The ESPN.com headline:

Braves' Acuña 5th player ever with 40-40 season

I went through the list in my mind: Canseco, Bonds, A-Rod and ... who was the other? Right. Alfonso Soriano in 2006. Or did I even know that? 

Then it hit me: Will Acuna also be the first since the first to win the MVP? Here's how they fared:

• Canseco, 1988, 42 HRs and 40 SBs (16 CS), first in AL MVP in a landslide, with 28 (of 28) first-place votes
• Bonds, 1996, 42 HRs and 40 SBs (7 CS), fifth in NL MVP voting, despite the league's highest bWAR (which obviously didn't exist yet)
• A-Rod, 1998, 42 HRs and 46 SBs (13 CS), ninth in AL MVP voting, despite the league's highest b WAR
• Soriano, 2006, 46 HRs and 41 SBs (17 CS), sixth in NL MVP voting

Interesting that with the exception of Bonds their SB% weren't great. Interesting, too, that with the exception of A-Rod everyone had more homers than SBs.

And now Acuna (thus far):

• Acuna, 2023, 40 HRs and 68 SBs (13 CS)

He's also leading the league in half of all offensive categories but apparently his defense is a little suspect? His bWar is currently 8.0, so he won't approach Bonds' 9.7 bWAR but he has a good shot at A-Rod's 8.5. He's already passed Soriano (6.1) and Canseco (7.3). 

Over on the Substack Section 327 that I do with friend and worldwide webslinger Tim H., I wondered about the MLB teams that have never gone through a name change—either by moving to a different city/state, changing the name of their city/state, or changing their nickname. Like neither Flordia team counts since both made tweaks: Florida Marlins became Miami Marlins (alliterative!) while the Tampa Devil Rays simply became the Rays (meh). I narrowed it down to 11 teams who, soup to nuts, have just been one thing:

• Chicago White Sox
• Detroit Tigers
• Philadelphia Phillies
• Pittsburgh Pirates
• New York Mets
• Kansas City Royals
• San Diego Padres
• Seattle Mariners
• Toronto Blue Jays
• Arizona Diamondbacks
• Colorado Rockies

Tim wondered about some of those original 16 teams, though. Like I discounted the Red Sox because, per Baseball Reference, they'd once been called the Americans: “As I understand it,” Tim wrote, “there's some question whether the Red Sox were ever really the Boston Americans or if they were simply referred to in the papers as such as a shorthand for 'the Boston team of the American League'...” 

Thankfully I have that superhandy newspapers.com account which gives you a bit of a glimpse into our past. And I was able to determine that from 1901 to 1906 there were zero references to “Boston Red Sox” (quotes included) in American newspapers, but there were thousands of references to “Boston Americans.”

All that began to change at the tail end of 1907:

Undoubtedly. 

The best part was a few grafs down:

“Pres Taylor has suggested red stockings to be a part of the uniforms and thought the Boston 'Red Sox' might sound better to the baseball enthusiasts than the names now used by many, such as 'The Pilgrims,' 'The Yankees,' etc.”

The Boston Yankees???? Wow. It's tough to make two cities simultaneously nauseous but I think that sentence would do it. 

I'm with Joe on this. Mr. Posnanski was at the the Royals-Astros game Saturday and fans were still booing José Altuve, and he was kind of scratching his head:

I mean, on one level, sure, I get it: Many people think Altuve was wearing some sort of sign-stealing buzzer when he hit the pennant-winning home run off an Aroldis Chapman breaking ball in 2019.

What I don't fully get is why people in KANSAS CITY are holding on to that all these years later. ... Whatever he may or may not have done, the Royals are not really involved.

It struck me as odd because everything else about Jose Altuve is so utterly likable. He's tiny — the shortest player in baseball since Kansas City's beloved Freddie Patek — and he plays such a wonderfully joyous game. I mean, he's a lifetime .307 hitter. He already has more than 2,000 hits. He's 5-foot-6, 166 pounds, and he has 209 regular-season home runs and 23 more in the playoffs — that's absurd. Only Joe Morgan, among players around Altuve's size, hit 200 big-league home runs. This guy's a little miracle. ... I just find it kind of weird that Royals fans are still mad at Altuve over a home run that beat the Yankees four years ago.

