I saw it on the New York Times site first. Something about the Yankees? And it was good? A pitcher ... oh, crap! No! Who did he do it against? Of course. Had to be. Uccckhh.

I always liked that King Felix was the last MLB pitcher to throw a perfect game—way back in August 2012, when the world was young—but now that the world is old and haggard that honor belongs to the Yankees' Domingo German. He did it last night, against the hapless A's, before a tiny crowd in Oakland. He's the 24th pitcher to ever throw a perfect game—or 22nd if you ignore the 19th century, which I do. It's also the fourth time the Yankees have been involved in a perfect game, and, shocker, they're 4-0. In the win column, no other team is close. Isn't that sad? Even in this narrow category of ballyhoo, where, say, both Cleveland and Philadelphia are good, the Yankees still dominate everybody. Can't we have one nice thing ever? 

Here are the standings:

Last night the Yanks won 11-0, and apparently that's a record for most runs in a perfecto. This one will probably set another record, too, but we'll have to wait until October to find out. Right now, the worst team that's been on the losing end of one of these, at least in terms of season-long winning percentage, is the 1964 NY Mets, victims of Jim Bunning, who went 53-109 (.327). Second worst is the 2012 Astros, blanked by Matt Cain, who went 55-107 (.339), followed by the '81 Blue Jays, who lost to Len Barker and went 37-69 (.349) in that strike-shortened season.

The 2023 Oakland A's are currently 21-62 (.253). They're on pace to shatter the mark.

Joe Posnanski wasn't happy with the result, either.

And here ya are. And it's a beautiful day.

In the bottom of the second, with one out, a man on first, and the M's down 3-0, Mariners catcher Tom Murphy hit a dunker into right field for a single. A second later the non-Diamond Vision screen let us know it was his 200th career hit. I applauded softly and then realized, “Wait, that's a season for some guys. How long has he been playing anyway?”

Since 2015, it turns out. But he's mostly backup, and often injured, and 200 is 200. Plus we had a rally going now. Go M's!

Until we didn't.

Murphy had himself a day anyway: 3-3, all singles, using all fields. And he never made it past second. He was: 1) stranded at first, 2) stranded at second, 3) eliminated at second. But then it wasn't exactly Murderers' Row hitting behind him. Our No. 7 hitter was A.J. Pollock, a DH hitting .158(!), who went 0-3 with two strikeouts. Behind him was Dylan Moore, a backup left fielder hitting .050(!!), who went 0-3 with one strikeout. No. 9 hitter Jose Caballero (.238) must've thought, “How am I hitting behind these guys?”

It was a beautiful day at the ballpark and not a good day at the ballpark. I arrived late, or at least on time, but then waited a while in a slow-moving line to get inside. By the time I did, the M's and Logan Gilbert were down 3-0: single, single, double, single. Then Logan found his game again. Julio hit one to the wall in the first, and we had that first-and-third situation with one out in the second, and we nearly tied it in the fifth when J.P. sent one to the warning track in center with two on and two out, but that was the best we managed against Washington Nationals starter Patrick Corbin, who went 7 innings, struck out 9, walked nobody, and gave up zero runs. The last time Corbin went seven or more and gave up no runs? Pre-pandemic. August 2019. Welcome to Seattle, kid.

We got our one run with a leadoff homer from Caballero in the 8th. That was off new pitcher Amos Willingham. And by new I mean new. He'd just been called up, and Jose was the first batter he'd ever faced in the Majors. Two batters later, Julio sent another one to the warning track, but Jose's was the only hit the kid gave up. Good for him. Welcome to the Majors, kid.

But it's getting dispiriting again. The M's began poorly last year but made their move by now. No move is being made this year. We're just floundering. We struggle to .500, then slip below the surface again.

My next scheduled game is the All-Star Game on July 11 and I can't fathom who our All-Star will be. We don't really have one. Last time the ASG was in Seattle was that year we won 116 games and we had, like, seven All-Stars. This year? No regular player is hitting above .275, or slugging above .450, or getting on base at a .350 clip. We're second in the Majors in strikeouts, 15th in walks, 15th in homeruns. Seriously, I don't know who I'd pick. Jered Kelenick for his hot start? Teoscar Hernandez for his hot June? Julio for being Julio? I guess I'd go Luis Castillo, who, sure, is 5-6, but with a 2.86 ERA, a 1.06 WHIP and a 108-28 strikeout-walk ratio. Oh, poor Luis! I just realized: Last year it looked like we'd saved him from MLB pergatory with the hapless Cincinnati Reds, and now the Reds are young and hot, and the M's are not and not.

In the ninth, down 4-1, manager Scott Servais' one move was to pinch-hit for our 3-for-3 guy, Tom Murphy, with two out and nobody on. He didn't let him have his day. Or he didn't let Cal Raleigh have his day off. I don't get it, to be honest. Raleigh K'ed on four pitches. It's an ending that makes sense anyway, even if it doesn't make any sense. 

WARNING: SPOILERS

“Past Lives” is not a movie for passive men. Or maybe it’s exactly the movie for passive men.

It centers around the Korean concept of in yun, or how relationships in past lives affect this life. If you’re walking on the street and brush sleeves with someone, perhaps you knew each other in another life; and if you’re lovers, it's assumed you knew each other over many lives. That’s how Nora (Greta Lee) describes it to Arthur (John Magaro), a fellow writer she meets at an artist’s colony in New York. When he asks if she believes all that, she says no, it’s just something Koreans say to seduce one another. And then she sits there, very upright and very still, until he realizes, oh, that’s a kind of invitation. And he bridges the gap between them to kiss her. They wind up married. That happens less than halfway through the film.

At the end of the film, our two main protagonists, Nora and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), are walking in silence on the streets of Brooklyn before his Uber arrives to take him to the airport and back to Seoul and out of her life again. It recalls the scene when they were 12, when her family was suddenly leaving for Canada and they walked up the hills of Seoul for the last time in silence. Now, as they wait for his Uber, they talk about in yun again, and what it means in their relationship. They stare at each other and smile, and she’s very upright and very still, and she waits, and waits, and their bodies sway a little … and then his Uber arrives and he turns to put his suitcase in the backseat. As he does this, he misses how distraught she looks. 

There is talk in the film about how, for Hae Sung, Nora is the woman who leaves, while for Arthur she’s the woman who stays. It’s sad, but it’s just the way things are. It’s fate.

But Arthur also makes a move and Hae Sung doesn’t. Arthur bridges the gap. Kids: Learn to bridge the gap.

Already apart
Writer-director Celine Song gives us Nora and Hae Sung’s relationship in three stages:

• Age 12, when they’re best friends
• Age 24, when they reconnect via Facebook
• Age 36, when they meet in New York

In any romance, it’s the writer’s job to keep the lovers apart for two hours—we want anticipation, not closure—and Song’s answers to this age-old dilemma are unique. Phase one is easy. They’re just kids and her parents decide to move away. End of story. 

And that would’ve been the end of the story at almost any time before, say, the mid-90s. They grow up, she does her thing in Canada/America, he does his in Korea, they never see each other again. Maybe they think about each other occasionally, as she does here: What was the name of that boy I had a crazy crush on? By now it’s 2010 or 2011, she’s living in New York, and she and mom are having fun looking up old friends online. So she googles Hae Sung and discovers he's been asking about her on Facebook. And that’s how they reconnect—via IMs and Skype and FaceTime. And they revel in each other’s faces.

Nora is ambitious and hard-edged most of the time, but around Hae Sung she softens. She does that Asian girl quirk of saying “Hmm” a lot—sometimes in thought, sometimes in agreement with others, sometimes in agreement with herself. She’s almost tingly around him, while he gets happy and bashful. All of which answers the writer’s dilemma. What keeps the lovers apart? They’re already apart.

Yes, but what keeps them apart? New York-to-Seoul is 15 hours. They could take the next step. So why don’t they? Now it gets murky. I would argue they don’t trust it enough. I would argue they’re both on their own path, being pushed along by their own currents, and each allows themselves to be pushed—she to a writers colony, he to China to study Mandarin. Maybe she sees he’s not a NYC guy, too, and that’s what she wants, because that’s the life she wants. So she says let’s take a break from this for a few months, and in that time she meets Arthur. And this never returns. And 12 years go by. And now it’s now.

Why does he visit her now? I never really got that, either, but he finally takes the 15-hour trip to NYC (he bridges that gap), and they meet in Central Park, and it’s so, so charming. “Wah,” she says, a Korean version of “Whoa.” Then he says it. And they keep saying it as they look at each other. After all this time, they can’t believe this other person, this missing piece of themselves, is here. It's just lovely. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a movie where I felt that two people belonged together more than these two.

So what keeps the lovers apart at the end?

I think it’s still the currents. She’s married, Arthur is nice (despite the video games), and she wants a writing life. But it’s also the gap that Hae Sung doesn’t bridge as they wait for the Uber. Or maybe he doesn’t bridge it because he suspects all of the aforementioned, and to close the gap, to give in to their love, would make her miserable in a different way. And he senses that and leaves her alone. And leaves. 

