it's increasingly kinda necessary. In my lifetime, games have gotten longer and longer, and players aren't going to police themselves—they'll take what they can get—and so they have to be policed. Apparently spring training games are a half-hour quicker this season: 2.5 hours vs. 3 hours. That's about what it was when I was a kid.

As for Roger Angell's great quote about baseball and time? Poz says it still applies:

But there's a bigger reason I believe both in a pitch clock in baseball and no clock in baseball — it's because I think we're talking about two entirely different things. I don't think the concepts clash at all.

See, by “no clock in baseball,” what I'm really thinking about is not time between pitches. It's all about how outs, not minutes, are the currency of time in the game. That's the magic. ...

If anyone tried to mess with that part of baseball, sure, I'd roar angrily. Three outs in an inning ... nine innings in a game ... this is the most elegant way ever created to time a sport in my view. There is no clock limiting your possibilities. You could be down six runs with two outs in the ninth inning and nobody on base, the way Pittsburgh was against Houston in 2001. If this were an NFL game or NBA game or NHL game or soccer game, there would have been no hope.

But baseball has no clock. And there was hope. And the Pirates came back and won. I'll have more on that game as we get closer to a certain book I've written.

Point is, there's still no clock in baseball. There's now a timer to make sure that guys don't just stand around and halt the forward momentum of the game. But you're still alive until the last out is recorded.

I like that distinction. Here's that Pirates game, btw, when they defeated time and remained forever young. 

You know the fun thing about that game? Besides the obvious? After Pat Meares' HR makes it 8-4, the color announcer—is it Bob Walk?—says, “A lot of hoopin' and hollerin', but the horse is already out of the barn.” I probably would've thought the same. No chance for a comeback. But when they do come back, when Brian Giles goes deep to win it, the same color announcer offers a really nice, really smooth mea culpa. “Seven runs in the bottom of the 9th inning, he hits a grand slam homerun off possibly the best closer in baseball ... That is just phenomenal. Well, they went out and found that horse, put a rope around his neck, and let him back in the barn.”

Opening Day is March 30.

Posted at 02:06 PM on Friday March 10, 2023 in category Baseball   |   Permalink  

Thursday March 09, 2023

A Tale of Two Headlines: NYT

Here are two headlines from The New York Times. This was the lead story on their website when I woke up:

Raising taxes, wow. On you and me? Well, not really. That's the bit the headline leaves out. The proposed taxes would mostly fall on billionaires and corporate stock buybacks. The closest it gets to you and me is including earners north of $400k. But that's still a ways from me. Hope you're doing better.

Here's the second headline. It's one of the big stories making the rounds this week:

They shared a quandry, Gracie? What was that quandry? The subhed gets right into what the headline soft-pedals: “Fox hosts and executives privately mocked the former president's election fraud claims, even as the network amplified them in a frantic effort to appease viewers.” Yeah, that's a quandry all right. You push a narrative you privately think is nuts and dangerous because it's good for business; then that narrative helps lead to the gravest, most violent threat to the transition of power and American democracy in my lifetime. A “quandry.”

What do these headlines have in common? Both benefit Republicans. They push Republican narratives. The real story about Biden is beneficial to Biden. The real story about Fox is detrimental to Fox.

You can't help but wonder who's writing the headlines for the Times and what their marching orders are. I get the feeling there's a quandry there.

UPDATE: An hour later, the Times changed its Biden headline to “Biden's $6.8 Trillion Budget Doubles Down on the Power of Government.” But records showing Fox pushed a dangerous narrative it didn't believe in that resulted in Jan. 6? That's still a quandry.

Posted at 08:45 AM on Thursday March 09, 2023 in category Media   |   Permalink  

Wednesday March 08, 2023

Movie Review: All My Sons (1948)

WARNING: SPOILERS

Let me give you the synopsis of an Arthur Miller play: A businessman with two sons and a doting wife has a terrible secret, and when one of his sons finds out their relationship is ruined. The family seems happy but is actually haunted—it’s dealing with ghosts—ghosts that went overseas. For a time, the father sustains himself with lies. But in the end, forced to confront his failures, he kills himself.

And the play isn’t “Death of a Salesman." 