Amen amen amen. I was shaking my head last July when Seattle fans were booing Astros players during the All-Star game, but added: “I know, the booing won't stop. Mob rule. Once booing becomes a thing, you can't put it back in the bottle.” Even so, I'm with Joe on this, and particularly when it comes to Altuve, whom I, as a charter member of the Short Man's Room, totally cheer for.

A friend offered us three free tickets to the Mariners game today, and we got rooked.

We sat in the sun in the left-field bleachers, row 2, good seats, but I've never been much of a bleacher bum and age 60 is the wrong time to start. I squinted a lot and didn't always pick up the ball. Neither did the Mariners. It was the third game of a three-game series with the Dodgers and we were trying to avoid the sweep. Their lineup suggested they were, too. It was their B squad, the getaway game group. No Mookie, Freddie Freeman, Max Muncy or Will Smith. It was LA saying, “We'll take ya with one hands tied behind our backs!”

And they did.

We had our third-best pitcher on the mound, Logan Gilbert, and they went the opener route: Shelby Miller pitched an inning, then Ryan Yarbrough for 4.2, then a kid named Gavin Stone for the rest. Logan gave up a first-inning solo shot to Jason Heyward and Jarred Kelenic dropped a ball, Charlie Brown style, in the left-field corner, but at least it didn't do any damage. Plus J.P. Crawford led off our half with a double. HERE WE COME! And there we go: pop out, strikeout, line out. In the top of the second, they scored three more. Bottom two, with one out, Gino walked, Mike Ford singled and Ty France singled. Speed on the basepaths! Ah, but Rojas struck out. But wait! Single from J.P. to plate a run! And we had Julio up with the bases juiced!

And he grounded out to the pitcher.

That was pretty much it. That was our shot. The final was 6-1, Dodgers. 

Again, the Dodgers didn't start their four best hitters and put second-hand goods on the mound, and they still clobbered us. Gavin Stone has pitched seven games this year and in terms of earned runs has given up: 4, 5, 7, 1, 4, 7. Against us, on this day, he pitched 3.1, gave up one hit and zero runs. Zero. He had an ERA over 10 when he showed up and now I think it's south of that. He got his first save. Way to go, kid.

On the way home, I complimented my wife on how gungho she was during the game. 

“I don't feel gungho now. I feel dispirited.” 

“You know that makes you?”

“What?”

“A Mariners' fan. Welcome to the party, pal.”

WARNING: SPOILERS

The 1945 movie “Dillinger” may have more in common with the 1949 James Cagney movie “White Heat” than it does with John Dillinger.

In this way.

In the beginning of the third act, an attempted train robbery goes awry, gang leader John Dillinger (Lawrence Tiereney) is wounded, and the gang holes up in a mountain cabin, where the protagonist's blonde dame (Anne Jeffreys) gets too chummy with one of the gang members. Sound familiar? You could segue that right into the beginning of “White Heat,” where an attempted train robbery goes awry, a gang member is wounded, and the gang holes up in a mountain cabin where the protagonist's blonde dame (Virgina Mayo) gets too chummy with one of the gang members. Basically “White Heat” begins near where “Dillinger” ends.

Jeffreys and Mayo even look alike:

“White Heat” is the better movie, of course, and it has Cagney. The amazing thing about Cagney is that even when he played an awful person you still liked him. You felt for him. Not true for Tierney. He plays Dillinger as a flaming asshole and you get the feeling it’s not just Dillinger.

And introducing…
This is the movie debut of Tierney, who would become famous in my day as the gruff, bald bossman in “Reservoir Dogs.” Here, he’s young and slim with slicked-back hair. He’s got a B-grade Kirk Douglas thing going. In the opening credits, he’s “And introducing…”

This was Hollywood’s introduction to Dillinger, too. He was gunned down outside the Biograph Theater in Chicago in July 1934, but that was about the time the Production Code grew teeth. Since Catholic orgs were already up in arms (so to speak) about fictional gangsters like Tom Powers and Tony Camonte, one assumes the studios decided to steer clear of the real deal. Elements of Dillinger’s story may have been used in 1935’s “Public Hero No. 1” starring Chester Morris, but that character was named Jeff Crane. Here it’s finally John Dillinger.