I was a little disappointed in them, actually. They seemed so in love. Not everybody gets this. Don’t blow it. But that’s exactly what they do. They don't make enough of an effort. Is that why the film doesn’t quite resonate for me? Why it isn’t quite a tragedy? It’s a quiet, emotional film, but it doesn't sink in. It doesn’t bridge the gap.

There all the time
Or maybe you have to believe in reincarnation to make it work. His last line to her is: “See you then.” He’s talking about the next life. Not a bad line. I also liked something he says to her earlier:

If you had never left Seoul, would I still have looked for you? 

I think he means: Do we fall in love if someone is there all the time? Or does love require absence? The absence doesn’t have to be physical, it could be the mere sense that the other is not all there, that they’re not fully committed. I’ve thought about this in my own life—that what we think of as love is just an incompleteness, a yearning, and if the other person is there all the time, well, fuck, what do I do with that? You want me? What the fuck is the matter with you?

When we first see Nora and Hae Sung as children, they’re walking home through the narrow streets of Seoul (it looks like Bukchon Hanok Village, which my wife and I visited last month), and she’s crying because he got a higher exam score. Usually she gets the high score, and she’s so competitive that she’s not even talking to him. Which he doesn’t think is fair. It was his one time being first—she should be happy for him. We later learn that she cries a lot, and we later learn that he often consoles her, and when they’re adults, after he leaves in the Uber, she walks back to her brownstone where Arthur sits patiently waiting on the steps outside to see if his wife will return. She does, of course, but then she breaks down in his arms. She cries for this other man. And Arthur consoles her. The torch has been passed.

WARNING: SPOILERS

I actually kind of liked this. At least I liked it more than most critics, whose reviews were tabulated by Rotten Tomatoes into a 49% rating. Normally it goes the other way. Normally I’m like, “Really? That high, huh?” But I thought this was breezy and fun.

I guess it helps that I came in with low expectations.

C.C. Beck’s source material is ridiculous: “Holy Moly” and “Big Red Cheese” and “Talky Tawny,” and dopey villains like Mister Mind, a super-intelligent worm that the movies keep teeing up in those mid-credit sequences but have wisely stayed away from (thus far). Basically the original Captain Marvel was created for kids for whom Superman was too complex. And yet these David F. Sandberg-directed movies make it work. Billy Batson (Asher Angel) is a kid who turns into a manly superhero (Zachary Levi) with a magic word (“Shazam!”). Every other incarnation portrayed the superhero as a man—a rather dull man—but here they wisely make him a kid inside a man’s body. It’s Superman crossed with “Big.” 

I also like the sense of place we got here. The Shazamily has six members, but I’d say the city of Philadelphia is a close seventh. When the kids screw up, they’re known as the Philly Phiascos. When the baddies create chaos by planting a golden apple in our realm, it’s planted at Citizens Bank Park, home of the NL champion Philadelphia Phillies. 

Kind of a bummer when I found out they never actually filmed in Philadelphia. Georgia. Tax breaks. So it goes.

The mightiest of mortal beings
Before the plot kicks in, we get the usual small emotional conflicts. Billy is worried about “aging out” of his foster home, and maybe as a result he’s over-managing the group. Mary (Grace Caroline Currey) wants to go off to college, while the entire group is not exactly getting kudos from the city. The Benjamin Franklin Bridge weakens and its supports snap, and the Shazamily shows up and rescues everybody, but can’t save the bridge. Rather than talk infrastructure, etc., the news media blames the superheroes. Everyone is J. Jonah Jameson now.

Meanwhile, Freddy (Jack Dylan Grazer) is being bullied at school. Is that still a thing? Jocks mocking the other-abled? Then a new, impossibly pretty girl named Anthea shows up (Rachel Zegler, Maria from “West Side Story”), and Freddy, no fool, stands up for her. She’s grateful, and maybe interested, but, oops, she’s with the bad guys, the Daughters of Atlas, who don’t like what the Wizard has done with Daddyo’s powers. (Atlas is that first “A” in Shazam!) So why is she hanging at Freddy’s high school? Because of that mid-credits scene in the first film, when Shazam and Superman buoy up Freddy in the lunchroom. Since Freddy apparently knows Shazam, she’s going to use him to find Shazam. Instead, he shows up as his own alter ego, Captain Marvel Jr., and they steal his powers with a thunderstick-y thing. They’re taking all the powers back, not just Daddyo’s.

I call him Captain Marvel Jr. above but the movie doesn’t call him that. It’s a running gag with a meta, intellectual property wink. The team is called the Phiascos in part because they’re unnamed; and they’re unnamed in part because Marvel owns the copyright to “Captain Marvel,” even though their Captain Marvel came way, way later*; so in this movie, everyone keeps suggesting different names for our heroes. Freddy wants to call himself “Captain Everypower,” one guy suggests “High Voltage” and I think “Captain Thunder”—the original Captain Marvel’s original name—is even tossed out. Eventually the Wizard (Djimon Hounsou) tells him his real superhero name: “Shazam.” Sure.

* It’s a bit ironic that DC owns the copyright to the original Captain Marvel but not to the name, since they’re the ones that sued Fawcett Comics for Superman infringement—and won—allowing Marvel to eventually swoop in and grab the name. Live by IP, die by IP.

Oh, during the battle, one guy does use the original name, and I’m ashamed to say I missed who it was. Shazam has just been zapped, the citizenry cheer him on, and one guy shouts, “You’re the best, Captain Marvel!” His dopey red shirt with yellow collar/cuffs should’ve been the giveaway. It’s Michael Gray, who played Billy Batson in the live-action, Saturday-morning “Shazam!” TV series in the mid-1970s. I watched it all the time. Highways and byways of the land, baby! It’s a nice cameo. The original 1940s Billy Batson, Frank Coghlan Jr., guested on Michael's show in 1974, so this is a nice pass-the-torch moment. We'll see if they do it again in 2072.

The other Daughters of Atlas are Hespera (Helen Mirren) and Kalypso (Lucy Liu), and they’re hardly of one mind. Lucy Liu wants serious vengies, Maria from “West Side Story” keeps empathizing with the humans (and Freddy), while the Grand Dame is stuck in the middle. When she gets too stuck, Lucy Liu simply eliminates her, then removes Anthea’s powers. She also puts a dome over Philly—I forget why—and unleashes “Jason and the Argonauts”-type monsters on the citizenry.

By this point, everyone in the Shazamily has lost their powers except for Billy. So what do the others do?

To be honest, they haven’t had much to do in the first place. I’m sure it’s tough for the filmmakers: six characters with super alter egos, each played by a different actor (except for Mary), so how do you make sure everyone gets proper face time? It’s mostly the Zach and Jack show. Even Asher Angel as Billy, the nominal star of the first, gets short shrift here. Pedro (Jovan Armand) comes out as gay, which … is that still a thing? Having to come out? It feels like we're this close from it not being anything. I forget what Eugene’s bit is, but Darla (Faithe Herman) likes animals. She has a kitty cat named Tawny—a shout-out to the Talking Tiger—and during the battle they are told that the one mythic beast that can take on the others is a unicorn. And she loves unicorns. (She's a little girl.) Except, wait, these aren’t good unicorns. They hate everybody. So what might tame them?

Get ready for the most blatant product-placement in movie history. Faced with a charging unicorn, cutie-pie Darla stands there with a confident smile, and at the last moment tosses into the air … Skittles! This stops the unicorn cold. It sniffs the air, then begins eating them off the ground while Darla whispers the product’s slogan: Taste the rainbow.

That’s pretty awful. I mean, whatever the Reese’s Pieces slogan was, E.T. never said it. At the same time, unicorns and rainbows cracked me up. It’s the 10-year-old girl dream combo.

Or 70 years past the life of the author
I know the movie doesn’t sound like much, and it isn’t, but it has moments. Example: At the Rock of Eternity, the kids get a sentient feather pen named Steve, and they use it to send a letter to the Daughters of Atlas. Hespera reads the letter aloud, straight-faced, vaguely confused and impeccably Helen Mirren:

Dear Daughters of Atlas. Violence is not the answer. Oh, great first sentence. Thanks, Darla. We’d like to make a trade. We’ll give up our powers if you give us Freddy. Add “unharmed” or they’re gonna monkey’s paw you. Smart, Eugene. Steve, add “unharmed.” Then, like, “Yours tru…” No. “Sincerely.” “Best.” Maybe just “Signed, The Champions.” Should we proofread it? Nah, Steve doesn’t make mistakes, just writes what you say. Great, I feel good about this. Me, too. Anyone else want a Gatorade? Do we have red?

In the end, Shazam sacrifices himself to defeat Lucy Liu. But at his gravesite, his crush and ours, Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot), shows up, and, as a god herself, reactivates the thunderstick, restoring various powers and, yes, bringing Shazam back to life. It’s an OK scene, and always nice to see Gal, but I was hoping they’d just let him lie. Learn the Leo’s-face-disappearing-into-the-void lesson of “Titanic.” But he’s IP. IP lives forever. Or at least 100 years.

The second Billy cheering on the third, copyright laws be damned.

