Recent Reviews
The Cagneys
A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935)
Something to Sing About (1937)
Angels with Dirty Faces (1938)
A Lion Is In the Streets (1953)
Man of a Thousand Faces (1957)
Never Steal Anything Small (1959)
Shake Hands With the Devil (1959)
Monday July 31, 2023
Movie Review: Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023)
WARNING: SPOILERS
In a movie in which an 81-year-old man (Harrison Ford), playing a 69-year-old man (Indiana Jones), outraces New York subways on a horse, survives fistfights, gunshots wounds, tuk-tuk car crashes and rapid scuba-diving resurfacings, not to mention attacks from eels, scorpions and spiders, and then, why not, travels back through time in a Nazi war plane to 212 B.C. and meets Archimedes, the great philosopher-mathematician, during the Siege of Syracuse, amid all of this, I, of course, couldn’t get past the following incongruity:
Would a kid really be wearing a Bob Griese jersey in August 1969?
I mean, it’s possible: Griese was around. He was a rookie in ’67. But there were bigger NFL QB names back then: Johnny Unitas, Joe Namath, Bart Starr. Plus jerseys or jersey-shirts weren’t prevalent yet. A blank 12 jersey in Dolphins colors feels more like a ’70s thing.
But everything else? Yeah, why not.
“Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” is the fifth installment in the series, and at 2.5 hours, plus .5 for the previews, it was a tad long for this old man. But both my wife and I felt it was a little better than its word of mouth.
More: It seems like the past and future of movies all at once.
Everything old is new again
It’s the past of movies for obvious reasons: he old. We first saw Indy in the summer of 1981 in “Raiders of the Lost Ark”—the No. 1 movie of the year and still No. 22 all-time adjusted for inflation—and then kept revisiting him: in 1984 (“Temple of Doom,” No. 2 for the year), 1989 (“Last Crusade,” No. 2) and 2008 (“Crystal Skull,” No. 3). He’s nostalgic. He’s the good old days. You can feel it in the number of times director James Mangold holds the camera on his iconic fedora and bullwhip. What is it—four times? Five? Twelve? Find someone who looks at you the way James Mangold looks at Indiana Jones’ fedora, basically.
And here’s the thing: Indiana Jones started out nostalgic. In the 1970s, George Lucas wanted to create a throwback to Saturday afternoon movie serials of the 1930s and ’40s, but with A-production values, and Steven Spielberg said “Sign me up!” And it totally worked. Which means we’re now nostalgic for that time when we were nostalgic for that other time. That’s why the movie feels like it’s the past.
It feels like the future because of that opening sequence.
Near the end of WWII, Nazis are trying to scram from one of their many occupied countries when they capture an enemy agent and bring him hooded before Col. Weber (Thomas Kretschmann). When the hood is removed … ta da! … it’s Indiana Jones! Looking great. Thanks to CG and AI and who knows what other acronyms, he looks about 35 again. And sure, when he first speaks, we get that old-man Harrison growl and you’re like, “OK, that’s not fooling anybody.” But then that problem goes away, and suddenly we’re getting brand new scenes of Indiana Jones in his prime running from Nazis and battling them atop trains. It’s amazing.
And worrisome. We are now that much closer to the day when we won’t need new actors, when CGI and AI storytellers will give us new James Bond movies starring 1964 Sean Connery, or new “Star Wars” films with the ’77 crew, or maybe 1978 Christopher Reeve and 1989 Michael Keaton teaming up as Superman and Batman. Or did they already do that in “The Flash”? At what point does the culture stagnate? And have we already reached that point? And what does it do to us as a result? Would we do something stupid like, I don't know, elect a sociopathic game show host as president?
Anyway, that’s why it felt both exciting and depressing.
Indy’s latest holy grail is introduced in that opener: the titular Dial created by Archimedes, which supposedly reveals fissures in time that allow for time travel. Indy doesn’t buy any of that hocus-pocus but his Brit companion Basil Shaw (Toby Jones) is less skeptical, while their Nazi nemesis, Dr. Voller (Mads Mikkelsen), is all in. But he only has half of it. And then he gets punched off the train. Auf wiedersehen.
Cut to: Moon Day 1969. Initially I thought that meant July 20, the small step/great leap day, but here it’s the day the Apollo 11 astronauts are feted with a ticker-tape parade in Manhattan. That actually happened, by the way, and it was huge, and it was followed by a ticker-tape parade in Chicago and then a state dinner in LA presided over by Pres. Nixon—who, yes, could’ve used the Archimedes Dial himself—but parade day back then wasn’t called “Moon Day.” The newspaper usage of “Moon Day” in 1969 mostly concerned legislative talk to turn July 20 into a national holiday. Yes, didn’t happen.
If life for Indy in 1945 was exciting, by 1969 it’s just annoying. His wife has left him, his neighbors are damn hippies listening to that damn Beatles music (“Magical Mystery Tour”), and his students don’t know the answers. Oh, and he’s being forced to retire. Oh, and his son from the previous movie, Mutt (Shia LaBeouf), died during the Vietnam War. No surprise, really. In 2008, LeBeouf was a huge rising star and now he’s problematic. So: Vietnam War.
Wait, one of Indy’s students does know the answers! Except she’s not his student. She’s his goddaughter, Helena Shaw (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), yes, the daughter of ol’ Basil, now deceased. Turns out she’s a bit larcenous, too. She wants the half of the Archimedes Dial that Indy took from her father—not for academic reasons but to sell to the highest bidder in Tangier. Another group (coincidentally?) shows up at the same time: Indy’s old nemesis Dr. Voller, with henchmen Klaber (Boyd Holbrook of “Narcos”: good) and Hauke (Olivier Richters: huge). Colleagues at Hunter College are killed, there’s a chase through the Apollo 11 ticker-tape parade, and Indy escapes on a horse but is of course blamed for the murders. And now we’re off to the races.