It was wild seeing “All My Sons” as the closing movie at SIFF’s 2023 “Noir City” Film Festival. One, it’s not close to being a noir, and two, it touches on many of the themes and plot points of “Salesman.” The ghost that haunts the family isn’t Ben, the older brother who walked out of the jungle a rich man at age 21, but Larry, the son who went overseas to fight the war and never returned. And the father’s secret isn’t an affair with a floozy; it’s shipping defective airplane parts that cause the death of 21 American pilots during World War II.

Directed by Elia Kazan, “All My Sons” debuted on Broadway in January 1947, ran for a year, and won Tonys for best author and best direction, as well as the New York Critics Circle prize for best play of the 1946-47 season.

Then it came to Hollywood.

Some baggage
The movie isn’t bad, but …

  • Burt Lancaster as Edward G. Robinson’s son? I guess the wife did a lot of heavy DNA lifting there.
  • Howard Duff as the moral authority? Enjoy it while you can, Howard.
  • Louisa Horton as the girl you yearn for even though she reminds everyone of family tragedies? I guess?

Universal tapped Chester Erskine to adapt and Irving Reis to direct. Erskine was also producer so he had a say, but neither seems the A team.

The relationships here are interconnected enough to feel incestuous. Chris Keller (Lancaster) is courting Ann Deever (Horton), who used to be his brother Larry’s girl, and whose father is the business partner Chris’ father, Joe (Robinson), betrayed. Yeah, that’s some baggage with which to start a relationship. Worse, Chris’ mother, Kate (Mady Christians), keeps calling her “Larry’s girl” because she can’t abide any suggestion Larry won’t return—to the point where she seems a bit nuts. Meanwhile, Ann’s brother George (Duff) has just visited their father, Herbert (Frank Conroy), in prison, realizes how Chris’ father betrayed him, and arrives to take Ann away.

I like how even George has a secret—he has a thing for a married neighbor, Lydia Luby (Elisabeth Fraser), who’s on her third child. I also like how he shows up angry, ready to take Ann away, until he’s mothered into a good mood by Kate. (Kate, oddly, is at her best with George.) But he loses the good mood at dinner, when Joe begins bragging about how he’s never been sick a day in his life—even though a sick day was his excuse for why Herbert, and Herbert alone, was responsible for shipping the defective parts.

The second half of the movie is Chris realizing his father is in fact guilty. Eleventh hour, Ann brings out a letter Larry wrote the morning he left for his final mission. He says he was so distraught by his father’s actions that he planned to commit suicide by crashing his plane off the coast of China. All of which makes Joe kinda-sorta wake up and realize he shouldn’t have shipped the defective parts—that those boys overseas were all his sons. He says this as he goes upstairs. And then blam.

The movie ends with Kate shooing Chis and Ann out the door and desperately urging them to live … LIVE! I don’t know if that was an attempt at a happy ending but it comes across as the opposite.

Observing people
Here’s what I don’t get. Why would Joe would ship defective airplane parts overseas when his son was a pilot overseas? He didn’t need to see every G.I. as his son, he just needed to connect the obvious dots. “Joe, what if your son winds up flying one of our defective planes?” “You’re right, Herb. Don’t know what I was thinking.”

Apparently all of this is based on a true incident. From 1941 to 1943, officials at an aeronautical plant in Ohio “conspired with civilian advisers and Army inspection officers to approve substandard or defective aircraft engines for military use.” Miller’s mother-in-law pointed out the story to him.

Interesting that the two big Warner Bros. gangsters, Robinson and James Cagney, both starred in film adaptations of award-winning plays in 1948. Cagney’s was the self-produced “The Time of Your Life” by William Saroyan, which won the Pulitzer in 1940, and in which Cagney plays “Joseph T. (who observes people).” Neither is great nor well-remembered. Cagney’s nearly sent him into bankruptcy.

This movie did make me think Robinson would’ve made a great Willy Loman. He’s what Miller envisioned the character to be: short, Jewish, charming, a perennial outsider.

Posted at 06:02 PM on Wednesday March 08, 2023 in category Movie Reviews - 1940s   |   Permalink  

Tuesday March 07, 2023

Tucker Carlson Hates Donald Trump Passionately

Via The Washington Post:

Days before the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, Fox's Tucker Carlson texted producer Alex Pfeiffer about how badly he wanted to stop covering President Donald Trump and how he had come to loathe the president.

“We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights,” Carlson texted Jan. 4, 2021. “I truly can't wait.”

“I hate him passionately,” Carlson added.

MAGA nation, please reconcile this discrepancy amongst yourselves—if you can. And if you can't, please sell tickets.