Of course, how much of it is John Dillinger? Iffy.

The movie begins where Dillinger’s life ended: at a movie theater. After a quick “News of the World”-type documentary on the bank robber, Dillinger’s dad comes onstage, hat literally in hand, to talk about his son. He says young John was like the other boys until he wasn’t. “It was best to give him his head,” Dad says.

Then we cut to Dillinger as a grown man about to commit his first crime. This is part of the film that feels iffy. He’s at a bar/diner with a blonde, the waiter won’t take his check, so he goes into the night and knocks off a little grocer. Gets $7.20. Then he runs straight into a cop and straight into prison. There he talks big but is surrounded by guys who actually knocked off banks—primarily his cellmate Specs (Edmund Lowe), who leads a gang of three: Marco (Eduardo Ciannelli), Doc (Marc Lawerence), and Kirk (Elisha Cook Jr.). Kirk has a grape-eating habit that I assumed would come into play but doesn’t.

The other gang members don’t think much of the loudmouthed kid but Specs figures he’ll be useful. And he is: paroled first, he springs the others with a scheme involving firearms smuggled into cement-mix barrels. Afterwards, they’re knocking off bank after bank, with Specs leading the way and Dillinger marginalized and seething on the sidelines. Then he comes up with a great scheme and suddenly the gang is his. It’s a quick turnabout. 

As they cut a swath west, the movie suggests Dillinger is captured at a dentist in Tucscon, Ariz., because Specs squeals to the cops. Then we get part of the legend I remember: Dillinger, in prison, carving a gun out of a piece of wood, painting it with shoe polish, and escaping. (I flashed on the Woody Allen twist in “Take the Money and Run” and laughed.) Back at the hideout, Dillinger kills Specs for squawking and takes over the gang for good. His next scheme is the aforementioned train robbery, which will sic the feds on them, and get Kirk killed and Dillinger wounded. Their mountain hideaway belongs to Kirk’s surrogate parents, so there’s tension, but I like how economical the movie is about it. Nobody says anything. The elders just seeing the gang tromping in without Kirk and get it. After an attempted late-night call to the cops, Dillinger kills them.

Again, this section is very “White Heat.” Dillinger’s dame, Helen Rogers, a movie theater cashier he robbed, winds up spending time with Tony (Ralph Lewis), the newest, youngest and cutest member of the outfit, and Dillinger doesn’t like it. It’s not just paranoia, either—they have something going. So Tony gets an off-screen axe in the back, the last of the gang surrenders to the feds, and Dillinger and Helen flee to Chicago, where Dillinger holes up in a two-bit hotel, while Helen keeps eyeing the $15K reward for his capture. It’s December, and, trapped, he listens to a street-corner Santa (in creepy mask) and kids singing Christmas carols. For a moment, I worried they were going to off him in December rather than July.

Nope. We cut ahead seven months, when Dillinger, now sporting a bad moustache and small sunglasses—like in life—takes Helen to the Biograph for “Manhattan Melodrama,” a gangster flick starring Clark Gable, as the feds close in. Helen dresses in red. She’s both Billie Frechette (his lover) and Anna Sage (the woman in red who betrayed him).

$7.20
Is Dillinger most famous for how he left us? I still wonder why him. How did he become as big a story as he became. If you do a newspapers.com search on “John Dillinger,” he was nothing until 1934, when he was everything; then he was nothing again.

Number of mentions of “John Dillinger” in U.S. newspapers:

• 1932: 58
• 1933: 3,527
• 1934: 81,994
• 1940: 1,044
• 1944: 792

Yet the name lives on. We didn’t get another cinematic Dillinger until Leo Gordon played him in Don Siegel’s “Baby Face Nelson” in 1957, and not another attempted biopic until 1965’s “Young Dillinger,” starring Nick Adams. Post-“Bonnie and Clyde,” everyone tried: the Italians (“Dillinger is Dead,” 1969), John Milius (“Dillinger,” 1973, starring Warren Oates), Roger Corman (“The Lady in Red,” 1979, written by John Sayles, focusing on Frechette). Eventually we got around to Michael Mann and his mania for detail in 2009.