In Tangier, we’re introduced to the Griese jersey-wearing kid Teddy (Ethann Isidore), Helena’s larcenous sidekick, when Voller & Co. show up for another round of chase-me-I’m-yours. Then it’s the Aegean Sea, for scuba-diving with Indy’s old friend Renaldo (Antonio Banderas) and more chasing. Then Sicily and Archimedes’ Tomb. Each is a roller-coaster ride, and along the way Helena becomes less larcenous while Indy becomes more of a believer in the destiny of the Dial—particularly when they spot a wristwatch on Archimedes’ skeletal frame. But it’s at this moment, when they have both halves of the Dial, that Voller & Co. finally catch up and … yoink! They take both the Dial and Indy.
Voller/Mads is great, by the way. He wants Indy along not as a hostage but as a peer. He’s excited to show him what he’s done, and he wants Indy to be excited, too. Plus his plan is wonderfully ironic. Whenever the idea of time machines is brought up, the answer for many in the western world is to go back and kill Hitler. Which is exactly what Voller wants to do! Except he wants to do it to preserve Nazi victories. He wants to go back to ’39—maybe before Poland?—and kill him then. He wants a sensible Nazi Germany. I guess he’s nostalgic, too. Make Nazism Great Again.
Of course he overshoots the mark and winds up in 212 B.C.
Heavy lifting
Did anyone else think the warring factions in the Siege of Syracuse dealt with the sudden appearance of a WWII airplane with something like aplomb? They call it a dragon and start throwing spears, but c’mon, has any of them seen a dragon? Is no one deathly afraid of this huge metal thing in the sky? Also 212 B.C. spears turn out to be pretty effective. They actually down the thing and burn the Nazis. We knew how to make spears then. We knew how to burn Nazis.
Did anyone else think Helena—not to mention the movie—discounts Teddy’s achievements rather quickly? On the 1969 runway, he not only commandeers a plane and flies it for the first time, he pilots it through the timehole, then lands the sucker next to the warplane wreckage. He’s the reason they’re able to return. Otherwise they’re stuck there. How about a “Thank god” from her? Instead, she’s all, “Great work, kid, now don’t get cocky!” basically.
Because by this point she’s dealing with an Indiana Jones that doesn’t want to return to 1969. He’d rather hang with Archimedes in 212 B.C. than listen to one more Beatles song. I get it: archaeology. It’s the past as present. But talk about mucking with the timeline. Was anyone else disappointed in our longstanding hero?
Thankfully, Helena saves the day—and shortens the movie—by cold-cocking him. When he wakes up, it’s 1969 again. Think about all the heavy lifting she has to do here: drag Indy to Teddy’s plane in 212 B.C., fly with Teddy back through the timehole and somehow land on exactly the right century/year/day/time when they left; then (I assume) she has to drag him back to America, and New York City, and his apartment, and put him to bed. And while he’s still sleeping it off (helluva punch, girl), she reunites him with Karen Allen! She gets her to return! She gives him a reason to live! Then she takes Sallah (John Rhys-Davies: thinner) and all of his kids out for ice cream to give the lovebirds a moment.
Not bad for a woman who just wanted to sell half the Dial to the highest bidder in Tangier.
I’d heard Waller-Bridge wasn’t good, or her character was annoying, or something, but, no, she’s fine, it’s just that the character is inconsistent. She changes 180 degrees for no apparent reason. Plus you’d have to believe that Toby Jones, god bless him, sired this tall drink of water. That’s the Bob Griese jersey all over again.
Saturday July 29, 2023
C'mon, Internet
This is HBO Max, so Warner Bros./Discovery:
They've since changed that heading to read “A Scary Good Time,” because saying “Embrace the Fear' about one of the best comedies of the 1970s makes you look a little stupid. At least they were only stupid for a few weeks.
Speaking of: This is Google, after a search on ”Bart Starr."
Coach? Starr was a quarterback for 16 years, a coach for eight. As QB, he led the Packers to three NFL championships and the first two Super Bowl titles, won an MVP (1966), and was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio in 1977. He became legendary. During his years as a coach, the Packers appeared in the postseason once, losing in the second round to the Dallas Cowboys in the expanded 1982 playoffs. He was a little less than legendary.
It's still there, that designation. Google IDs him as a coach. Because Google. Because the whole damn thing is getting worse.
Embrace the fear.
Saturday July 29, 2023
Curtains for Zoosha?
I think I saw this via Mark Harris' Twitter account before Elon musked everything up. For a time, as a non-user, I couldn't even access Twitter. Yesterday I found I could again, though if you go to anyone's page you don't get their tweets (Xes? Echhs?) in reverse chronological order, as before. Now they're all over the place: 2022, 2017, 2020. Interesting snapshots, though. Right, that particular Trump idiocy. Right, another one. Right, the first awful days of the pandemic. Good times.
The point is, I don't know if I've ever felt so seen in a cultural tweet before.
Damien Owens, it turns out, is a writer, with several novels. I bought one of them on the strength of this tweet. You can find him on Amazon here. Yes, for some reason, I don't do Facebook or Twitter but still do Amazon. I'm not saying it makes sense.
He's also on Mastodon, and on the Blue Sky thing that's still in beta. We're all trying to figure it out. We all want to hang but the guys throwing parties are such, such assholes.
Friday July 28, 2023
Elon's Brand: Ecch
For a few years during the 1960s, Marvel Comics produced a humor magazine called NOT BRAND ECHH, a title playing off of commercials of the time that pitted a named product (Pepsi-Cola, say) vs. an unnamed product labeled “Brand X.” That was the brand you never wanted: Brand X.
I thought of it again when hearing about Elon's latest supergenius move: rebranding Twitter as X. Apparently that happened on Sunday.
Per the NY Times:
Inside Twitter's headquarters in San Francisco on Monday, X logos were projected in the cafeteria, while conference rooms were renamed to words with X in them, including “eXposure,” “eXult” and “s3Xy,” according to photos seen by The New York Times. Workers also began removing bird-related paraphernalia, such as a giant blue logo in the cafeteria. Outside the building, workers took off the first six letters of Twitter's name before the San Francisco Police Department stopped them for performing “unauthorized work,” according to an alert sent by the department.