Posted at 07:19 PM on Tuesday March 07, 2023 in category Media   |   Permalink  

Tuesday March 07, 2023

.350 Hitters By Decade

A few weeks ago, in his Pitchers and Catchers report, Joe Posnanski lamented the dearth of 140-RBI seasons by counting out their number per decade since the 1920s, and ending with this:

2011-present: ZERO.

Yeah, that's right: zero. The most RBIs in a season was Miguel Cabrera's 139 in 2012, followed by Chris Davis' 138 in 2013. I love that Chris Davis and Khris Davis have two of the top RBI seasons of the last decade. But the point is that the big RBI seasons have mostly gone away. This is surely because fewer and fewer hitters are getting on base, batting averages have gone way down, Mike Trout and some of the other great hitters in the game can't stay healthy for a full season. But it's a little bit sad. I'm not a fan of using RBIs to judge a player's production, but I admit to getting a little thrill when I see a player with a BIG RBI total.

As with me and hitting .350. So I thought I'd do the same. To be honest, I thought I'd already done it, in the post “It's 2018: Do You Know Where Your .350 Hitters Are?” but I'd just counted up dearths, not decades. So here they are by decades:

  • 1900-09: 25, led by Nap Lajoie's .426 in 1901
  • 1910-19: 30, led by Ty Cobb's .420 in 1911
  • 1920-29: 95!!!!!, led by Rogers Hornsby's .423 in 1924
  • 1930-39: 50, led by Bill Terry's .401 in 1930
  • 1940-49: 16, led by Ted Williams' .406 in 1941
  • 1950-59: 8, led by Ted Williams' .388 in 1957
  • 1960-69: 3, led by Norm Cash's .361 in 1961
  • 1970-79: 8, led by Rod Carew's .388 in 1977
  • 1980-89: 13, led by George Brett's .390 in 1980
  • 1990-99: 18, led by Tony Gwynn's .394 in 1994
  • 2000-09: 17, led by three players with .372
  • 2010-19: 1, Josh Hamilton, .359 in 2010
  • 2020-22: 2*, led by D.J. LeMahieu's .364 in 2020

First, how cool is it that Ted Williams had the highest batting average of the 1940s and 1950s? And it wasn't like it was 1949 an 1951. It was 1941 and 1957—a 16-year gap!

Second is that asterisked “2” for the 2020-22 years. Both occurred during the pandemic-shortened year when MLB teams played, at most, 61 games rather than 162. So do we count those? Not really. If you go by a full season, which is kinda what I do, no one's done it since Josh Hamilton in 2010.

But I'm thinking the new rules—particularly the banning of the shift—could swing the pendulum back again. Fingers crossed.

Posted at 03:39 PM on Tuesday March 07, 2023 in category Baseball   |   Permalink  

Monday March 06, 2023

At 2023 CPAC, Bannon Trumps Trump

At least via this article from John Hendrickson in The Atlantic. I remember when I didn't even know CPAC existed. Fun times.

Hendrickson says Trump's two-hour, rambling and complaining speech gave off a “1 a.m. at the party” vibe rather than anything  vibrant and angry, and he wondered if this wasn't “the last gasp of CPAC.” In the next sentence, he finally unburied his lede—or at least the most interesting fact about the event: Fox News wasn't there. It wasn't a sponsor. Instead, the thing was sponsored and attended by the grabbag of kooks and grifters that hope to fill Fox's void if Fox ever leaves a void: Newsmax, The Epoch Times, Right Side Broadcasting Network, America First, One America News, Lindell TV, blah blah blah.

According to Trump, the 2020 election was still stolen, the state is still deep, the U.S. is becoming a “crime-ridden, filthy communist nightmare,” and we put up illegal immigrants at the Waldorf Astoria. “My wonderful travel ban is gone,” he lamented at one point. That made me smile, remembering the horror of it. And remember how he always said he was the only one who could fix a seemingly unsolvable problem even though he couldn't solve 2+2? He's latest unsolvable only he can solve is Russia-Ukraine. One assumes by backing Russia:

“I stand here today, and I'm the only candidate who can make this promise: I will prevent—and very easily—World War III.” (Wild applause.) “And you're gonna have World War III, by the way.” (Confused applause.)