This is from Sherwood Schwartz' book “Inside Gilligan's Island” (don't judge):

In 1970 there was an important survey of the buying habits of TV viewers by an authoritative advertising publication. This survey revealed a tremendous difference in the buying power of urban viewers versus viewers in rural areas. Consumers in large metropolitan cities spent twice what their country cousins did, and were far more important for sponsors, and, therefore, to the networks who served them. As a result of that survey, Bob Wood, Programming Chief at C.B.S., cancelled all the rural situation comedies on his network, four of which were in the top twenty in the Nielsen ratings. The inside joke in the industry that year was that Bob Wood had “cancelled every show with a tree in it.”

I assume he's talking “Mayberry R.F.D.” and “Hee Haw,” among others. But yes, this is what helped lead to the diverse, urban, Norman Lear-style sitcom that dominated from 1971-74. Then we got our fantasy jiggle shows in the mid-70s. And by the end of the decade we'd come full circle, with “Dallas” and “The Dukes of Hazzard,” both on CBS, leading the way. And then we got Reagan.

I knew about the rural purge, just didn't know the rationale behind it.

Who knew this divide, rural/urban, country mouse/city mouse, would wind up being the great continuing battle of my American lifetime? And ongoing. Tune in next week for more exciting episodes.

“A lot of times, the industry tells itself what happens on its opening weekend is what a movie is about. It's not just about that opening weekend. It's about 30 years from now. Movies have a chance to change us forever.”

-- Kevin Costsner, “100 Years of Warner Bros.,” on HBO Max, as scenes from “Blade Runner” play (ironically, given what WB did to the original release). I don't know about “Blade Runner” but fuck yeah to this quote. A thousand times this quote. And not just for movie but for everything. Look past this moment, this quarter, and at the big picture. The big picture that includes all of us. 

Here's some of the attempts:

• Trump, Fox's Bret Baier spar over former president's 2020 election claims --The Hill
• Trump went on Fox News to defend himself. It didn't go well. --Vox
• Trump All But Confesses to Mishandling Classified Docs on Fox News --Rolling Stone
• Trump reacts angrily as Fox News anchor directly tells him he lost the 2020 election --The Independent
• 'I was very busy.' Trump gives new reason he didn't hand over classified documents --USA Today

This is what The New York Times, our paper of record, went with:

You lead with the lie?

On the plus side, they get rather quickly to what the record currently states:

The July 2021 meeting — at Mr. Trump's golf club in Bedminster, N.J. — was recorded by at least two people in attendance, and a transcript describes the former president pointing to a pile of papers and then saying of Gen. Mark A. Milley, whom he had been criticizing: “Look. This was him. They presented me this — this is off the record, but — they presented me this. This was him. This was the Defense Department and him.” ...

According to the transcript, Mr. Trump describes the document, which he claims shows General Milley's desire to attack Iran, as “secret” and “like, highly confidential.” He also declares that “as president, I could have declassified it,” adding, “Now I can't, you know, but this is still a secret.”

If it was news clippings, why would he say Milley “presented me this”? Why would he describe news clippings as “highly confidential” and “still a secret”? All of that is damning. And none of it is in the headline. In the headline is the excuse. It's a lie. And I'm tired of lies that we all know are lies becoming stand-alone headlines. 

Of course, the Times' headline beats National Review's:

• Trump's Home Run with Bret Baier

Yes, editor Rich Lowry says, Trump probably didn't help his legal case with the interview; but since his best way of getting off is getting elected, Lowry feels he did help his case by being “a dominant presence.” What a sad statement that is—about Fox's viewers, Lowry's readers, the modern GOP, and the fragile state of American democracy and the rule of law.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Did they intend to make Scott Lang’s daughter, Cassie (Kathryn Newton), super annoying? Within the first 15 minutes, she:

• Gets arrested protesting the SFPD breaking up a homeless encampment (she says she did it peacefully but she also shrinks a cop car down to Matchbox size, which she hands over to the police with a knowing smirk*).
• Dismisses the fact that dad, Ant-Man (Paul Rudd), sure, helped save half the universe, but what’s he done for us lately? Why aren’t you saving the world AGAIN, Dad!
• Reveals she’s been sending signals to the quantum realm where Grandma, Janet Van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer)**, was traumatized for 30 years.
• Gets everyone in her family sucked back into the quantum realm.

* I thought the point of Ant-Man was that even ant-sized he maintained the strength/weight of a full-sized human. So wouldn’t the cop car weigh like 2,500 pounds rather than 2.5?

** I get that she’s 65 now. But if that’s Grandma, call me Grandpa.

And while Cassie has moments of regret, as soon as they run into a tribe of oppressed peoples led by an angry female warrior named Jentorra (Katy M. O’Brian), who glares angrily at Ant-Man as if he were Gen. Custer, Cassie’s all “We have to help these microscopic people, Dad!” rather than, you know, looking for ways to get out of the horror she got them into. But of course that’s the point of the movie. Early on, reading from his awful autobiography to a rapt room of kids and parents, Scott says: “Make mistakes. Take chances. Because if there’s one thing that life’s taught me, there’s always room to grow.” He says this cheesily, in that knowing-wink way of Paul Rudd, but it’s what Cassie does. She makes mistakes, takes chances, and in the final act rescues the angry female warrior and gives the speech that rallies the masses to take on Kang the Conqueror (Jonathan Majors).

She’s still super annoying.

Nothing but Star Wars
I avoided this one for a while. The quantum realm? No, thanks. Maybe others felt this way, too. (It didn’t do great at the box office.) Maybe Marvel had research indicating, “Yeah, no one cares about the quantum realm,” and rather than pivot they just tossed everything into it: giant cilium and cannister-head robots and 1970s-era Omni magazine far-out landscapes, and 1980s-era “Blade Runner” cityscapes. Not to mention bars out of “Star Wars.” It’s so “bars out of ‘Star Wars’” you’d expect a lawsuit if both properties weren’t owned by Disney. That’s creativity now—copying from whatever other IP you own. Oh look, jawas. Oh look, sandpeople. Oh look, Bill Murray. 

Murray plays Lord Krylar, a self-important functionary with a thing for Grandma who gets his quickly and ironically—eaten by a type of critter he’d been eating, which was supersized by the original Ant-Man, Dr. Hank Pym (Michael Douglas). He’s down there, too. He and Janet Van Dyne (Pfeiffer) and Hope Van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly), a.k.a. the Wasp of the title. They get separated from the Langs and have their own adventure.

You know, for a title character, Wasp doesn’t factor in much—in the storyline or in our imaginations. Who is she? What’s her role? There’s nothing there. Scott has the father-daughter thing going, Grandma is guilt-ridden because she helped Kang before she realized who he was, and Hank, original Ant-Man, just gets off some good, breezy lines. Does Douglas act much any more? He did “The Kaminsky Method” TV series a few years ago—I might have to check that out. Otherwise he’s been sucked into the Marvel universe. But he’s so good. He’s fun.

I also liked Majors as Kang. I always thought of Kang as a semi-boring Iron Man villain but apparently he controls the multiverse, or whatever, and is being positioned as the new big supervillain. Majors plays him both infinitely sad and terrifying. You empathize until he shows his true self:

Let me make this easy for you. You will bring me what I need or I will kill your daughter in front of you, then make you relive that moment over and over again in time, endlessly, until you beg me to kill you. 

What does Kang need here? A power core. That’s this movie’s Maguffin, or one of its many. Scott agrees to steal it, but then the Multiverse kicks in and suddenly there are thousands of Scotts. But Hope shows up, the Scotts band together for the good of Cassie (I guess none of them find her super annoying), and Scott and Hope team up to take on Kang. All the boxes are checked. Our titular heroes destroy the power core, Cassie somehow creates a portal back to Earth, and Kang is defeated by original Ant-Man and a horde of ants that were also sucked into the quantum realm and became hyper-intelligent. More irony, since Kang was forever dismissing Scott’s power: “You … talk to ants!” Oops.

Stick ’em up
Mostly, though, I was bored. It took several sittings before I finished. I worked it down like a kid eating broccoli. Without the nutritional value.

At least they seem to be setting up something big in the Marvel universe again. Post-credits, we got all the Kangs ready to take over all of their various multiverses. That certainly beats whatever they’ve been doing since 2019, but do they have to keep going bigger? Thanos killed half the universe and now the Kangs are messing with the fabric of all time and space. Part of me misses bank robbers.

This is increasingly the thing. Corporations are constantly asking you how they're doing but they don't really want to know. It's just data. It's a number, not an explanation. And there's no out. There's just now or later but no never. How are we doing? How are you doing? You were doing OK until you kept asking me how you were doing.

We made a mistake not regulating these assholes.

The DC Extended Universe or DCEU is ending not with a bang or a whimper but more of an audience shrug. Deservedly. For an extended universe, they never really extended themselves. I mean, these are the movies:

Look at that. They had the most popular superheroes in the world and kept returning to bit players. They went “Suicide Squad” third, before Wonder Woman or Aquaman, and then kept giving it to us. Somebody had to make that decision. So much of their strategy seemed to be: “Well, that didn't work ... so let's try it again.” And the universes never really intermingled. Maybe a cameo here or there, but “Suicide Squad” was its own thing, “Shazam” was its own thing. And boiled down, it makes no sense:

• 3: Suicide Squad
• 3: Shazam/Black Adam
• 2 Wonder Woman
• 2 Aquaman
• 1.5 Superman
• 1 Justice League
• .5 Batman

And now, finally, “Flash” arrives a year after its star, Ezra Miller, kept getting arrested. (The Times has a good rundown of the charges; it's a little sad but less problematic than the initial headlines.)