Supposedly this is a first step in making Twitter an everything company like China's WeChat, but it's a stupid, clumsy first step—more of a pratfall, really.
“It's natural to wonder why the world's richest man would spend his time dismantling one of the world's most recognizable social-media brands in favor of an inscrutable super app nobody asked for,” The Atlantic's Charlie Warzel writes midway through his article, “Why Elon Killed the Bird.” Jeff Tiedrich has less patience in his post, “Never Fuck With Your Brand,” writing, “Elon hasn't just fucked with his brand, he's poured gasoline all over his brand and set it the fuck on fire. He's replaced one of the world's most iconic logos with a generic letter of the alphabet—one that thousands of business already use.”
What's a tweet now? An X? Or ex? Or echh?
To coin a phrase: Who says a social media platform has to be good?
Thursday July 27, 2023
Sinead O'Connor (1966-2023)
The most interesting and exciting thing in the whole world
At a time when music videos were getting more elaborate and fantastic—from the special effects of “Sledgehammer” to Michael Jackson's 1930s gangster noir “Smooth Criminal”—director John Maybury, for the second single from the second album by Sinead O'Connor, went the John Ford route. One time, so the legend goes, when the weather was not cooperating in Monument Valley and his assistant kind of threw up his hands, thinking they couldn't shoot anything, Ford said they could still shoot “the most interesting and exciting thing in the whole world: the human face.” And that's what Maybury gave us: a video-length closeup of O'Connor in all of her tough, vulnerable, beautiful, ambisexual glory. That video, and the song, “Nothing Compares 2 U,” written by Prince in 1985, made the Irish girl with the shaved head an international star.
I was suffering my own breakup at the time so the song hit deep for me. The simple act of inverting the usual order of how we talk about time (“It's been seven hours and 16 days...”) made you realize the singer was counting every hour. The album, “I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got,” was on constant rotation for me, too. Every song was great. No bums in the bunch. It begins with the Serenity Prayer—the first time I heard it, I believe—and the irony is there was nothing serene about Sinead or her career. There were public dustups with Prince and Madonna, Frank Sinatra and Andrew Dice Clay, and nobody seemed able to get past her hair. Then there was the Pope-picture-tearing incident on “Saturday Night Live.” That was in 1992 and “SNL” kind of threw her under the bus and all the knives came out. The next week Joe Pesci hosted the show, proudly showing off the photo of Pope John Paul II taped back together, and talking about how he wanted to smack Sinead around. For that, he was applauded while she was booed. The '90s were a weird time.
Particularly when you remember why she tore up the Pope's photo. It was to protest the Catholic Church's silence on child abuse. She was in-your-face, impolite and impolitic, but she sure as hell wasn't wrong.
Given how much I loved the album, I don't know why I didn't seek out more of her stuff but I didn't. I wasn't the only one. “I Do Not Want...” was a No. 1 album everywhere, and her follow-ups were No. 1 nowhere. I get the feeling she didn't mind. In her 2021 memoir, she writes, “I feel that having a No. 1 record derailed my career, and my tearing the photo put me back on the right track.” In an interview with The New York Times, she adds, “It seems to me that being a pop star is almost like being in a type of prison.”
All the bells say: too late, as John Berryman wrote. These also say: too soon.
Tuesday July 25, 2023
Happy 40th, Pine-Tar Incident
Not so fast, Yankees Baseball Network
Yesterday was the 40th anniversary of the pine-tar incident, when KC Royals third baseman George Brett hit a two-out, two-run homerun off closer Goose Gossage at Yankee Stadium to give the Royals a one-run lead—until, that is, Yankees manager Billy Martin accused him of using a bat with excessive pine tar up the handle and asked the umpires to disqualify him and call him out. Which they did. Which led to Brett storming out of the dugout in insane, eyeball-popping fashion. Which has made for a fun video clip ever since.
Asked by ESPN's William Weinbaum what it's like to be known as the pine-tar guy, Brett responds that everyone's known for something and before that he was known as the hemorrhoids guy (cf., 1980 World Series), so pine tar isn't so bad. Me, I'm like, “Isn't Brett just known as one of the best hitters in baseball history? And one of the last guys to challenge .400? And a great Yankee-killer in the postseason? Plus a handsome SOB?” Let's get our priorities straight, people.
There are two stand-out quotes in their interview for me. The first is Brett describing July 24, 1983:
We were playing the team that I despise the most, the New York Yankees, and they despise me.
Gotta love him for that. The other is when Weinbaum asks him whether he watches the clip much. He says he doesn't seek it out but he doesn't turn away, either. Then this:
Showed it to my kids a whole bunch of times when they were young. I wanted to see the look on their faces when I got mad. I told them, “You better never make me this mad.” And they never did.
Is Brett the greatest Yankee killer of all time? He's in the running—even if his exploits didn't always lead to the Yankees being killed. Royals won the AL West in 1976, '77, '78 and '80, and faced the Yankees in the ALCS each time, and they didn't finally get to the World Series until 1980. But at least that was a sweep.
These are Brett's numbers during those Yankees series:
Year | G | AB | R | H | 2B | 3B | HR | RBI | BB | SO | BA | OBP | SLG | OPS |
1976 | 5 | 18 | 4 | 8 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 5 | 2 | 1 | .444 | .476 | .778 | 1.254 |
1977 | 5 | 20 | 2 | 6 | 0 | 2 | 0 | 2 | 1 | 0 | .300 | .333 | .500 | .833 |
1978 | 4 | 18 | 7 | 7 | 1 | 1 | 3 | 3 | 0 | 1 | .389 | .389 | 1.056 | 1.444 |
1980 | 3 | 11 | 3 | 3 | 1 | 0 | 2 | 4 | 1 | 0 | .273 | .333 | .909 | 1.242 |
TOTALS | 17 | 67 | 16 | 24 | 3 | 4 | 6 | 14 | 4 | 2 | .358 | .394 | .761 | 1.155 |
Not sure what number I like best: that 1.056 slugging percentage (slugging percentage!) during the '78 ALCS; or the fact that over these 17 games he struck out exactly twice.