It was Bannon who attacked the true enemy:

Late Friday afternoon, he marched onto the stage in all black, three pens clipped to his shirt, and attacked Fox News for its alleged “soft ban” of Trump. He referred to the Murdoch family as “a bunch of foreigners” and said, “Note to Fox senior management: When Donald J. Trump talks, it's newsworthy.” He fired up the crowd: “We're not looking for unity. We're looking for victory!” He pounded his hand on the lectern, summing up the theme of the weekend: “MAGA! MAGA! MAGA!”

That's dipshit American for “Tora! Tora! Tora!” 

Posted at 08:42 AM on Monday March 06, 2023 in category Politics   |   Permalink  

Monday March 06, 2023

Dreaming of Clearing My Name in Esperanto

I am accused of something and there's a lot of innuendo in the accusation. I'm at a bar that's long and low-slung, with a lot of old, distressed wood—floor, walls, tables, benches. I pick up a magazine, and on the cover the accusations continue. In one subhed, an ex of mine apparently had defended me and the subhed is accusing her, or us, of collusion or something, some kind of plot, and it's so far afield as to be laughable, but if you don't know us you might believe it.

Then the accuser is actually there, talking into a microphone, regaling the crowd with more accusations, including studies he'd done, like of our toothbrushes, and why, for six of the seven, was the result this and yet only mine was the toothbrush with the plastic cover? Finally I got so fed up that I brandished my toothbrush, which still had toothpaste on it, and yelled, “HERE! Take it! Do your fucking study!” and the guy grabbed it greedily and did his test. And how long would the results be? Almost immediate? I was wondering if it had been smart to allow this to happen. The results were coming in, but in some obscure language like Esperanto. You had to go to a certain website and plug in the results in that language, and what you got back was an image, a gif, which was a metaphor for the result. A guy next to me at the bar was doing this on his phone. There was a race to be the first to do it, as if it was breaking news. The image I saw on his phone was of a dark blue bird with wings flapping, and he said that was a good sign and I was in the clear. Later, in the bar's backroom, my accuser appeared, apologetic, with a plate of cookies, sugar cookies with frosting, and he was as insistent in his apology as he'd been in his accusation. He kept hovering. I said nothing. I looked at him but revealed nothing. I took the plate of cookies but left them on the bar. 

There was a sporting event I was trying to drive my car into, and there were two lanes on the grass, taking turns, and eventually it was my turn. I thought I was taking a short cut like that other cooler, car before me had done, but it led to a dead end, areas too narrow to get through—all of this on the sidelines of a football-ish game—and at one point, unable to go forward, I simply picked up the car and moved it to the path where it should be and kept driving. I was driving onto the field. The car was a purple convertible with Minnesota Vikings logos, and, crap, I was actually driving on the field in the middle of the game. At the far end of the field, which is where I was driving, there were eight or nine athletes lined up, like in a swim meet, but it was for a kickoff. They were returning a kickoff and I was in the way. But then it was made better. A fair catch or something? The kick went out of the end zone? The play had stopped. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time but hadn't affected the outcome. Then there was a kind of Native American ceremony hovering above the far sidelines and in the air above me, three warriors with tomahawks all lit up, and I wanted it to go away. It was highlighting the fact that me and my purple Vikings convertible were in the wrong place at the wrong time. 

Posted at 05:12 AM on Monday March 06, 2023 in category Culture   |   Permalink  

Saturday March 04, 2023

Movie Review: Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022)

WARNING: SPOILERS

Here’s a good way to make sure a movie won’t last: put “Forever” in its title.

Sure, some of them aren’t bad:

  • “Diamonds are Forever” (1971), with Connery returning to the James Bond role
  • “Dragons Forever” (1987), a reteaming of Jackie Chan, Samo Hong and Yuen Biao

But most don’t exactly last forever. They’re romance movies you’ve never heard of and franchises on their last sad legs: 

  • “Forever Young” (1992), with Mel Gibson and Jamie Lee Curtis
  • “Waiting for Forever” (2010), with Rachel Bilson and Tom Sturridge
  • “Batman Forever” (1995), the one with Val Kilmer
  • “Shrek Forever After” (2010), the fourth and final feature
  • “Jackass Forever" (2022)

Add this one to the pile.

A moment of silence
Yes, the decks were stacked against “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.” It lost its young star, Chadwick Boseman, shockingly and tragically, to colon cancer in 2020, and his absence is felt throughout the film. After the cold open, in which his character, T’Challa, the Black Panther, succumbs offscreen to an undisclosed illness despite the heroic efforts of his braniac sister, Shuri (Letitia Wright), we get a grace note: The Marvel logos all feature Boseman and there’s nothing on the soundtrack. A moment of silence. That’s nice. 

