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)
Sunday June 30, 2024
Willie Mays (1931-2024)
I heard about the death of Willie Mays when I was beginning my third week in Minneapolis helping look after and advocate for my father, who’d had a stroke at the end of May. The next morning, visiting Dad in his small room at R. Hospital in Golden Valley, I read him the long obit in The New York Times, and we reminisced about all Dad used to say about The Say-Hey Kid as a tour guide at Target Field in the 2010s.
In one of the rooms at Target Field, I think the “Legends” room, there was a giant photo of Willie playing for the Minneapolis Millers in the spring of 1951, and most of Dad’s stories related to that time period: how Mays was hitting .477 over 35 games when he got the call to join the NY Giants; how Mays was so beloved in Minneapolis that Giants owner Horace Stoneham had to take out an advertisement apologizing to Millers’ fans for “stealing” their star; how, when Mays told Giants’ manager Leo Durocher that he didn’t think he could hit big league pitching, and then owned that he was hitting .477 for Minneapolis, Durocher supposedly replied “Do you think you could hit .2-fucking-77 for me?”; and how, after he began his career hitless in his first three games, and he again felt he couldn’t hit Major League pitching, Durocher assured him that he was his center fielder for life. “You’re the best player I ever saw,” Durocher told him, or some reasonable facsimile of that, and at R. Hospital Dad repeated it with tears in his eyes.
Dad must’ve choked up five times during our Willie Mays conversation. That’s how much he meant to people.
To Charles Schulz, Mays was the symbol of perfection:
To Joe Henry, he was a sign of a better time for America:
But that was him
I'm almost sure
The greatest centerfielder of all time
Stooped by the burden of endless dreams
His and yours and mine
He was the subject of songs, and biographies, and Saturday morning cartoons, and he was so omnipresent when I was young, so much the sky, that in 2012, when I was telling a story about him to friends, and one of those friends, Myriam, asked, “Who’s Willie Mays?” I didn’t even know how to respond. I just stared at her. Who’s Willie Mays? I should’ve said: One of two geniuses in the world, according to Tallulah Bankhead. The other was William Shakespeare.
Do we go into the numbers? I know most of them off the top of my head.
660 is, of course, the homerun total, which would’ve been higher had he not played at Candlestick Park, but it was still the third highest-total in MLB history when he retired. He was only the second player to hit 600, nearly 40 years after Ruth, Sept. 22, 1969. There are now nine on the list. Half are suspect.
.301 is the career batting average. Some of his contemporaries, like Mickey Mantle, wound up dipping below .300. Not Willie.
24? Number on his back, number of All-Star appearances. The latter will never be broken, the former is worn all the time in homage.
Interestingly, the true greatness of Willie Mays—in numbers—didn’t reveal itself until decades after he retired, when WAR (Wins About Replacement) was created. It’s supposed to take in all aspects of a player’s game. Mays won two MVPs, in 1954 and 1965, but by bWAR he was the best position player in the National League for 10 seasons, and the best in the entire Majors for eight seasons. In the integrated era of baseball, no one’s close.
Then there’s the catch off Vic Wertz in Game 1 of the 1954 World Series, now just known as “The Catch,” and the stories surrounding it. It was the top of the 8th, tie score, 2-2, and Cleveland got the first two guys on: walk, single. So Durocher called for reliever Don Liddle to face Wertz, who hit a shot into deep, deep center field. Mays runs back, his number 24 visible to all, and makes a catch “that must’ve looked like an optical illusion to some people,” according to Giants’ announcer Russ Hodges. So Durocher makes another pitching change, and as Liddle hands the ball to reliever Marv Grissom, he shrugs and says, “Well, I got my guy.”
I also like the exchange between left fielder Monte Irvin and Mays as they trotted in after the Giants held the line.
Irvin: Nice going, roomie. Didn’t think you’d get that.
Mays: You kidding? Had that one all the way.
Sidenote: Wertz went 4-5 that day, with a double, a triple and two singles. He should’ve gone 5-5 in a Cleveland romp. He should’ve been the star player of the game and the series. Instead, he’s the sidenote: the guy who hit the ball that Mays caught.