For those who don't know: the AL president wound up overruling the umps on the pine-tar call, for not being in the spirit of the rule (pine tar doesn't help you hit homers); the rest of the game was played several weeks later from after the homer, with Brett tossed for rushing the field like a madman, and the Royals won, 5-4. Brett watched the end from an Italian restaurant in New Jersey—another detail from the interview I liked.
Final thought? Billy would've killed for a player like Brett. He was exactly the kind of guy he wanted on his team.
Monday July 24, 2023
Box Office: 'Barbie' Shatters the Glass Ceiling
Yesterday I was returning from the Olympic peninsula on a mid-morning ferry loaded with Seattle Mariners and Toronto Blue Jays fans arriving way early for the 1:10 game; but I also noticed a few women and girls glitzed up in pink and shiny baubles and taking selfies. I figured—unless they were arriving super early for the evening's Taylor Swift show—that they were heading downtown to see Greta Gerwig's “Barbie,” starring Margot Robbie. Indeed, that's why I was traveling alone. My wife stayed behind an extra day to see the film with her sister-in-law at the Rose Theater in Port Townsend. Her toenails were painted pink in honor.
So I got some sense of the groundswell of support before finding out, via Box Office Mojo, that “Barbie” topped the weekend with a $162 million haul. That's the 20th-best ever, unadjusted, and fourth-best since the pandemic all but destroyed the movie-theater industry—while the three ahead of it are the usual super-powered suspects: Spidey, Doctor Strange and Wakanda. Which, right, makes “Barbie” the biggest opener of the year. It did what Harrison Ford, Tom Cruise, The Little Mermaid, Flash and Transformers couldn't: Got people to the movie theater in droves.
As for the other half of the “Barbenheimer” weekend? Chris Nolan's “Oppenheimer” opened to $82 million. Some IMAX shows are sold out until August.
All of which is good news for people like me who like watching movies in theaters, and who wouldn't mind something besides superhero movies now and again.
I'd love to see how the opening weekend of “Oppenheimer” stacks up against other biopics, or against other films with a 3-hour runtime. You used to be able to get that kind of info on Box Office Mojo. Then Amazon bought it and enshittified it. Now it's a battle to just find all-time opening weekends. (For the record: Go to the “All-Time” tab, then the “Weekend Records” tab, and it's the third one down—but after “Biggest Second Weekend Drops” and “Largest Post-Thanksgiving Weekend Drops.” That's right, they alphabetized it. Because who doesn't want to know which movies performed poorly the weekend after Thanksgiving weekend? That's like a weekly conversation for me.)
In third place with $19.8 million is the third weekend of “Sound of Freedom,” that right-wing, anti-Hollywood Angels Studio production starring a blonde-haired Jim Caviezel in “the incredible true story of a former government agent turned vigilante who embarks on a dangerous mission to rescue hundreds of children from sex traffickers,” per IMDb. It's done gangbusters business, thus far outdoing Cruise's seventh(?) turn as Ethan Hunt: $124 million in three weeks vs. $118 in two. Cruise came in fourth: $19.3. Rounding out the top 5: “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” with $6.6 mil for a $158 domestic total.
It is pretty amazing what three days of “Barbie” has already walloped: Not just four weeks of Indy and two of Ethan but the domestic runs of “Creed” ($156), “Transformers” ($155), “Fast X” ($145), and “The Flash” ($107). The Old Boys Club ain't what it used to be.
Sunday July 16, 2023
Before They Were Famous: Kevin Costner in ... What?
I think I got pulled in to the IMDb slideshow because I didn't recognize the actors and thought, “Well, if this is 'Before They Were Famous,' maybe this will help me figure out who among the kids is famous.” Win win.
Sashe Calle, for example. Here she is on the afternoon soap “The Young and the Restless” before she was famous. So why is she famous now? Ah, she's the new Supergirl in the new “The Flash” movie nobody went to see. Got it. And here's Anson Mount wearing flannel on some 1995 TV somethingorother. And now he's ...? Oh right, he's the new square-jawed Capt. Pike on the new “Star Trek.” Or the new old “Star Trek.”
And then I got to the one on Kevin Costner.
Before he was famous.
Kevin Costner.
In “Dances With Wolves.”
By that point, he'd only starred in “No Way Out,” “The Untouchables” (the fourth-biggest box-office hit of 1987) “Bull Durham” (15th of 1988) and “Field of Dreams” (14th of 1989). I subscribe to newspapers.com, which digitizes and makes searchable hundreds of newspapers from the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries; and in 1989, among the newspapers this website has contracts with, there were 40,113 references to Kevin Costner.
Before he was famous.
Could IMDb get it more wrong? Could IMDb continue to get it more wrong in all of the ways they do? It's like they're gaslighting our cultural history. Costner became more famous after this, sure, and “Dances With Wolves” helped. And so did “The Bodyguard” and Whitney Houston and “I Will Always Love You,” and all that. In 1991, per newspapers.com, he's referenced 80,301 times. So that's twice as famous. He became twice as famous as he was before. But before, he was just one of the most famous actors in Hollywood.
Put another way: It's not like anyone went to “Dances With Wolves” in 1990 and said, “So who's this starring again?” We knew.
IMDb, if you can get a deleted-scene screengrab of him as Alex in “The Big Chill,” yes, that's him before he was famous. You might want to try that.
Friday July 14, 2023
George Will: Putin's Fifth Column is the GOP
“The Republican nomination contest is accelerating, as is Ukraine's counteroffensive, the latter underscoring the stakes of the former. During Spain's civil war, a rebel general boasted that he had four columns marching on Madrid and ”a fifth column“ in Madrid, meaning supporters of the army's insurgency. Vladimir Putin's fifth column is not in Kyiv but in the Trump-DeSantis faction of the Republican Party.