And then, sadly, the movie begins.

I guess at the end of the last movie in 2018, T’Challa revealed that Wakanda was an all-powerful nation and the only source of vibranium in the world; and though in the interim we had, you know, the Blip, where Thanos extinguished half the lives in the known universe, western countries still fear a Black planet more than a big purple dude. At the U.N., both the U.S. and France bitch to Wakanda’s new ruler, Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett), about not getting any of the promised vibranium. Elsewhere, they (or just France?) try to steal it but are beaten back by Wakanda’s baldheaded female security force.

Ah, but using a “vibranium detector,” the U.S. finds some on the bottom of the ocean. Take that! Except, whoops, there’s also an undersea kingdom there, ruled by the 500-year old Prince Namor (Tenoch Huerta), whose superpowered people attack and kill the helpless Americans. 

When I collected comics in the 1970s, Namor was also called the Sub-Mariner, and I remember him being angry, imperious, and forever kidnapping Sue Storm of the Fantastic Four. Here, he’s calm and seemingly reasonable—emphasis on seemingly. Bypassing Wakanda’s security, for example, he delivers an ultimatum to Ramonda and Shuri: Do what I say or I’ll destroy your kingdom.

And the thing he wants them to do? Find and kill the scientist who created the “vibranium detector” so both of their kingdoms will be safe again. Right. It should’ve led to a conversation like this:

Shuri: Um, you do know there’ll be notes, right? Spreadsheets? I’m sure the inventor had conversations with colleagues. How do you kill all that?
Ramonda: You can’t stop knowledge.
Shuri: Besides, doesn’t the U.S. military already know where your kingdom is? It’s the place where you attacked them.
Ramonda: You’ll be killing someone to prevent them from doing a job they’ve already done.

The scientist turns out to be a 19-year-old Black female university student named Riri (Dominique Thorne), and, hoping to head off Namor, Shuri and security chief Okoye (Danai Gurira) visit her to bring her back to Wakanda. Riri loves Wakanda, is amazed that they’re there, but still fights to not go. But then the FBI come, blah blah, and Namor’s warrior forces attack them on a bridge (it’s always a bridge), and Shuri and Riri are taken to Namor’s undersea kingdom, Talokan, where we finally get their backstory. Seems way back when, they were all part of the Mayan civilization, but Europeans came with their death and disease, and a cure-all for both was vibranium. Side effects? Their skin turned blue and they could only live underwater. Namor, born shortly afterwards, was different: superstrong, with wings on his feet, and able to live in both worlds.

Vibranium always seems to find historically downtrodden people but never in a way that helps the whole. Other Africans are still enslaved, the Mayan civilization is still destroyed. It’s just the chosen few that sail along. What an odd dynamic. It’s like writer-director Ryan Coogler and his screenplay partner Joe Robert Cole want to uplift people, but in doing so they just create some really weird continuity issues.

In the end, Namor, et al., attack Wakanda and Queen Ramonda is killed. Then Shuri, after spending the movie saying there would be no more Black Panthers, becomes the Black Panther, and they take the battle to the Talokans. They dry up Namor to weaken him, and after defeating him, and despite the murder of her mother, Shuri/BP shows him mercy. Which totally makes sense. She’s BP, he’s IP. 

Oh right. Subplots. The love interest I’d already forgotten about from the first movie, Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o), is hanging in Haiti these days. Why didn’t she make it back for T’Challa’s funeral? Because she and T’Challa had a child and I guess he didn’t want anyone to know. The boy’s name is Touissant, but his Wakandan name—revealed during the midcredits sequence with all the immensity of the “Rosebud” revelation—is …. wait for it … T’Challa! 

OK. … And? 

So much of the movie is this way. They want us to care about shit that … why? Who cares? The movie is overlong and bloated and we still get to know nobody. I’m beginning to wonder if Marvel thinks representation is enough—that you don’t have to make people of color interesting, that it’s enough that they’re people of color. 