1945’s “Dilllinger” was directed by Max Nosseck, a German-Jewish director who fled Nazi Germany in 1933 and wound up directing nothing big. This one, at 6.5, is his fourth-ranked on IMDb. I’d be interested in seeing his top-ranked, “Singing in the Dark” at 7.4. It’s from 1956, about a Holocaust survivor. Tierney has a small part.

The shock for Hollywood in 1945 was less that “Dillinger” was made than it garnered an Academy Award nomination for Philip Yordan for best original screenplay—but that shouldn’t have been a shock. In the early days, gangster flicks often got screenplay and story noms. In one ceremony alone, three of the five story nominations were gangsters: “Doorway to Hell,” “Smart Money” and “The Public Enemy.” The previous go-round, Ben Hecht’s “Underworld” won, and a few years later, Arthur Caesar’s “Manhattan Melodrama”—the movie that killed Dillinger—won. It was a theme.

Virginia Kellogg got nom’ed for story for “White Heat,” too, but I am curious if she saw this. Her story was supposedly based on Ma Barker and his boys, then it evolved into Ma and one boy, while Cagney suggested getting psychopathic and psychological with it.

In the end, for all the problems regal Hollywood had with a two-bit outfit like Monogram Pictures glorifying an infamous bank robber like John Dillinger, “Dillinger” winds up being that rare biopic where you don’t care much for the main subject. He starts out a jerk, he ends a jerk. After he’s shot down outside the Biograph, the cops go through his pockets and find $7.20—the same as after his initial robbery. That’s what crime will get you, kids: nothing. Remember that.

Our sister-in-law Jayne stayed with us last week and we all watched “Shall We Dance,” the 1937 Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movie where he plays ballet dancer Peter P. Peters, aka “Petrov,” and she plays tap dancer Linda Keene, and the songs include such Gershwin numbers as “They All Laughed” and “Let's Call the Whole Thing Off,” and we get that insane roller skate dance in Central Park. And for some reason, in the middle of it, I looked up Fred Astaire on IMDb. I forget what I was checking. Because I got distracted by this:

Right. Not an Astaire-Rogers movie in the mix.

And hers?

One Astaire-Rogers, their final RKO picture together, which was a bit of an anomaly. Per Wikipedia:

... there is none of the usual “screwball comedy” relief provided by such actors as Edward Everett Horton, Victor Moore, or Helen Broderick, it is the only Astaire-Rogers musical biography, the only one on which Oscar Hammerstein II worked, the only one of their musicals with a tragic ending, and the only one in which Astaire's character dies. 

And not exactly the first Astaire-Rogers movie I think of. That would be “Top Hat,” or “Swing Time,” or “Shall We Dance.” Apparently I'm not alone. If you sort Astaire's feature films by user rating, it goes exactly that way, with “The Band Wagon” fourth. I love “The Band Wagon,” by the way, it's his other “Known For”s that are the head scratchers—particularly when you consider that billing supposedly matters in the Known For algorithm. Astaire-Rogers movies, he's usually top-billed. For “Towering Inferno”? He was fifth-billed (Newman, McQueen, Holden, Dunaway, and everyone else alphabetically), and third-billed for “On the Beach.” He did get Oscar nom'ed for “Inferno,” so that probably pushed it up. But to No. 1? (Good trivia question: Who won the Oscar the one time Fred Astaire was nominated for an Oscar? Answer: Robert De Niro for “The Godfather Part II.” Worlds colliding.)

Her No. 1, “Kitty Foyle,” was also an Oscar turn, for which she won. Her only nom.

So our biggest movie website says the most famous dance team in movie history isn't known for dancing with each other. I expected nothing less from IMDb. 