But yes, “Flash,” the Fastest Man Alive, arrives late. He arrives last. That is so DCEU.

It did OK, $55 million opening weekend, but that's not OK when you consider the return of Michael Keaton's Batman. I attribute the soft box office to Ezra's issues and Zack screwing up the DCEU from the get-go. Fool me 10 times, shame on me. Plus if you're in the know, you know that the EU is in fact ending. Quickly. James Gunn is taking over and trying a new DCU. These are sale items. They need to empty the shelves.

So how does that $55 mil compare with other DCEU movies? Not great, but not horribly for recent ones:

Grey = pandemic-era

I remember when “Man of Steel” opened with a mere $116 and I was bummed. Shouldn't it be higher? Well, that turned out to be the third-highest opener for a DCEU flick. And yes, COVID hurt, particularly “Wonder Woman 1984,” which I think would've opened well since there were such good vibes from the first one. But Zack hit before the pandemic did. Zack hurt before COVID did. 

“Elemental,” a Pixar flick, opened second with $29. That feels soft, but then the reviews were soft: 76% on Rotten Tomatoes. Or—I should say—the reviews were soft for a Pixar flick. If it stays there, it'll be Pixar's fifth-worst RT score.

The third weekend of “Spider-Verse” fell off by 50% ($27.8) for third, and the second weekend of the latest “Transformers” crap was fourth ($20), falling off 67%.  

The other day I noticed that Amazon.com fixed one of the many glitches on its site: the 1925 Richard Barthelmess movie “Shore Leave” was now listed as 1925 rather than 1969. Good for it! Someone somewhere was actually paying attention. Or maybe it was an AI fix? I'll take it either way. It made me wonder how they were doing with all the other glitches I've flagged recently.

Turns out, meh:

• Amazon-owned IMDb says you can watch the 1931 George Arliss movie “The Millionaire” on Amazon Prime ... but the link still leads to the 2012 Russian film “The Millionaire.” (First flagged: May 2020)
• Amazon-owned IMDb says you can watch the 1925 Lon Chaney movie “The Monster” on Amazon Prime ... but the link still leads to the 1975 Joan Collins horror flick “The Monster” (First flagged: February 2021)
• Hey, another fix! The 1933 Edward G. Robinson comedy “The Little Giant” no longer says it co-stars Ewan McGregor (born 1971). Wait ... No, sorry. They just no longer list actors and directors on the first page. You have to go into the “Details” section, where, again, the movie stars Edward G. Robinson, Mary Astor, and ... yes, Ewan McGregor (born 1971). Plus in the “Related” section, offering up other films to stream from the principles, they include Astor, supporting players Helen Vinson and Russell Hopton, director Roy Del Ruth, but bupkis on Robinson. (First flagged: August 2021)

I guess one small step for Amazon was just one small step for Amazon.

Its inalienable essence

One of the great takeaways from Sam Wasson's “The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood” is just how much Roman Polanski meant to the script. Writing credits are really kind of nuts in Hollywood. People who work on a thing aren't credited, people who don't work on the thing wind up with screenwriting Oscars. According to Wasson, the screenwriter for “Chinatown, Robert Towne, ”secretly employed an old college friend named Edward Taylor as his uncredited writing partner for more than 40 years,“ including on ”Chinatown.“ But their draft went on and on and on. What Towne and Taylor couldn't do is kill their little darlings. That was up to Polanski. 

The new ”Polanski“ draft was focused on its inalienable essence: Jake Gittes. He was in every scene. True to convention, the audience would never know any more or any less than their screen detective but would uncover the mystery as he did, clue by clue.

Additionally Polanski had tossed out Evelyn and Escobar's affair along with their tangential subplot; he cut many of Gittes's lowlife vulgarisms and class consciousness, reviving in their place certain hard-boiled characteristics common to the genre; he removed scenes with Cross's goons and long expositional dialogues between Evelyn and Gittes—strewn confusingly with red herrings and dense conspiratorial fogs right out of The Big Sleep. Where once the character of Byron Samples—also cut completely from the new draft—accompanied Gittes on his investigation of the retirement home, now Evelyn goes with Gittes; the change enhances their complicity, their love story, and leads nicely to bed. In Towne's first drafts, Gittes's motivation is blurred in the smokescreen of twisty misdirects. After Evelyn drops the lawsuit against him, what does the water scandal matter to him personally? In the Polanski rewrite, an answer is offered as an outraged Gittes, in the barbershop, defends the integrity of his profession, an indication that for all his sleazy divorce work, a nobler detective is waiting to emerge. The water mystery is his opportunity to do good—which, in a flourish of chilling irony, he will blunder by hindering rather than helping, near the climax of the Polanski revision. In the original, Evelyn masterminded the showdown with her father; in the Polanski revision, Gittes instigates it, creating a new scene that further demonizes Cross. Rather than tremble and repent when confronted or wither under a narcotic haze, as he did in Towne's early drafts, Cross stands firm and fully justifies his crimes: ”You see, Mr. Gittes,“ he growls in the new scene, ”most people never have to face the fact that at the right time and the right place, they're capable of anything.“

It makes sense that Polanski more than Towne would come up with that line. Polanski grew up Jewish in Nazi-occupied Europe. He knew it firsthand.

”Chinatown" wound up being nominated for 11 Academy Awards. It won one: Towne.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Considering its historic importance—the first feature film for both Humphrey Bogart and Spencer Tracy, not to mention directed by John Ford and based on a story by Maurine Dallas Watkins, who wrote “Chicago”—Amazon.com treats “Up the River” rather shabbily. The version I streamed for $3.98 was not only blurry but chopped up. It kept skipping bits of dialogue. Nips here, tucks there. The movie is suppose to run 92 minutes but the version I streamed was 84, so I lost eight minutes. Two to five seconds at a time.

It's another 1930 prison movie—there were a lot of those—but this one’s a comedy-romance. Saint Louis is a gangster, while Steve Jordan is a nice-guy inmate who falls for a female prisoner. Guess who plays who? Right. Tracy is the gangster, Bogie the romantic interest. They didn’t know who these guys were yet.

G-rated Shawshank
The third lead is Warren Hymer as Dannemora Dan, a malaprop-laden foil for Saint Louis. The movie begins with them breaking out of a prison in the South, but when Dan implies he’s going straight and starting a chicken farm, Louis leaves him high and dry. So long, sucker!

They next meet when Dan is a member of the Brotherhood of Hope, a Salvation Army type group, and he’s in the midst of telling how he came to be saved when Louis pulls up in a big car with two dames and a shit-eating grin. “And verily,” Dan intones, “I say to you, the wages of sin is—a punch in the jaw, you louse!”

Cut to: Bensonatta, “A penitentiary in the Middle West,” a title card tells us, where the cons jeer the newcomers like in a G-rated “Shawshank Redemption”:

• “Oh, look at the mug on that guy.”
• “Look at that pan!”
• “What did you do, boy, rob your mama’s bank?”

Claire Luce plays Judy Fields, the romantic interest, and she’s willowy and lovely to look at but conveys little. She also doesn’t seem like much a con—hardened or otherwise. When she’s released and Louis asks about her plans, she says brightly, “I’ll go back to the old racket, I suppose,” and you believe exactly zero of it.

She’s also not that Claire Luce. For some reason, I thought Clare (no “i”) Booth was an actress before marrying Henry Luce, but she was socialite and playwright (“The Women”), and then went on to become a U.S. rep (CT-4th), ambassador to Italy (under Ike), and, with hubby, strong, stupid supporter of Chiang Kai-shek. Claire with an “i” had a short career in Hollywood and a fairly long one on Broadway. Among her stage roles: Curley’s wife in “Of Mice and Men” (1937-38) and Katharina in “The Taming of the Shrew” (1951).

The plot here isn’t much and isn’t the point. Steve is paroled and promises to wait for Judy, and Louis and Dan break out of prison and wind up helping Steve. Seems the reason Judy wound up in the can was a con artist named Frosby (Morgan Wallace), who shows up in Steve’s New England town and blackmails him into staying mum about a stock investment scheme. But when Frosby scams Steve’s mom, Steve grabs a gun. Saint Louis grabs it back. “It’s a sucker’s game,” he says, and talks about friends on death row who were there one day and not the next. Instead, they just steal the bonds back from Thursby. I mean, Frosby. Sorry. Every time Bogie said “Frosby” here, I couldn’t help but think of Bogie saying “Thursby” in “The Maltese Falcon.” 

Steve gives the two men a message for Judy but Dan loses it on the train back. They show up worse for wear just as Judy is being released, and just in time for the big baseball game run by Pop (William Collier Sr.). The movie ends with them taking their positions as battery mates as the newly energized prisoners sing the title song:

Rolling home like a beautiful song
Rolling home up the river
Where you belong

Oddities and not-oddities
If the plot isn’t the point, what is? Personality. It’s poor, dumb Dan forever losing out to the charismatic Saint Louis. Tracy’s character has a catchphrase, “I never break my word,” which he constantly does. That’s the gag.

Louis: Tell you what, I’ll give you my word. And you know I never break my word.
Warden: No?
Louis: Well, never twice in succession.