”Putin has two hopes for a less than completely mortifying rescue from his Ukraine blunder. One is the election of Trump, whose frivolousness about national security complements his weakling's admiration for a bully. Putin's other hope is the election of DeSantis, who says (or said, before retreating when criticized) Russia's attempt to erase a European nation is a “territorial dispute.” And whose pandering to Trumpkins prevents him from denouncing House Republicans who are as eager to abandon Ukraine as they would have been to abandon Czechoslovakia in 1938.“
-- George Will, ”Neither Trump nor DeSantis will get the GOP nomination," The Washington Post. I hope he's right. I hope he's prophetic. It'll make things tougher for the Democrats but it'll be much, much better for the nation. (Well, depending on who winds up with it.)
Wednesday July 12, 2023
All the Jerseys at the 2023 All-Star Game
The view from 300 during BP.
The team with the uglier uniforms won. So it goes.
Yesterday I attended my second in-person All-Star Game, at what is now called T-Mobile Park and used to be called Safeco Field, south of downtown Seattle, about 1.5 miles from where I live in the First Hill neighborhood. The last (the only other) ASG I attended was at Safeco, and as I was walking to the game, I ran through all the All-Star Games that played in Minneapolis (where I grew up) and Seattle during my lifetime, and why I hadn't been to more of them.
MINNEAPOLIS
- 1965: Metropolitan Stadium
- 1985: The Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome
- 2014: Target Field
SEATTLE
- 1979: The Kingdome
- 2001: Safeco Field
- 2023: T-Mobile Park
I missed the first one in Minnesota because I was 2 years old, missed the second because I was in college, studying, and had lost track of baseball for a time. I remember feeling sad that I'd lost track of baseball. Like: What had I become? But look at that list again, there's some interesting history there. Our stadiums once had generic names (“Metropolitan”); then in the 1960s and '70s multi-use stadiums were built and named for famous, powerful people (Humphrey, King, RFK, Shea); but then in the 1990s it was decided, no, retro ballparks subsidized by local governments, with high-priced seating and suites so rich people wouldn't have to intermingle with the rabble, that was the way to go, and while we're at it let's make even more money by selling naming rights to the highest-bidding corporation. And that's where we are. The world keeps turning, and turning bad.
But what sticks out for me is that each of the above ASGs was in a different stadium—except for the two I attended, at Safeco/T-Mobile. How often does an All-Star Game show up at the same stadium within a 25-year span? And that led me to this Wikipedia page on all the MLB All-Star venues, which led me to the realization that I have no idea how they choose the ASG venue. I'd always assumed they just took turns. And if a new stadium was built, well, you go to the head of the line. That first part isn't really true, though. The Tampa Bay Rays, for example, have been around since 1998 and have never hosted—I assume because they have a shitty ballpark. It's MLB going to Tampa, “No, you haven't tried hard enough. You're not helping the brand.”
But if a county builds a new stadium? Damn right we're going to showcase you. The first retro ballpark, Camden Yards in Baltimore, opened in 1992 and hosted the All-Star Game in 1993, and since then, with a few detours to stadiums that were established (Veterans, 1996) or iconic (Fenway, 1999) or iconic and soon-to-be-shuttered (Yankee, 2008), it's been all the retro ballparks, year after year. And then I guess they just ran out. In 2019, the ASG returned to Cleveland and Jacobs/Progressive. In 2021, Coors got a second go-round. In '22 it was iconic Dodger Stadium and now it was Seattle's turn to re-host. Re-hosting at the same stadium with a new corporate name is the new thing. It's what's happening. And I was there for the happening.
Seattle lucked out in showcasing our city, since yesterday was about as perfect a day as you could ask for: mid-70s, blue skies, and the mountains were out. My Philly cousin in LA sent me this email during the game: “Seattle sure looks good on TV. In fact the beauty shots are way more interesting than the game.” I have to admit, there were times, sitting in the 300 level behind homeplate, when a plane went overhead and I'd get lost just looking at its slow trajectory against that vast blueness.
On the ground, not everything was so peachy. Walking there, via the International District and Seahawks parking lot, I ran into crowds on Occidental, as well as one of those miked-up doomsaying preachers. I thought: “Well, at least they pushed him way back here instead of in front of the stadium where he usually is.” Except, nope. He was one of four such preachers I ran into on Occidental. Is there a permit involved when using a microphone for soap-box sermonizing in a public space? I'm curious how it works. I'd be way more interested in these guys if they'd lose the mic. (OK, not too interested.)
And the hawking that I wanted to hear but didn't? Scorecard guys. “Programs, get yer programs!” That was about as staple as baseball use to be, and I would've bought one. But apparently they don't sell them that way anymore. Now it's via the souvenir shops and stands, which may be why the lines there were superlong before the game, and not long at all for the foodstuffs. Me, I bought a brat from my usual guys, ate it in my seat while watching BP, then returned to the 100-level and walked around the park a bit. My favorite thing was checking out all the jerseys everyone was wearing. It wasn't just M's and whatever team we were playing. Everyone was represented, all 30 MLB teams, and then some. My seatmate Andy W. saw an Expos jersey; both of us saw a good 1969 Seattle Pilots number. Hell, Rays fans even showed up, poor bastards. (“Poor” in that they have a smart, winning organization with a shitty ballpark and fanbase.) I saw a Bench 5, and a De La Cruz 44, and a Mets de Grom, and a Jeter 2—along with the usual Griffey 24s, Martinez 11s and Rodriguez 44s. Oh right, I even saw a Yankees 13 for the other Rodriguez, A-Rod. That was intriguing. The most obscure jersey? A Kenji Johjima number. Been a while. If ever.