Got my copy of “Why We Love Baseball: A History in 50 Moments,” by Joe Posnanski, via Rainy Day Books in Kansas, last week. And true to his word, he signed it with the mea culpa I asked for:

Posnanski did write up bios of “10 Who Missed” the Baseball 100, including Killebrew, but I'm glad he finally came clean.

Dee with Dietrich lighting; Dalton Trumbo called her character “a thrill-seeking little bitch.” 

WARNING: SPOILERS

This came onto my radar because of a good chapter on writer-director Rowland Brown in Philippe Garnier’s book “Scoundrels & Spitballers: Writers and Hollywood in the 1930s.” Except I can’t remember if the movie sounded interesting or Brown did. Stuff like this keeps happening to me. My streaming queues, for example, are filled with films that were part of some important late-night research, but now I look at them and go, “Um … OK?” Whatever rationale I had for watching them is gone.

“Blood Money” isn’t great but it deserves a wider audience and a better print. (I watched it via an avi file on my computer—not ideal.) The film gets into class issues, and gender issues, and it has wit and a cynical sense of the world. People want what’s bad for them and run toward ruin with open arms. Sadly, we get a happy ending.

A thrill-seeking little bitch
We keep hearing about our main character before seeing him. (Cf., Rick in “Casablanca.”) A wife betrays her husband to the cops, he belts her, then tells her to get Bill Bailey on the line. A judge is awakened in the middle of the night with a bond request. “That Bill Bailey has a lot of nerve!” the wife says. Then it’s onto the working class. A butcher, weighing sausages, says Bill Bailey ordered 150 turkeys for Thanksgiving. For charity? “Sure,” he responds. “For our poor judges, our poor lawyers, and our poor police officers.”

When we finally see the man (George Bancroft), he’s ringside at a prizefight, sponsoring a boxer with the just-sitting-there slogan “Bailey for Bail.” When someone says he hasn’t picked a winner all night, he smiles and says, “I make all my money off losers.”

So there he is: a Tammany Hall-type grifter with the world wrapped around his finger. What brings him low? A woman, of course.

She’s a new client who needs $1.5k bail and uses a $6k ring for collateral. That sends his antennae up. She says her name is “Jane Smith” (up again), and, eavesdropping, he discovers she’s from money: Elaine Talbert (Frances Dee), the daughter of the president of a Hawaiian pineapple company. She’s also wild—someone who steals for the thrill of it. Example: While he’s helping her post bail, she lifts his cigarette lighter. Later, when they’re going for burgers and onions, and she lights her cigarette, he takes it, sees it’s his—inscribed to him from Jack Dempsey—and gives her a look. Suddenly she’s in her element. She leans back with a saucy smile and  “So … what?” 

Dee is dynamite—both senses. She has a lovely neck, and can play both good girl and bad. The good is a front. The bad is, too, in its own way. She wants to be bad but she also wants to be punished. “I want a man who’s my master, who isn't afraid of anybody in the world, who’d shoot the first man that looked at me,” she tells Bailey at a Hawaiian luau on her father’s estate.” If only a man would give her a thrashing, she adds, “I’d follow him around like a dog on a leash.” In his review in The Spectator, Dalton Trumbo called her “a thrill-seeking little bitch.”

Bailey’s response to all this? He falls for her like a sap. He turns into the opposite of what she wants.

When does he fall? That’s a good question. Earlier we see him hanging with Ruby Darling, a laconic female gangster/nightclub owner played by Judith Anderson in her film debut. (Yes, Mrs. Danvers from “Rebecca” is the initial love interest.) “Aw, Ruby,” he tells her, “I could never get stuck on any girl but you.” But then Elaine shows up. What tips him? When she wants her burger smothered in onions, and he says he always wanted to meet a girl who really liked onions? When she steals his lighter? The longer they’re together, the less interesting he becomes. It’s called love.