Future Ford mainstay Ward Bond also shows up as prison bully with undertones of sexual violence. “What are you gonna do—make a favorite of that punk around here?” Bond growls at Bogie. “Say, who are you to tell me to keep my hands off anybody?” he growls again before getting decked by Louis. You get a sense Ford knows what happens in prisons.

There’s oddities. The warden’s daughter Jean (Joan Lawes), who’s about 8 or 10 years old, is always hanging in the prison yard. Sure, what could go wrong? The oddest moment may be in Steve’s New England town, when twin sisters May and June (Elizabeth and Helen Keating) burst in to dinner with news of a hayride. They’re dressed alike and they speak in unison? It’s like “The Shining” but played for laughs.

We also get some not-oddities for the period: society matrons sticking their noses in; Judy calling Frosby a “dirty rat”; blackface. The big crowd-pleaser at a prison talent show is a minstrel routine, “Black ‘n’ Blue,” with Amos ‘n’ Andy-type dialogue. A Black con in the audience roars with laughter. “See?” Ford seems to be saying. “They like it, too.”

I do like Hymer, who played not-smart throughout the 1930s, then ruined his career with a not-smart move: urinating on the desk of movie mogul Harry Cohn. Here, at that New England dinner, Dan is sitting next to Bogie’s sister, but when the twins arrive seats are shuffled and he loses his spot to—of course—Louis. Now he has nowhere to sit. After pouting a bit, and with nowhere to go, he simply slips behind a dressing screen in the corner and sits on a stool there, hoping to not be noticed. It felt like me at half the parties I was at in my teens.

“So he has been told he has the right to remain silent. We'll see how that goes.”

-- George Conway, attorney, anti-Trumper and estranged husband of Kellyanne Conway, on social media, after reading that the booking process for Donald Trump has been complete and the former president was now under arrest.

WARNING: SPOILERS

It’s a tale told in three sales pitches:

• To get in the door (“I don’t like to take no for an answer. And I actually think your son should be endorsed by someone with that exact mindset.”)
• To set up the meeting (“I believe in your son. I believe he’s different. And I believe you might be the only person on Earth who knows it.”)
• To seal the deal (“A shoe is just a shoe until somebody steps into it.”)

Schlubby Nike exec Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon) has to make other pitches, too. He gets a feeling about Michael Jordan, the skinny guard from North Carolina who took the winning shot in the 1982 NCAA tournament, but he has to convince Nike CEO Phil Knight (Ben Affleck) to bet it all on him, then he has to finesse the kid’s agent, David Falk (Chris Messina), to not get in the way. 

But these pitches are semi-comic, the men he’s pitching to vaguely ridiculous. The pitches to the family, particularly the mom (force of nature Viola Davis), are heartfelt and poetic.

Aren’t they also a bit of a lie? They convince us that what matters is the words—the pitch—when it really comes down to the numbers: the $250k, the car, the specially designed sneaker, and a cut from all sales of the specially designed sneaker. That’s what wins the day. A pitch is just a pitch until someone comes up with the scratch.

“Air,” written by Alex Convery and directed by Affleck, is a fun, breezy movie, and I enjoyed it throughout, but I felt a little empty afterwards. These are our heroes now? These are our stories? A crummy commercial?

“Air’ also glosses over what I feel is the most important part of the story: the feeling.

The feeling about the shot
Haven’t we all had such feelings or premonitions? I had a very strong feeling that Donald Trump would win the 2016 presidential election, for example, particularly after James Comey opened his piehole 11 days beforehand. The Thursday before election day, I biked down to Myrtle Edwards Park on the Seattle waterfront, massively depressed, anticipating it all, actually thinking of the happy people passing by, “They don’t know what’s about to happen.” What is that? Is it nothing? Is it paranoia? Or is it tapping into … something? It’s either nothing or it’s everything.

Sonny not only has his feeling about MJ but he acts on it. He risks his career on it. Why?

In the movie, it goes back to The Shot. (The first “The Shot” for MJ.) James Worthy was the big man on the UNC team, he was supposed to take the last-minute, down-by-one shot, but watching the video Sonny realizes, no, he was just a decoy. It was always supposed to be the freshman. And why would UNC coach Dean Smith—who rarely played freshman—trust this one freshman over his superstar All-American with the national title on the line? 

And why does no one else get it? Sonny’s in Beaverton, Oregon, but the NBA team down the block misses out. For a time I thought the movie was joking about all the kids in the ’84 draft—Jordan and Olajuwon and Barkley and Stockton?—but it turns out, yes, that draft was legendary and they were all in it. Olajuwon went first and Jordan went third. In between the Portland Trail Blazers picked poor Sam Bowie. The movie should’ve underlined the Oregon-ness of it all. “Why are you so sure when the professionals aren’t?”

Conventional wisdom winds up being represented not by the Blazers’ GM but by a poor cashier at the neighborhood 7-Eleven. Before the draft, he’s all: “Nah, lucky shot, and besides, Jordan is too small to be in the NBA, both him and Stockton.” After everything changes, he’s bitching about the Blazers not picking Jordan. “Everybody knew,” he says of Jordan, which makes Sonny smile. Right, everyone knew. “Air” opens with the Dire Straits’ “Money for Nothing” (“That ain’t working/That’s the way you do it…”), which is a song about an outsider bitching about an insider, the guy who doesn’t know how hard it is complaining about how easy it looks. And that’s the 7-Eleven cashier here. Poor cashier. Poor fictional cashier. I’m reminded of Tom Hanks’ pompous bookstore CEO showing an elevator operator how to operate elevators in “You’ve Got Mail.”

Hey, Hollywood, leave those working-class kids alone. Pick on someone your own size.

On the spot
Nice cast anyway. Nice seeing Ben and Matt together again. Viola Davis, as mentioned, is her usual powerful self, while Julius Tennon makes a good, charismatic James Jordan, working on his car. I like some of the tennis-shoe history we get (Adidas/Nazis), though I would’ve liked more of it (Puma Clyde/Walt Frazier). The movie tries to dole out credit. Yes, Sonny saw, but Rob Strasser (Jason Bateman) helped, Peter Moore (Matthew Maher) designed, Phil Knight signed off. He dared. Team effort. All for a guy who wasn’t exactly a team guy.

Oh right, the MLK story. Right. Marlon Wayans plays George Raveling, who warns Sonny about stepping around the agent to get to the family. But he also tells him about a day when he had his own feeling, when he felt like this event he’d heard about would be important. So he went. And there he heard a speech that meant a lot to him. Afterwards he congratulated the man who gave the speech, and the man thanked him and stuck the speech in his pocket. And when George looked for the words that meant so much to him, they weren’t there. Because the man had made them up on the spot.

The words he was looking for: “I have a dream.”

Most of that is true, by the way. George Raveling was at the March on Washington, and he was given the original copy of MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech in which “I have a dream” does not appear. The problem? Yes, MLK deviated from his prepared speech to get to the dream, but he didn’t make it up on the spot. Read your Taylor Branch. It was part of a sermon he’d delivered the week before in Chicago and Detroit. As MLK paused, near the end of the prepared text, Mahalia Jackson, standing on the dais with him, supposedly said aloud, “Tell ’em about the dream, Martin.” Did he hear her? Not known. What is known? He did not, as the movie says, make “the whole speech up—right there on the spot.” But now we’ll have millions of people who believe he did. Thanks, Hollywood.

I’m curious: Are there great Hollywood movies that make heroes out of salesmen like this one does? It is a rarity. In “The Founder,” he’s half a dick, and in “Wolf of Wall Street” he’s 100% a dick. There’s Willy Loman, of course, but he’s tragic. What I wanted with this movie, what would’ve filled me rather than left me empty, was something closer to what Bennett Miller did with “Moneyball,” but I don’t know how you do that with this story. Do you mention that they were so successful that their product not only made billions but actually got people killed? Kids murdered each other over Air Jordans. But that’s not exactly feel-good. 

Maybe the filmmakers did the best they could with the story they had. A dude had an idea, nobody thought it was good, they did it anyway, everybody made a ton of money. That’s not just a Hollywood ending; it’s the ending Hollywood hopes for itself every day.

I missed being on Twitter this week, and confess that along with Googling the latest Mark Harris tweets, I also checked out what George Conway, Preet Bharara, Joyce Vance, Laurence Tribe, The Lincoln Project, et al., were saying about Trump indictment Part II. I lurked behind the scenes. Press reports about breaking legal matters tend to be too vague to my liking, whereas lawyers often cut to the heart of it.

I do recommend the latest episode of Bharara's podcast, “In Brief,” with Joyce Vance. Both are former U.S. attorneys who know a little something-something about prosecution, and, though they try to stay sober-minded, there's a kind of astonishment at how good the case against Trump is—how much evidence he has given the prosecution. At one point, Bharara calls the recording of Trump meeting with Mark Meadows' ghostwriters “the single most damning thing in the indictment.” Vance responds:

This is the smoking-gun piece of evidence in this case. This is Trump, in essence, committing a crime while he's in the room with these folks, on tape. He's actually showing classified material, that he is not entitled to have, to other people, who are not entitled to see it, while discussing his guilty state of mind and knowledge that it's a crime at the same time—it's really pretty remarkable. I can't remember ever seeing anything like this. 