Two chants got going during the game: “Come-to-Seattle! [clap clap clapclapclap]” whenever Shohei Ohtani batted; and “Sell the team!” whenever the Oakland A's lone rep did anything. That message was for the A's current owner, who is in the midst of shipping the team to Las Vegas, a horrible idea, so I was behind both chants. What I wasn't behind? The continued booing of Astros ballplayers because of the 2017 garbage-can scandal. One, most of the current Astros weren't on that team, so you're booing innocent bystanders. Two, the Mariners weren't going anywhere that year, so it's not like Houston robbed us of anything. And three, who knows, but the cheating might've prevented the New York Yankees from winning the pennant in 2017, which was their best shot at a pennant in the 2010s, so instead they suffered their first pennant-less decade since Babe Ruth was purchased for $100k back in the winter of 1919. C'mon. Anything that prevents the Yankees winning more is a positive. “By any means necessary,” as a great man once said. So stop with the booing already.
(I know, the booing won't stop. Mob rule. Once booing becomes a thing, you can't put it back in the bottle. See: A-Rod.)
We had three Mariners reps this go-round and were lucky to get those. The first one chosen, Luis Castillo, didn't play, but George Kirby pitched an inning (and gave up a run), and Julio Rodriguez, whose jersey I was wearing, played the second half in center field and struck out in the 7th. In the 9th, with the AL down by one, he was the fourth man due up, and the first two guys made outs. The third guy, Kyle Tucker, is an Astro who wasn't around in 2017 but was lustily booed nevertheless. He worked a walk to let us see Julio bat again. (See? Astros can do good things.) Last year, it seemed Julio kept making the magical happen, but this season not so much. He flails too much after the outside sliders and then takes the fastballs in the zone. But here he worked a walk, to get us to Cleveland third baseman Jose Ramirez, who struck out to send us home, a little disappointed but not much.
I was excited to see the youth on the field, all these up-and-comers, so it was interesting that the big blow for the NL was struck by Colorado catcher Elias Diaz, age 32+, a career .249/.302/.391 hitter, playing in his first All-Star Game. Good for him! The scoring began with a Diaz homerun (Yandy, AL, 2nd inning) and ended with a Diaz homerun (Elias, NL, 8th inning), which is a nice bookend. We try to stay neat in Seattle. But I would've preferred it ending with a Rodriguez homerun.
Is that my last All-Star Game in my home park? Probably, unless I move. The year 2001 doesn't seem so long ago in some contexts, but I was 38 then and I'm 60 now. And 60+22 isn't my favorite math.
After the game, fans file past an image of a Diaz who was neither of the Diazes that went yard during the game. (I wish I'd taken more photos of all the jerseys. I like the brave Bonds fan. And the Kyle Lewis wearer has nothing on Kenji.)
Monday July 10, 2023
.500 Days of Summer
After the first game of the 2023 season the Seattle Mariners were one game over .500, and at the start of 2023 All-Star Break the Mariners are one game over .500. That's often baseball, those ups and downs, that stasis, but much of the season felt like a struggle to get to .500 and then slipping below the surface again. Hey, we finally made it! Oops. Glug glug glug.
- 4-8 —> 8-8 —> 8-11
- 11-16 —> 17-17 —> 21-20 (!) —> 21-23
We began June two games over .500, then of course lost five of six. How many times last month did we reach .500 only to lose the next game? A lot. June 6, .500; June 7 loss. June 13, .500; June 14 loss. Same with June 16-17, 18-19, and 23-24. You know the Vic Chesnutt song “Flirted With You All My Life”? That was the Mariners and .500 for the first half of 2023.
Going into July we were four games under, so of course we win four in a row. And then of course we lose one. Glug glug.
That said, we did end the first half by winning series against the Rays, Giants and Astros, all postseason contenders. The last series we lost was to the Nationals, who have the second-worst record in the NL. So it goes.
MLB no longer as the All-Star Game but the All-Star Week, and this week, or this year, it's in Seattle. I'll miss the homerun derby today but will be at the game tomorrow, section 327.
Friday July 07, 2023
Scorsese: 'Where the Hell We've Been'
“Films allow us to see ourselves—to see who we've been, how we've evolved. There may be things we don't like to see about ourselves in the past. [But] we don't really have a chance of knowing where we're going unless we know where the hell we've been.”
-- Martin Scorsese, “100 Years of Warner Bros.,” episode 3
Amen. It's why retrofitting past artifacts to current cultural values is a sin to me. (Recent example: scrubbing the n-word from “The French Connection.”) It's not only white-washing history, it's an insult to all the people who fought and sacrificed to get us where we are now. It's pretending their great work wasn't even necessary.
Wednesday July 05, 2023
Lancelot Links
- Joey Poz has a nice Esquire cover story on Aaron Judge, No. 99, Yankees captain, in the mould of professional Yankees like Gehrig, Mattingly and Jeter (as opposed to raucous Yankees like Ruth and Reggie), and he did it without even interviewing the man. Apparently Judge turned that down—politely and professionally. “You do know it's for the cover?” “Yeah, whatevs.” The most impressive thing isn't that Posnanski did it without the interview, it's that he talked up the Yankees' recent championship drought without a snicker. He's a better man than I am.
- David Chen breaks down Reddit, subreddits, and the recent subreddit protest in his SubStack article “It Sure Would Be Great If Our Social Media Companies Weren't All Run by Jerks.” Chen also quotes from Cory Doctorow's “enshittifcation model” which I've been thinking about a lot lately. Doctorow's argument: On platforms, surpluses first go to users (great experience!), then suppliers (wait a minute...), then shareholders (crap). Chen writes: “At some point [Reddit CEO Steve] Huffman became convinced that he was the one in charge and everyone had better do what he says or else. There's a callousness to the concerns of the community, a sense that Reddit and Twitter can force users to stick around and accept whatever conditions are on offer.” Chen is more optimistic than I am, though, that this spells doom for the platform. Maybe eventually? Still waiting on that fate for Facebook (which I left in 2019) and Twitter (2022).
- A Twitter account from a pretty blond with ties to Obama and Biden campaigns whose tweets are “cartoonishly liberal” turns out to be (shocker) a fake.