At the dog-race track, Bailey buys a dog for her and she’s beside herself with joy; when the dog finishes last, she mutters, “Where’d you get that mutt?” In a sense, the dog is Bailey. As soon as he introduces her to a sleeker model, Ruby’s brother Drury (Chick Chandler), a bank robber known as the “Lone Bandit,” her eyes get like saucers, and Bailey becomes the mutt. There’s a nice scene later at a golf course when Bailey and Drury make calls in adjacent phone booths—both to her. Another nice scene occurs after Elaine kisses Drury goodnight on the cheek and he returns to his apartment building—to find Bailey standing in the shadows. Does Bailey know? Is he angry? Neither. He’s solicitous. While dabbing the lipstick off his cheek with a handkerchief, he warns that the cops are closing in and Drury should jump bail and leave the country. 

Drury: I think I’ll go to Russia.
Bailey (chuckles): They’ll put you to work there…

Instead Drury lams it with Elaine, but beforehand tells her to take the $50k to pay Bailey for the bond he’s jumping, then destroy the $300k in worthless registered bonds he stole. Except she gives him the bad bonds, and that’s the bonehead move that sets up the rest of the film. Thinking himself betrayed, Bailey works with the cops to bring Drury back. So Ruby calls a meeting to call out her protégé/lover, and the gangsters gang up on Bailey. They tell everyone to jump bail so it’ll sink Bailey’s business; then his safe is blown up and the stolen bonds are found. Now he’s looking at jail time himself.

But—final reel—Drury find outs how Elaine betrayed Bailey, sends word to sis, and she rushes to save Bailey before an eight ball laden with explosives (yes) blows up in his face. “You’ll always be getting behind an eight ball, darling,” she says, as they kiss and make up, “and I’ll always be pulling you out.”

That’s the dull part. The part that sticks is our final scenes with the thrill-seeking little bitch. Elaine shows up at Bailey’s, too, just in time to see the kiss, and when she leaves she bumps into a woman who’s distraught because a man placed an ad for a modeling gig then pawed her. “My arms are black and blue!” she cries. Which is when Elaine’s eyes light up, she grabs the ad, and off she goes—toward what she’d always wanted.

Decking Dempsey
“Blood Money” is from 20th Century Studio, pre-Fox, and produced by Darryl Zanuck, post-Warners. In its trivia section on the film, IMDb lists several of the film’s debuts and finales: 

• Adalyn Doyle's debut
• Frances Dunn's debut
• Final film of Sandra Shaw
• Final film of Blossom Seeley
• Theatrical movie debut of Dame Judith Anderson  

Beyond Anderson, most of these are bit players—save Blossom Seeley, who was a big star as a San Francisco jazz singer in the 1910s. In Ruby’s nightclub, she belts out “San Francisco Bay” and “Melancholy Baby.”

At the luau, we also get a sexy hula dance from an actress named Grace Poggi, who was only 19 at the time, and only made 15 films, usually as a dancer. She pops.

The big problem with the movie may be the lead. I loved Bancroft in Sternberg’s “Underworld” but he’s hardly a leading-man type. He’s good with bluster and brutism but not affairs of the heart. This movie doesn’t play to his strengths. 

The previous films Brown directed were “Quick Millions” with Spencer Tracy and “Hell’s Highway” with Richard Dix. Would love to see both. He also wrote for two Cagney films, “The Doorway to Hell” and “Angels with Dirty Faces,” and is given credit, by Pat O’Brien at least, for much of what was good with the latter. “Brown wrote it, no doubt about this,” O’Brien said in 1975. “He was sort of a genius, that guy. … He talked to you like a stevedore would, in plain old everyday American.” Brown is also one of the two screenwriters (among eight writing credits altogether) on the Constance Bennett movie “What Price Hollywood?” which is basically ur-“A Star is Born.”

Brown had gangster connections, or didn’t, drank too much, or not at all, and once sparred with Jack Dempsey and maybe knocked him down. Even Garnier has a tough time getting a handle on him. Either way, “Blood Money” is the last time Brown got credited as director. He was either fired a week into “The Devil is a Sissy,” or filmed the whole thing but was told by Eddie Mannix that MGM’s go-to director W.S. Van Dyke would get credit because his name would sell better. So Brown hit Mannix—either with a phone book or the script—and there went directing. And now he was on the downhill side. That price, Hollywood.