They also seem to think that rumored appointed judge Aileen Cannon, who was not only tapped by Trump after he lost the 2020 election but made some very suspect calls in his favor earlier in this case, calls so bad that she was chastised by (I believe) the Fifth Circuit—Preet and Joyce seem to think she'll either recuse herself or be asked to recuse herself. We'll see.

Anyway, it was a good week.  

I don't think the COVID pandemic gets enough credit for its positives—such as limiting the number of “Transformers” movies we're subjected to. We used to get one every 2-3 years, but the latest, “Transformers: Rise of the Beasts,” is the first since 2018's “Bumblebee,” which itself was a kind of spinoff. The last time we had a true “Transformers, colon” movie was in 2017: “Transformers: The Last Knight.”

Alas, it wasn't the last. 

Of course, the drop off might've happened anyway. The series was fading at the box office.

* Annual ranking at domestic box office

“Beasts,” starring “Hamilton”'s John Laurens, opened better than the two most recent “Transformers,” but even unadjusted it's nowhere near the box-office powerhouse it once was. One assumes its Millennial fanbase, which grew up on the '80s cartoon, has aged out of the moviegoing demographic and hasn't been easily replaced, since, for the rest of us, the series has always been a WTF proposition. Wait, they're what? And pretend to be what? And have been around for how long? And there's evil ones? And they're all really from another pla-- Fuck it, I'm outta here. It's the stupidity, stupid, and everyone just got tired. The first had a nearly positive Rotten Tomatoes rating (57%) but it was all downhill from there, except for the Hailee Steinfeld one, which was hailed by critics (91%), and then, as if to underline how little its audience wants that (not to mention smart female leads), promptly died at the box office.

Man, I remember the early days of this blog when I would rail against “Revenge of the Fallen”'s dominance at the summer box office as if democracy itself depended upon it. As if the popularity of something this stupid meant that someday we might be dumb enough to do something really stupid—like, I don't know, elect an evil game-show host president of the United States.

No. 2 at the box office was the second weekend of the second “Spider-Verse” movie, at $55 million, a not-bad 54% dropoff. No. 3 was the third weekend of “Little Mermaid” ($22), followed by the sixth weekend of “Guardians Vol. 3” ($7). “Guardians” is currently No. 2 for the year at $335, a fer piece behind “Super Mario Bros.”'s $570.

“Special Counsel Jack Smith alleges a few key points. First, that Trump handled the classified material exceptionally sloppily and haphazardly, including stashing documents in a shower, a bedroom, and—as depicted in a striking photo—onstage in a ballroom that frequently held events. Second, that Trump was personally involved in discussions about the documents, and in directing their repeated relocation. Third, that Trump was well aware of both the laws around classified documents and the fact that these particular documents were not declassified. Fourth, that Trump was personally involved in schemes to hide the documents not only from the federal government but even from his own attorneys. The indictment carefully lays out its case with pictures, texts, and surveillance footage.

”In sum, the indictment depicts a man who knew that what he was doing was wrong, and went to great lengths to cover it up.“

-- David A. Graham, ”The Stupidest Crimes Imaginable,“ The Atlantic 

I found out ... late yesterday afternoon? I wound up interrupting my wife's video pilates to ask 1) Has Jellybean been fed?, and 2) Did they hear the news? Trump indicted, they're guessing seven charges. Turns out it's 37. Or 38? I've seen both. And none of it is really surprising but it's amazing how airtight it all is, and again, as I've said before, the key phrases are ”willfully retained“ and ”failed to return,“ and the evidence of that seems overwhelming. And once again, Trump is not the problem. The problem is the people who buoy him up—the MAGA-heads who support him no matter how much he brings our country down, and the Republicans who are too fearful of the MAGA-heads to speak the truth. And of course who should wind up with the case? Apparently Judge Aileen Cannon, who issued such awful decisions earlier in this matter that even conservative justices were like, ”WTF?" So we'll see. But all in all it's still a good day for the rule of law. 

“In December 1941, in a cab home from the Polo Grounds, [a young Robert Evans and his family] heard that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. That night a family meeting was called at Uncle Abe's luxurious eighteen-room apartment overlooking Central Park. Riding the elevator with his father, Evans could tell that the old man, mysteriously ashamed, felt a sorrow older than the coming war. Archie, his head low, whispered a lesson his son would never forget: ”The wealthy will get wealthier and the young will die."

-- from Sam Wasson's “The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood” 

Another excerpt from Sam Wasson's “The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood,” which I read earlier this year and recommend. It's the early 1970s. Director Roman Polanski is visiting his father in Gstaad, Switzerland:

Under a soft light, his father was sitting on the edge of the bed, his eyes on the floor. He was crying. “Why are you crying?” “No, no,” his father insisted. “It's just the music.” Beside his bed, a radio. A German song. “O Mein Papa.” Oh, my Papa, to me he was so wonderful, Oh, my Papa, to me he was so good. Polanski sat beside him. No one could be so gentle and so lovable, Oh, my Papa, he always understood.

“After you ran from the ghetto,” his father began, “and just before the final liquidation of the ghetto, they took all the people.” Oh, my Papa, so funny, so adorable, Always the clown so funny in his way. “They called all Jews ... we were standing there ... suddenly trucks arrived and they started loading children on those trucks. As this was happening, most were parents of those children, they started swaying and waving and moaning and screaming and crying and falling on the ground and tearing the mud from the ground ... and the Germans were playing this song.”

Oh, my Papa, to me he was so wonderful
Deep in my heart I miss him so today
Gone are the days when he would take me on his knee
And with a smile he'd change my tears to laughter

Polanski would try to console him. “This can never happen again.” “Wait fifty years. You'll see.”

Fifty years. Pretty much on the nose. 

When I heard Chuck Todd was leaving NBC's “Meet the Press” after nine years as its host, my first thought was “Good riddance.” But I wasn't seeing that sentiment in much mainstream media coverage. (I'm off Twitter, where, I'm sure, that sentiment was widespread.)

So thank you, Jeff Tiedrich, for your post “Good fucking riddance to Chuck Fucking Todd.” 

Tiedrich begins his piece with this Journalism 101 lesson, attributed to many: “If someone says it's raining, and another person says it's dry, it's not your job to quote them both. Your job is to look out of the fucking window and find out which is true.” Tiedrich adds: “Chuck Todd never looked out the fucking window. Not once.” 

Then he gives numerous examples of Todd's no-look reporting style. He also quotes Todd bragging about this tendency way back in 2013. It was in reference to the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, which, Todd said, Republicans “have successfully messaged against.” And it wasn't journalism's job to expose misinformation? “What I always love is people say, 'Well, it's you folks' fault in the media,'” Todd responded. “No, it's the president of the United States' fault for not selling it.”

On some level, yes, Dems should be pushing back harder against this shit, particularly when they see dipshits like Todd doing nothing. But people like Todd helped pave the way for Trump and possibly the undermining of American democracy. He'll never see it that way but he did. That's his legacy. Bye.

WARNING: SPOILERS

More like two mountains, isn’t it? Alps and Himalayas?

Yes, there’s a lot of peaks within those ranges, I’m talking the metaphor of it all. Pietro isn’t exploring the wide world, forever interested in the new and unseen; he’s beating a path between two places: Italy and Nepal. That reminds me too much of me—forever returning to the same places—to seem as wide and wise as the movie wants it to be.

To be honest, Pietro in both his childhood and adult incarnations (Andrea Palma, Luca Marinelli) reminded me of me. He’s the weaker, knobby-kneed half of a deep childhood friendship with Bruno (Francesco Palombelli, Alessandro Borghi), the athletic boy who lives in the mountains and knows how to milk cows and fix roofs and takes him on daring adventures, just as I was the weaker, allergy-ridden half of a deep childhood friendship with Mark N., whose family lived on Lake Harriet, and who was athletic and daring and took me on adventures. I was forever struggling to keep up. I was forever reluctant to go.

As a young adult, Pietro is just aimless. He’s 31, looks back, and wonders what the hell happened. He feels he played with life and lost. He committed to nothing and so has nothing. I related to that, too.

The movie isn’t as feel-good as its trailer, thank god, and it’s often beautiful to look at (mountains, FFS), and I like the short-hand from writer-directors Felix van Groeningen an Charlotte Vanermeeresch. “Are you still writing?” (Oh, he’s a writer.) “You’re famous now.” (Oh, he had a book published.) I also liked the character of Bruno. He knew what he wanted and how to get it and how to not want more. I just don’t get how he turned from the kid who couldn’t wait to leave his village to the man who couldn’t leave to literally save his own life. How did he get so stunted? The older he got the less interesting he became. Maybe that’s all of us.

My favorite character was Pietro’s father, Giovanni (Filippo Timi), a scientist who works and smokes too much but likes getting out into the mountains. We lose him about a third of the way in. There are late-stage revelations that while Pietro was estranged from his father, Giovanni and Bruno continued to hike the different peaks near Bruno’s village. Pietro finds a topographic map in which his father color-coded the hikes: one color for him, one for Bruno, and one for Pietro when he was young. Now Pietro takes it upon himself to hike the ones he missed, adding himself to the map. It should be poignant but isn’t really. I liked it intellectually but never felt it emotionally. Much of the movie is that way.