- A Twitter account from a doofus male with ties to Silicon Valley whose tweets are cartoonishly douchey turns out to be (shocker) Elon Musk. The Atlantic goes over his latest idiocy: limiting the number of tweets users can see, which, Charlie Wurzel writes, is “the social-media equivalent of Costco implementing a 10-items-or-fewer rule.”
- The fact that The New York Times wrote about a woman who has amassed half a million Tik-Tok followers by reading entries from her teenage diary sends Craig Wright into thoughts about Semisonic, Copernicus, and the centre not holding. “I miss gatekeepers” I once tweeted after reading too many idiot thoughts, and Craig is basically saying “Fuck gatekeepers.” He's saying there is no centre and never was, so enjoy yourself. “Fly, be free,” he's saying, which is what Mork said as he tossed an egg into the air for what turned out to be a very short flight.
Tuesday July 04, 2023
Movie Review: 100 Years of Warner Bros. (2023)
The brothers Warner: Sam, Harry, Jack and Albert. Sam was the visionary, Harry the businessman. Jack was the shvontz.
WARNING: SPOILERS
At first, I was pleasantly surprised.
Yes, it’s a four-part documentary on Warner Bros., produced by Warner Bros., and so a little self-congratulatory. But they got Morgan Freeman to narrate; and in that first episode, which takes us from the studio’s creation in 1923 until the late 1960s, when the last Warner, Jack, finally stepped down, they don’t ignore the bad shit: the blackface of “The Jazz Singer”; Jack taking credit—and the Oscar—for “Casablanca”; the cravenness of Jack before HUAC; Jack wresting control of the company from his two remaining brothers, possibly leading to the death of Harry in 1958. OK, so the problem was mostly Jack. James Cagney used to call him the Shvontz, Yiddish for “prick,” and the doc doesn’t ignore or whitewash any of it. That’s kind of cool.
And then the deeper we get into the series, and the closer we get to the present, the ickier it becomes.
CEOs come and go
I guess the second episode (late ’60s to early ’80s) isn’t bad. Merged with 7 Arts, and floundering, Warner Bros. was purchased by a gregarious former car salesman named Steve Ross, whose main question was: Do we still make movies? Is that still viable?
Turns out: Yes! And he hired three guys, Ted Ashley as CEO, Frank Wells as vice chair and John Calley to head production; and they in turn hired popular filmmakers like Clint Eastwood and Mel Brooks, and true artists like Stanley Kubrick, and let them do what they do. Martin Scorsese talks about looking for a distributor for “Mean Streets,” and not only being turned down by Paramount but kind of insulted: “Please leave,” he was told. But the guys at Warners? They knew those streets, they knew those people, and Scorsese walked out of the Warners screening stunned that he had a distribution deal.
“The thing about Warner Bros.,” Scorsese says, “they gave serious filmmakers a real home.”
So why didn’t he stay? “Taxi Driver” was Columbia, “Raging Bull” United Artists. The doc brags about Warners’ association with Terrence Malick and “Badlands,” so why was “Days of Heaven” done at Paramount? Why, after “THX 1138” at Warner Bros., did George Lucas go to Universal for “American Graffiti” and Fox for “Star Wars”? It looks like Warners got rooked there. They gave the kid his shot, then he made his box office hits, and remade the culture, elsewhere.
Some of the narration is already beginning to feel off. Eastwood’s Dirty Harry character, Morgan Freeman tells us, “played to America’s lifelong romance with law and order.” That’s one way of putting it. We’re also told that Warners “struck TV gold with a character from its comic division”—Lynda Carter’s Wonder Woman. Don’t get me wrong, she made an impact; but in its three years on the air, per Nielsen, the show finished 45th, 66th and 59th. Not quite “TV gold.”
The emphasis on Carter is part of the doc’s revisionism, which keeps underlining the studio’s bonafides with women and people of color. Sometimes it’s deserved (“Roots”), but mostly it feels like pandering or ass-covering. At one point, Freeman intones, “Attentive to the mood on the streets, Warner Bros. made history when they signed multitalented artist Gordon Parks, the first Black director to helm a major studio-financed film.” The doc then spends more time on Parks and “The Learning Tree” (1969) than it does on James Cagney and his entire oeuvre. Yes, I’m biased in the matter, but c’mon, Cagney was synonymous with Warners for years and years. His battles with the studio—legendary—are also given short shrift; they make it seem it was just Bette Davis and Olivia de Havilland when it was a triumvirate. Cagney was first but de Havilland did it best. He won his own freedom while she won everybody’s.
In the third episode (early ‘80s to late ’90s), Robert Daly and Terry Semel are now running things, and we get Steven Spielberg talking up his deal with Warners, and how it was a great place to work, blah blah, but again his best movies were elsewhere. With Warners he directed “The Color Purple,” “Empire of the Sun,” “A.I.” and “Ready Player One.” Not exactly your Spielberg fest. Yes, Warners bankrolled Eastwood’s “Unforgiven,” and, yes, they took chances with Oliver Stone’s “JFK,” fueling nutjobs around the world; but we’re now getting as much TV (“ER” and “Friends”) as movies; while the importance of Tim Burton’s “Batman,” per the narrative, isn’t that it demonstrated the box-office pop of superhero flicks; it’s that its box office allowed Warners to talk merger from a position of strength.
By the time you get to the final episode the corporate bullshit is thick. They brag about “unscripted television,” such as “The Bachelor” and “The Voice,” then give us short clips from the following:
- “Little Big Shots”
- “The Jennifer Hudson Show”
- “Hogwarts Tournament of Houses”
These are shows? Or were shows? Yes, past tense. Just checked: two of them lasted only one season. But it’s women, people of color and Warners IP, so here ya go.
Do we need five minutes on “Two and a Half Men”? Do we need Morgan Freeman intoning lines like:
“From the ultimate superhero face-off to a motley crew of supervillains, DC was reshaping the comic book film landscape.”