WARNING: SPOILERS

The last newly released Chinese movie I saw at Pacific Place in downtown Seattle was Donnie Yen’s “Ip Man 4” in early January 2020. Then you know what happened. Wuhan, China got very, very sick. Then the world got very, very sick. Then we stopped going to movies.

This past weekend was the first time since the pandemic began that I returned to Pacific Place to see a newly released Chinese film.

It’s been a long time.

I meant less since the pandemic began and more since China produced popular films about the crazy antics (the “Detective Chinatown” series) or the heroism (“Wolf Warrior 2”) of Chinese abroad. Now the lesson is an old, familiar one: Don’t trust foreigners! They actually say that at the end of this film: Don’t trust high-paying jobs—unless they’re in China. Stay here.

The girl’s in the bag and the cat’s off the balcony
“No More Bets” is not a good movie and let’s begin with that English title. The Chinese version is <<孤注一擲>> (guzhu yizhi), which translates to “Stake All On One Throw.“ That would be a better title. How about “Roll of the Dice”? Or “Big Stakes”? Or if some mucky-muck insists on the “Bets” thing, why not “All Bets Are Off”? 

Pan Sheng (Zhang Yixing of the Chinese-Korean boy band EXO) is a rising computer programmer whose promotion is given to some nepo baby, and at first he’s like, “Whatevs, it’s all good.” A second later, he’s storming out of the company meeting, hacking his usurper’s presentation with emojis, and accepting a dream job in Singapore.

Which quickly turns into a nightmare. He and his peers barely get a moment in the “Crazy Rich Asians” city before they’re attacked in a back alley, hooded, and driven to another country. I think they call it “Canan”? The script on storefronts looks Thai but it could be Cambodian. Apologies. My SE Asian studies don’t go far.

Instead of the promised high-rise apartments they wind up in a place that is a mix of prison camp (barb wire fences, sleeping on thin mats) and modern corporation. People are routinely beaten for not toeing the line but they also have to attend gung-ho, call-and-response company meetings, where they’re extolled to do their best because they’re all on the same team. Holy fuck. Just give me the prison camp.

It’s a fraud factory, and there’s a whole bunch of data mining and data scraping going on. Here’s the real oddity: Pan is prized for his programming/hacking skills but he tries to escape by writing messages? On paper? I mean, I could do that. The first one he has to swallow in the toilet to avoid detection; the second, on a US$20 bill, gets everyone into trouble. Can’t he just, I don’t know, hide a message in a computer program?

A lot of the fraud involves online gambling, with hot, well-dressed ladies at card tables enticing online schnooks into betting the house. One of these women, Liang Anna (Gina Jin), helps Pan, or he helps her, but either way we then get her backstory. She was a fashion model in mainland China but her photo somehow wound up on a scandalous site, and rather than her company suing the bastards they think she’s at fault and drop her like a hot potato. Then a friend suggests the international gig. 

Then we get the story of one of the schnooks, a recent grad named Tian (Taiwanese actor Talu Wang), who, maybe because of Liang’s photo, or just because he already has that predilection, gets suckered into online gambling. He does OK for a bit, then not, then suddenly it’s really, really bad, and his girlfriend, Song (Zhou Ye), is worried. At one point, gangsters show up at his family’s apartment to demand debts he owes, and to show they mean business they throw his cat over the high-rise balcony.

That’s the moment the movie lost me. We still get another 10-15 minutes of his handwringing, histrionic downfall, but I could give a fuck. Dude, you caused the death of your cat. If that doesn’t wake you up, nothing will.

(I'm serious, btw.)

Anyway, things get so bad he flops off a balcony voluntarily and winds up in a coma. Song tries to find the people responsible for his addiction, but the police, even the kindly Zhao Dongran (Young Mei), are mostly ineffectual. Meanwhile, abroad, various attempts at escape from the prison/company lead to various punishments. The main bad guy, Lu (Eric Wang), improbably takes a shine to Pan, and then, less improbably, toward Liang, in a different, more earthy way. For the latter, I gotta say: What took him so long? Why are these guys even kidnapping models in the first place if not for the sex? All the women do is sit at Vegas-like gambling tables and motion toward cards or chips or what have you, and couldn’t you deep fake that? I get why you need Pan but not why you need Liang.