In 2017, when “Spider-Man: Homecoming” opened at $117 million domestically, I went “Meh.” This weekend, when I found out that “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” is opening at an estimated $120 million, I'm all: WOW!

A pandemic will change you like that.

Alright so it's not just the pandemic. “Homecoming” was the opening salvo of the third iteration of live-action Spider-Man movies, and live-action Spider-Man movies used to break box-office records: 1 and 3 (first iteration) were the biggest openers ever up to that point. Hell, the first was the first to cross the $100 million barrier. It was an event. So when the third iteration opened as merely the 29th biggest opener ever, it was a bit of a shrug.

“Spider-Verse,” meanwhile is a cartoon, and so seems, I don't know, less adult. The first one in 2018 only opened at $35 million—a fraction of what live-action Spideys brought in. But it was diverse and critically acclaimed and gained adherents once it began streaming. Plus it was the first superhero movie (right?) to bring universes together, which is the great plotline of 2020s superhero cinema—not to mention Oscar-winning movies—so I guess that's why we got this. “Across the Spider-Verse” is the lucky 13th film to open north of $100 million since the pandemic began. It's also the second-biggest opening of the year—after another cartoon, “Super Mario Bros.,” in April—and the third biggest opening ever for a Spidey movie.

Here's a chart of those openings. Keep in mind that three of them (“Spider-Man 2,” “The Amazing Spider-Man,” and “Far from Home”) didn't open on a Friday but on the Tuesday or Wednesday before July 4, so their “weekend” numbers are skewed. The first RNK column is where the movie's opening ranked at the time of its release; the second is where it ranks now:

Either way, that's a lot of web-slinging. Probably too much. What stories aren't being told because we don't want to hear them?

WARNING: SPOILERS

What a weird fucking movie.

In the first half, a wife realizes her husband is unfaithful and it’s treated as a comedy. In the second half, she wins the husband back and it’s treated as a tragedy. Well, it’s an ur-disaster flick so it is a tragedy. It’s the Hindenburg before the Hindenburg, let alone The Hindenburg. There’s a golden calf element, too—outré revelry before fierce judgment—but then it was directed by Cecil B. DeMille, who did both the silent and Charlton Heston versions of “The Ten Commandments,” and who was always big on bacchanalia followed by shame. Lots of bacchanalia, a bit of shame.

You could also say the movie is ripped from the headlines: A dirigible full of rich, partying people crash. That pretty much describes the 1920s. At least these people had parachutes.

And it’s a musical! DeMille’s first and only. It shows.

Regular old crackers
I didn’t know it was a musical, so, 15 minutes in, when the maid (Elsa Peterson) bursts into “Live and Love Today” to her mistress Angela Brooks (Kay Johnson), bucking her up about her philandering husband Bob (Reginald Denny), I experienced the kind of disconnect people who hate musicals have about musicals. Is it the only time in the movie the singing is musical-y? It’s not a performer with a piano saying “Hey, I’ll sing a song here.” It’s an everyday setting where someone just starts belting it out. 

This scene follows an extended comedic open in which Bob and his pal Jimmy Wade (Roland Young) try to sneak back into his stately mansion, drunk, in top hats and tails, after a night of revelry. Jimmy is clumsy and keeps dropping stuff, including his top hat, which winds up on the head of a passing maid. Wucka wucka. But Angela discovers more than just the revelry. She realizes Bob is having an affair with a dame named Trixie (Lillian Roth) and confronts him about it. His response? He blames her.

• “Don’t you understand? Love can’t be kept in cold storage. Its a battery that has to be recharged every day.”
• “That’s you all over: cold logic. … I think you're above all other women. But below zero.”
• “I’m a romantic guy. I crave warm affection … and all I get is frozen justice.”

We also get this back-and-forth:

Bob: You don't know what love means.
Angela: You don't know what marriage means.
Bob: Oh, yes I do! It’s a schoolroom and you’re the teacher. Well, I’ve graduated!

Was male privilege ever more ascendant? 

Was DeMille a philanderer? Of course he was. With several women. And his wife knew. And did nothing. Probably just sang songs with her maid.

Oddly, given the above, the screenwriters are all women—Jeanie Macpherson, Gladys Unger, Elsie Janis—and all of them previously collaborated with DeMille. Particularly Macpherson. She had a longtime affair with him. So I guess they knew from which they wrote.

After confronting Bob, Angela confronts Trixie, but gets similarly dismissed and humiliated. So she divorces Bob and takes him to the cleaners.

Kidding. She decides to fight for him. This is what she says to Trixie: “You made him sick of virtue, I'll make him so sick of vice he’ll scream for decency!” How does she do this? That’s the second half of the film. Jimmy is throwing a masked ball aboard a moored dirigible and she decides to show up in the slinkiest outfit ever and turns heads—especially Bob’s, who pushes others aside to get to the front of the line. Just who is this mysterious woman who calls herself Madam Satan? He must know!

There’s some not-bad lines but Bob is a major creep and the movie doesn’t think so. Plus Angela’s plan to get him so sick of vice he’ll scream for decency is a non-starter. He seems very interested in vice until he realizes the vice would be with his wife. Where’s the fun in that? At which point whatever might’ve happened is disrupted by disaster. There’s a thunderstorm, the dirigible becomes unmoored and begins to break apart, and panic ensues among the swanky set. “I don’t want your husband,” Trixie cries, “I want a parachute!” Bob meanwhile, sacrifices his parachute for Angela but he survives like an action hero. As the ship is going down, at the last second, he dives into the city reservoir. Sure.

If his landing is heroic, for almost everyone else it’s comic: Angela parachutes into a car where a couple is making out, Trixie into a Turkish bath, and Jimmy into a tree in the lion’s den in a zoo. Wucka. 

Animal crackers
It is insane, though. At the gala, most of the women dress slinky (as cats, etc.) or outrageous (peacock-like), while most of the men show up as dashing Douglas Fairbanks types—including Bob as Robin Hood, arms akimbo. We also get a Roman senator, a pirate, Romeo, Eve, Fish Girl, Spider Girl, Victory, Electricity, Miss Conning Tower and Little Rolls Riding Hood. You can get a sense of the madness in this clip.

Roth, the woman who plays Trixie, was immediately familiar to me as the daughter to Margaret Dumont’s Mrs. Rittenhouse in the Marx Bros.’ classic “Animal Crackers.” There, as the loyal girlfriend, she overacts. Here, as the other woman, she’s not bad. But her career quickly sputtered from alcoholism. She recovered enough to write about a memoir about it, “I’ll Cry Tomorrow,” which was adapted into a 1955 Susan Hayward film of the same name.

The movie was a rare box-office bomb for DeMille—deserved. It’s overlong and feels longer. It debuted about a year after the Wall Street Crash and crashed. In a way “Madam Satan” does to us what Madam Satan does to Bob: draws us in with the promise of something sexy only to deliver a bland wife and her stupid husband, reunited at last.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Someday I’d like a real documentary on Reggie Jackson.

Early on in this one, sitting on a stool and talking directly to the camera, Reggie says he’s uncomfortable with the doc because he’s not in control of it, but I’m curious how much of it he controlled. He tells the viewer, “The reason you’re uncomfortable with me is because I’m the truth,” except so much of what he says, or what is said about him, feels false. It’s not Reggie as we remember him but maybe the Reggie as he was in his head? Or as he wishes he’d been?

It’s Reggie redrawn as athlete-activist in the tradition of Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali and Henry Aaron, and I’m like: “I thought the point of Reggie was Reggie.” Hot dog. Not enough mustard. Straw that stirs the drink. Superduperstar. In a ’70s-era clip, a reporter asks him what thoughts were going through his head after some superduper feat and he responds, “The magnitude of me.” That feels closer to it. And sure, that line could’ve come from Ali—both were mouths that roared—but Ali did everything else: “What’s my name?,” “No Vietcong called me nigger.” He sacrificed his title and his livelihood for a principle and changed the laws of the nation. I’m not remembering any activism from Reggie and the doc doesn’t help. He just kind of gloms onto these guys.

Until, in one instance, he doesn’t. Until he shockingly throws one of them under the bus. 

Jackie’s anger
A lot of the doc is Reggie visiting with other athletes, some now deceased (Aaron, Vida Blue), and I’m sorry but lord these guys can be boring. Particularly the recent ones. I like Aaron Judge but here he sounds like the PR rep for Aaron Judge, Inc. Just stop already, guys. Be people. Reggie’s contemporaries are a bit more fun but they’re oddly segregated. He talks with Joe Rudi and Rollie Fingers in one stadium, and Vida Blue and Dave Stewart in another. Stewart has the best story. In the early ’70s, he was an Oakland kid who hung out at the ballpark and Reggie befriended him. Stewart says the way Jackson treated him taught him how to treat kids when he became a professional. That’s nice. I wanted more of that.

Instead, Reggie visits Julius Erving, the great Dr. J., and the doc goes off the rails.

They’re talking about the fact that they, two Black men, were the preeminent athletes of the 1970s. Then Erving says this:

In terms of heroes and role models, they showed The Jackie Robinson Story in my school, and, you know, my mouth dropped. But for me, Jim Brown was hugely impactful in my life. With Jackie Robinson, it was turn the other cheek. And with Jim Brown, it was, “You need to get out of my face.”