I guess I cared for Okoye—and didn’t like the way she was dismissed by Ramonda. I like M’Baku, all bluster and fun, but didn’t like that Namor took him out with one punch. Julia Louis-Dreyfus shows up as Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, and you kind of wonder when they’re going to get around to her story—or if she’s just going to be like Viola Davis in the dipshit DC Universe: the evil bureaucrat behind the scenes who gets a few lines and nothing else. What a waste. We do find out that she’s the ex of Everett Ross (Martin Freeman), the anodyne CIA agent and FOW (Friend of Wakanda). Right. She would’ve eaten him alive.

A bomb
Allow me a final rant.

Ross is the one who gives up the Riri intel to the Wakandans, and later, when Valentina calls him on it, this is his excuse:

The Wakandans saved my life! They’re a good people!

That’s a little me me for a CIA agent to be giving out state secrets, but sure, why not. Except they have him add this:

You ever thought for a second what they could be doing? Ever thought what we would be doing if the U.S. was the only country in the world with vibranium?

The implication is the U.S. would do awful, awful things. Because we’re an awful, awful people.

Sigh.

First, for centuries, Wakanda only cared about itself. They let the slave trade continue apace rather than give up their Edenic life.

More, the U.S. was the only country with vibranium … except it was called the atomic bomb. And what did we do with it? Sure, dropped it on two cities in Japan to end the war. And you can argue that Nagasaki was unnecessary and I wouldn’t disagree. But after that? What else did we do when only we had that power? Didn’t we work to resurrect the economies of our enemies, creating democracies that still thrive, while staving off Soviet aggression? I mean, I’m hardly the rah-rah America type, but I don’t think that’s nothing. Say what you want about Wakanda but it’s still a kingdom. They’ve had family rule for centuries. How is that good? How is that advanced?

Seriously, I’m surprised there wasn’t more pushback on that line.

Posted at 06:50 AM on Saturday March 04, 2023 in category Movie Reviews - 2022   |   Permalink  

Wednesday March 01, 2023

Posnanski's Cool Thing/Mea Culpa

Here's a cool thing Joe Posnanski is doing. He's got a book out in September, “Why We Love Baseball: A History in 50 Moments,” which, yes, I'm already there. The cool thing is that while it's available from the usual online locales, if you buy it through his favorite local bookstore in Kansas City, Rainy Day Books, he'll not only sign the book for you but inscribe whatever you want:

I will write “Derek Jeter is awesome.” I will write “I agree with Mike Schur on hot fruit.” I will write, “I learned everything I know about baseball from Steve” — assuming your name is Steve.

For those not in the know: 1) He hates Derek Jeter, or just finds him massively overrated (but also underrated at times—no MVPs); 2) He likes hot fruit, as in pies, though his podcast partner is agin with a vengeance; and 3) He knows a lot about baseball. Apparently Poz made this offer with his previous book, too, “The Baseball 100,” and the lesson he learned there is to put a character limit on the inscription: no more than 150 characters. “We had to do it,” he writes; “some of the inscriptions for The Baseball 100 were Russian novels.”

So it's fun + a good cause. So of course I preordered my copy via Rainy Day Books. And this is the inscription I requested:

How Harmon Killebrew went from #67 on my first top 100 list to not making the cut at all I'll never know. What was I thinking?

Nice mea culpa. I'm glad he finally came around on the matter.

Posted at 01:13 PM on Wednesday March 01, 2023 in category Baseball   |   Permalink  

Wednesday March 01, 2023

Lid-Tard

“I know it violates the sensibilities of the innocent and tender-minded, but in the real world you sometimes have to employ extreme and extralegal methods to preserve the very system whose laws you're violating.”

-- G. Gordon Liddy, in a Playboy magazine interview years ago, vis a vis his discussion with other operatives on how to assassinate journalist Jack Anderson. It's detailed in Mark Feldstein's recent article, “The Nixon White House plotted to assassinate a journalist 50 years ago,” in The Washington Post. I know a lot about Nixon, and Watergate, but I never knew this story. Seems insane, and Liddy seems more sociopath than I realized. Feldstein quotes the above after writing, “Liddy offered to stab Anderson to death and make it look like a routine robbery by stealing Anderson's watch and wallet.” Apparently a few days after Howard Hunt briefed Charles Colson on the matter, the hit was canceled, or at least put on pause, so they could bug Democratic Headquarters at the Watergate Hotel. It's possible that Frank Wills not only helped expose the underbelly of the Nixon administration, he might've saved Jack Anderson's life, too.

Posted at 09:13 AM on Wednesday March 01, 2023 in category Politics   |   Permalink