After Pan owns up to writing on the US$20 bill, his leg is broken and he’s put in a small cage. Liang tries to escape on a bus but is betrayed by the cops, dragged to the waterfront, stuffed into a sack with stones, and tossed into the sea. The girl’s in the bag and the bag’s in the river. At least it wasn’t a cat.

How does she escape? She’s pulled back up with a crane because Lu’s right-hand man, An (Sunny Sun), heretofore a sadistic asshole, doesn’t want her to die. Does he have a crush on her? Is he developing a conscience? We get no clue. It comes out of nowhere.

Working levers
Ultimately, Liang finds her way back to China, and, reluctantly, into Police Zhao’s task force, which returns to the SE Asian country to finally put a stop to it. Takes a while. One moment they’re disciplined and effectual, the next a step behind the bad guys. Rather than scenario writers, I imagine CCP members working levers. ”Well, we can’t show the police as incompetent … but we do need people to take this issue seriously, so..."

In the end, amid histrionics and melodrama, the factory is raided and the bad guys brought to justice—including Liang. Yes. She gets two years, or two years probation, or something, even though she was a victim through it all. Pan’s sentence is commuted because he helped break the case. But he’ll have a limp for the rest of his days. 

Despite the melodrama, the story is “ripped from the headlines,” as they used to say. You can read the BBC report on Cambodian fraud factories here, and the closing credits include blurred-out interviews with real-life victims. Apparently fraud factories are a lucrative business. Also movies about fraud factories. This thing was released in China less than a month ago and it’s already grossed nearly half a billion U.S. That said, how does one view box office from a government-controlled movie industry? Did this one get a bigger push because they wanted its message out there? I imagine CCP members working levers.

How many women have played Ginger Grant, the Marilyn Monroe-esque movie star stranded with “the rest” on Sherwood Schwartz' much-syndicated 1960s sitcom “Gilligan's Island”? I knew that for some of the subsequent TV movies another actress had been tapped, since Tina Louise had been uninterested in reprising the role; but it turns out, no, not just some: She never reprised the role, through all of its various reiterations. Which means this is our Ginger roll call:

1. Tina Louise: “Gilligan's Island” (1964-67)
2. Jane Webb: “The New Adventures of Gilligan” (1974-75) (Animated)
3. Judith Baldwin: “Rescue from Gilligan's Island” and “The Castaways on Gilligan's Island” (1978, 1979) (TV movies)
4. Constance Forsland: “The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan's Island” (1981) (TV movie)
5. Dawn Wells: “Gilligan's Planet” (1982-83) (Animated) *

* Is this the ultimate revenge of Mary Ann?

But wait: Apparently there was a pilot episode, too—like Star Trek's “The Cage”—which resurfaced in the 1990s. And while Gilligan, Skipper, Thurston and Lovey were played by familar actors, the Professor was played by John Gabriel, Mary Ann was someone named Bunny and played by Nancy McCarthy, while Ginger Grant was played by yet another redhead, Kit Smythe. So:

6. Kit Smythe: “Gilligan's Island: Pilot episode” (1964)

I know she was a bit of a diva, but it's a testament to Tina Louise that no one compares.

Another conversation with IMDb:

• Them: Who's Sergio Leone?
• Me: You mean “The Good, The Bad and the Ugly” guy? 
• The ... what? No no no, I'm talking the “Once Upon a Time in America” guy.
• Oh sure, he directed that, too.
• DIRECTED? Leone's not known for DIRECTING. He's a WRITER!
• Really? I thought people thought of him as this great Spaghetti western director or something.
• Shows what you know. He only directed like nine things. And he wrote 16. Ergo, he's known for writing.
• Well...
• And that other thing? “The Good, The Bad and the Whatever” you talked about? I don't know where you get your movie knowledge. “Duck, You Sucker!” Now that's the ticket.
• I guess?
• Believe you me.

As the great man said in better circumstances: And it just continues...