And I’m like: Wait, what? Yes, for his first two seasons, Jackie had to turn the other cheek. That was part of the deal with Branch Rickey to change the sport and the culture and the country. It was nonviolent resistance before nonviolent resistance. But after that, Rickey let him loose. And Jackie let loose. Both barrels. Don’t these guys know that?

But Dr. J admits he doesn’t know baseball so I’m sure Reggie will correct him. No. He actually makes it worse:

I admire Jackie Robinson, but I wasn’t Jackie Robinson. I was Jim Brown. I was angry.

Wait, WHAT!?!

They didn’t think Jackie Robinson was angry? Did they think “The Jackie Robinson Story” truly reflected what was going on in his head and heart? He was furious. The true power of him turning the other cheek for two years was that he was never the guy to turn the other cheek. You don’t even have to read to know this, just watch Ken Burns “Baseball,” or the doc he did on Jackie Robinson. It’s all there. “Without that anger, you don’t get Jackie Robinson,” Howard Bryant says in the latter. “Do you want to know Jackie Robinson or don’t you?”

Seriously, I can’t believe they left that conversation in. Makes both men look really, really bad.

Filmmaker Alex Stapleton (“Corman’s World”) also screws up the chronology—like everyone these days. Reggie talks about playing minor league ball in Birmingham in 1967 and she shows us clips of firehoses and Bull Connor, and I’m like “That’s 1963.” I’m sure Birmingham ’67 wasn’t good for a Black kid from Philly but it was already a different era. A year later, Reggie makes the Majors and goes to Oakland, home of the Black Panther Party, and it’s like five years of American history truncated into one.

I like the early Oakland A’s clips. I could’ve used more of them. I could’ve used a shot of him hitting the top of the scoreboard at Met Stadium in Bloomington, Minnesota in 1969—a 500+ foot shot. He had a first-half for the ages in 1969 when he was a real threat to Roger Maris’ homerun record. On July 29, he hit his 40th but couldn’t keep the pace: five in August, two in September, 47 for the year. He didn’t even win the HR title—Harmon Killebrew did with 49—but it’s the most homeruns Jackson ever hit in a season. The doc mentions none of this.

The doc doesn’t mention a lot. How did Reggie feel when Thurman Munson died in a plane crash in the middle of the 1979 season? That might’ve been worth probing. We get a lot of Billy Martin and George Steinbrenner, of course, but I think the doc is too kind to the latter and problematic with the former. It implies Billy was racist—a designation Rod Carew and Rickey Henderson would probably dispute. I think Billy just didn’t like Reggie. You could say he didn’t like the challenge of Reggie. Reggie could be challenging. He challenged Munson as team leader and challenged Billy as manager, and not necessarily in good ways. But the doc ignores the not-good ways. It tells Reggie’s side of things.

Take the “straw that stirs the drink” line. This is the quote as it appeared in the NY press in 1977:

I’m the straw that stirs the drink. It all comes back to me. Maybe I should say me and Munson—but really he doesn’t enter into it. … Munson thinks he can be the straw that stirs the drink, but he can only stir it bad.

In the doc, the full quote is barely visible, and then we get Reggie on his stool saying, “I had no idea it was going to get twisted like that.” Uhh … twisted like what? Into an insult? Not much twisting necessary there. Back then Reggie claimed he’d been misquoted, which led to this classic rejoinder from Munson: “For three thousand fucking words?” 

In the '77 World Series, Reggie questioned starting Catfish Hunter in Game 2. He was probably right—Catfish got shelled—but it wasn’t smart to say. In the doc, he also complains about being platooned with Paul Blair, which isn’t quite accurate. Blair was a late-inning defensive replacement for Reggie, not a platoon. Even in those first World Series games.

Actually, that’s kind of fascinating. In ’77, Reggie had a Series for the ages, a Series that led to him being forever known as “Mr. October.” But it didn’t start out well. And it’s because it didn’t start out well that Thurman called him “Mr. October.” Initially, it was meant sarcastically. 

The forgotten Mr. October
Let’s break it down.

In Game 1, Reggie went 1-2 with a single, a walk and HBP, and in the 9th inning, with the Yanks up by 1, Paul Blair replaced him in right field. The Dodgers tied the game so it went to extras, but the move didn’t hurt Billy’s rep: Blair drove in the winning run in the 12th.

In Game 2, Reggie went 0-4 with two Ks and a GDP as the Dodgers won 6-1. That’s when Reggie questioned Billy’s managerial acumen: “What’s he doing starting Catfish? He hasn’t pitched since Sept. 10. It’s not fair to the Cat and it’s not fair to us.” To which Billy replied: “If he wants to second-guess me, he can kiss my Dago butt.” Reggie also questioned being replaced defensively. 

So of course in the next game (when Reggie went 1-3 with a single), Billy replaced him in the 7th inning. Did that light a fire? Because in Game 4, Reggie went 2-4 with a double and a homer—though Blair still came in in the 9th. It wasn’t until Game 5 (2-4, HR, 2 runs) that Jackson played the whole game. And in Game 6 (three homeruns on three swings, BB, 4 runs scored, 5 RBIs), yeah, no one’s pulling him, not even Billy Martin. World Series MVP. Legend. Mr. October.

Right. About that…

In the doc, Reggie says Thurman started the nickname after Reggie hit his 30th homerun in Detroit:

The press came in to talk to him and Thurman said, ‘I don’t feel like talking. I don’t want to talk. I’m hurt and I’m sore and I got to get my shoulder done and my knee wrapped in ice. Go talk to Mr. October, he’ll talk to you.’ And he just kind of threw it out there, you know, in sarcasm, annoyance, or whatever. And that kind of picked itself up from there.

That would’ve been Sept. 18.

The oddity is I can’t find any reference to it in any of the press from the period. Not in The New York Times, not the Daily News, not anywhere on newspapers.com.

In fact, the first reference to “Mr. October” that year wasn’t to Reggie Jackson. It was to Catfish Hunter. On Oct. 6, the Daily News teased a Mike Lupica column on the injured ace with this header:

The Daily News teaser during the '77 ALCS, before Reggie was ever referenced in the press as Mr. October.

So was Catfish the original Mr. October? Or does “the forgotten …” imply there’s one who isn’t forgotten? Either way, the first time the term is used for Reggie, and reported in the press, yes, it comes from Munson, but it comes after Game 2 when Reggie was 1-6 for the Series. And it’s not a compliment:

I wouldn’t be second-guessing the manager. I think it’s just a little heated argument. You know Reggie has not been doing all that well. He has been doing OK, but not all that well … and he wants to. I guess Billy just doesn’t realize that Reggie is ‘Mr. October.’

In one publication, Munson follows it up with “I read that somewhere.” In another, he says, “That’s what Reggie called himself, wasn’t it? ‘Mr. October’?”

So did Munson bestow the nickname ironically? Or was it a sarcastic reference to something Jackson already called himself? Even after Game 6, the press disagreed on its provenance. In one report, it was something his teammates called him; in another, teammate Mike Torrez exclaims, “Now I know why he calls himself Mr. October.” [Emphasis mine.]

Either way, what began as an insult became an honorific. Jackson turned it into an honorific. He willed it. That’s the amazing thing, and it should be the story, but it’s not the story. Not here anyway. The story here is much more ho-hum.

When Reggie was 1-6 for the Series.

No. 20
What is the story here? That Reggie is an activist (vaguely), that he’s suffered from a lot of racism (definitely at times, just maybe other times), that even after his playing days, when he tried to buy ball clubs, they didn’t want him around. Not because he’s Reggie but because he’s Black. That’s what he keeps implying. He put together an ownership group to buy the Dodgers in ’98 but Rupert Murdoch got it instead. Because Rupert is part of the “boys club”? Or because he offered more? Who knows? But the doc doesn’t question Reggie’s POV. It also doesn’t bring up the fact that the Dodgers are now co-owned by Magic Johnson.

Meanwhile, Reggie tries to stay in the game. He tries to stay relevant in the game. And that’s why he winds up leaving the Yankees organization for the Astros. He felt a figurehead with the Yankees but felt utilized by the Astros. Sure. The doc shows him giving batting advice to Jose Altuve, a batting champion who seems confused about why he’s being given batting advice, and who then goes and hits a home run. “Reggie” implies the homer is because of Reggie.

Again, the doc gives us some great ’70s footage, where he’s shockingly polite around reporters. We also see his first spring training with the Yankees in ’77 when he’s wearing No. 20. That stunned me. Numbers matter so much in the sport. Reggie was No. 9 for both the A’s and O’s but that was Graig Nettles’ number with the Yanks, so I guess Jackson went with Frank Robinson’s number? Then why 44? I’m guessing because Terry Whitfield was wearing it, he got traded in March, so Reggie jumped to Henry Aaron’s number. The doc doesn’t mention any of this—I don’t blame it, it’s a little insidery—but the baseball nerd in me wants to know.

Anyway, I hope someday we get a real documentary on Reggie Jackson. I wouldn’t be surprised if, by cutting deeper, he’ll come across not only more fascinating but more sympathetic.