That one actually made me laugh out loud. In the first part he’s referencing the idiotic “Batman v. Superman” (Rotten Tomatoes: 29%), and in the second it’s the idiotic “Suicide Squad” (26%). Reshaping is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.
And guess who isn’t mentioned at all? Zack Snyder. Obviously I’m not a fan, but it takes some impressive footwork to keep talking up Warners’ superhero universe in the 2010s without once mentioning the architect. They do this by promoting Patty Jenkins, director of Gal Gadot’s “Wonder Woman,” along with new CEO Kevin Tsujihara, who arrived in 2013 and “really wanted to expand the DC universe.” Sure he did. Because Marvel had already shown the way and Snyder was in the midst of doing it. Or fucking it up.
Talking of weekend b.o.
“100 Years” was directed by Leslie Iwerks, and if that names sounds familiar, yes, she’s the granddaughter of the beautifully named Ub Iwerks, who, in 1928, helped create Mickey Mouse with some schlub named Disney. One of the men got fabulously wealthy. So it was, so it always shall be.
Again, the doc has moments. I liked Clint Eastwood, frail now, deep into his 90s, talking about how he misses Steve Ross. That was sweet. And I could listen to Spielberg and Scorsese talk movies forever. Plus it’s valuable learning movies from the viewpoint of just one studio. I wouldn’t mind if other studios did this. While we still have other studios.
But business sucks up more and more of the story. Mergers come fast and furious (AOL, AT&T, Discovery), and those CEOs begin to come and go with a rapidity that makes your head spin. Tsujihara has a #MeToo moment in 2019, so he’s replaced by Ann Sarnoff, who lasts a year until she’s replaced by Hulu founder Jason Kilar, who is gone with the arrival of Discovery and David Zaslav in ’22. Just in time for the birthday party! Zaslav goes on and on about the importance of storytelling, and how he works from Jack Warner’s old office with one of the original Maltese Falcons on his desk to remind him of what matters: “The stuff that dreams are made of,” he says, quoting Sam Spade misquoting Shakespeare. That's here. In the real world, Zaslav rebrands HBO as “Max,“ lays off half the staff at Turner Classic Movies, and shelves completed movies such as ”Batgirl" for tax purposes. The Shvontz lives.
Monday July 03, 2023
Alan Arkin (1934-2023)
Alan Arkin, who passed away last week of heart ailments at the age of 89, said one of my favorite lines in recent movie memory.
In 2012, I put together a list of my favorite movie lines of the year—I was a go-getter back then—and a line from Ben Affleck's “Argo” was No. 2. In the movie, Alan Arkin plays Lester Siegel, a B-movie producer who agrees to help the CIA's Tony Mendez (Affleck) create a fake movie in order to hopefully spirit six Americans out of Iran in the midst of the hostage crisis. Anthony Lane described him as someone “so scornfully amused by Mendez’s request that he has no option but to obey it,” and at one point, he and Mendez are sharing fast food on some steps in magic-hour light and talking about life. Siegel says this:
“I was a terrible father. [Pause] It's a bullshit business. It's like coal mining: You come home to your wife and kids, you can't wash it off.”
It's a good line but the line reading is what makes it great. There's no apology in his voice, or concern about appearances, or asking for forgivness. He's past caring but still caring. Back then I wrote, “It's a mea culpa without too much culpa. ... He's describing Hollywood but he could be describing any business. They're all like that. That's why it resonates. We all carry that bullshit home.”
But that's not the line I'm talking about.
Six years earlier, in “Little Miss Sunshine,” Arkin played Edwin Hoover, or Grandpa, a man who travels 800 miles with his absolutely dysfuctional family in a yellow van so his granddaughter, Olive (Abigail Breslin), can participate in the titular contest in Redondo Beach, Calif. Are the parents fighting? I forget. But the trip includes Uncle Frank (Steve Carrell), a gay, depressive, unemployed Proust scholar, and Dwayne (Paul Dano), the wife's son from a previous marriage, who, stymied in his wish to become a fighter pilot, has taken a vow of silence and communicates only with notepad and pen. Meanwhile, Edwin, the father's father, is living with them because he got kicked out of his senior facility for snorting heroin. Yeah, it's a bit much. But it's still fun.
On the trip, stultified and fed up, Grandpa looks over at Dwayne, this doofus kid with his doofus vow, and says the following:
Can I give you some advice? Well, I'm going to give it to you anyway. I don't want you making the same mistakes I made when I was young. Dwayne? That's your name, right? Dwayne? This is the voice of experience talking. Are you listening?
You wonder what it could be. There's so much wrong with Dwayne it could be anything.
Fuck a lot of women, Dwayne. Not just one woman. A lot of women.
I exploded with laughter. It was so unexpected. It was also the line reading. He didn't care what other people thought but he cared enough to dispense this advice. He was past caring but still caring. In his later career, Arkin mastered that tone.
Better: It echoes something Arkin, as Dr. Sheldon Kornpett, said nearly 30 years earlier in “The In-Laws.” You know that movie, right? If you don't, I recommend it. He's being led astray by his future in-law and possible rogue CIA agent Vince Ricardo (Peter Falk), and now they're facing a firing squad in Latin America. And with death staring at him in the face, bereft, he says something like: “I only fucked four women. And two of them were my wife.” The regret Sheldon has is the advice Edwin dispenses.
Arkin's big break came on Broadway in 1963 with “Enter Laughing,” basically playing Carl Reiner, and shortly thereafter he was nominated for a best actor Oscar for playing Lt. Rozanov in “The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming” (which I have to see). Then he was terrorizing a blind Audrey Hepburn in “Wait Until Dark” before being cast as the titular “Inspector Clouseau” (following Peter Sellers), and then that great symbol of 20th century defianct impotence, Lt. Yossarian in “Catch 22.” Jeffrey Wells over at Hollywood Elsewhere writes of Arkin, “For me he was the king of fickle neuroticism and glum irreverence for decades and decades, and for decades and decades I loved him like few others.” Amen.