In Donald Honig’s oral history “Between the Lines,” Irvin recalls another Mays catch, in Pittsburgh, that some say is greater:
He was playing in close and Rocky [Nelson] got hold of one and drove it way out into that big center field they had in old Forbes Field. Willie whirled around and took off after it. At the last second he saw he couldn't get his glove across his body in time to make the catch, so he caught it in his bare hand.
That one made the Times obit, too, for the practical joke Durocher played on Mays afterward. Leo told everyone in the dugout to not say anything, to ignore him, and so instead of back claps Mays was greeted with silence. “Leo,” Mays wound up saying, “didn’t you see what I did?” “No,” Durocher replied. “You’ll have to go out and do it again.”
The stories could go on forever. One hopes they will.
Saturday June 29, 2024
Cheering Correa at Mariners Park
“Walks it off”: A nubber to the pitcher and an errant throw.
I found myself rooting for the Twins.
I spent most of June in Minnesota visiting my 92-year-ol father in M. Hospital or R. Hospital, where he was trying to recover from a stroke, and during that time we watched a lot of Twins games so I got to know them a bit. Meanwhile, I kind of lost track of my M's. Were they still in first place in the AL West? Apparently so. Nine games over .500. Had Julio become Julio again? No, he hadn't. And we still weren't hitting? No, we weren't. Pre-game, we were 29th of 30 teams in batting average, 25th in OBP, 25th in SLG. Among our regulars, Julio led in batting with a .252 average. We had pitching and not much else.
Meanwhile, the Twins had this kid, Royce Lewis, who couldn't sneeze without hitting a homerun. A few weeks back I checked and his SLG was .900. .900! For slugging. Barry Bonds looks at that and goes WTF? Twins also had superstar shortstop Carlos Correa who was beautiful to watch. Everyone on the field is a top tier athlete but some guys are just top top-tier and he was one of those. He made everything look smooth. I remember watching an at-bat in Minnesota where the ball landed in front of homeplate and Correa reached down and flipped it to the catcher in one smooth motion. The day before yesterday, I got worried when in the late innings of a Twins shellacking of Arizona, Correa got pegged in the forearm, grimaced, shook his forearm, and immediately walked off the field. He was injury prone but was finally coming back from all that. He was having a helluva June. So was he down again? No. Not a fracture. His hand went numb but feeling returned in the Twins locker room and he said he'd be in the lineup the next day, which was last night. He was.
I went with my wife Patricia. We got there slightly late—Correa was already on first with a one-out single—which meant we'd missed the first round of boos. I should've anticipated that. I was loving Correa now but he'd been on the 2017 Houston Astros, who cheated by stealing signs with high-tech gear and sent signals via trash-can lids, and Mariners fans, and pretty much all fans, continued to boo the stars of that team. Even a guy like Kyle Tucker, who wasn't on the '17 squad, who didn't make his MLB debut until July 2018 and didn't play a full season until 2021, even he gets booed like he's Simon Legree. So it goes. Me, I'm already passed it. Plus it's boring. So when the M's faithful booed Correa lustily in his next at-bat, I took the opposite tack: I cheered lustily. I cheered even louder when, in the top of the sixth, with the M's ahead 1-0, Correa hit a 2-run homer into the bullpen in left field. The only one who said anything was a Twins fan sitting behind me. He looked confused, pointing to my M's cap. Yeah, long story, pal.
Correa, by the way, was the only guy on either team with an average north of .300, but the Twins had five guys with averages better than Julio's, which, again, is the best on the M's. Just embarassing. Our leadoff hitter (J.P. Crawford) was near .200, our No. 3 hitter (Cal Raleigh) just scaped above .200, while our cleanup hitter (Mitch Garver) was significantly below .200. Again, we're 29th of 30. Thank god for the White Sox.
Mariners Park was packed for the first time in a long time. Because they'd just gotten back from a successful road trip? No, they'd gone 3-6 against the Guardians, Marlins and Rays. Because it was J.P. Crawford bobblehead night? Maybe. It was also Filipino Heritage Night, so that helped. It helped make it a rare midsummer sellout. Just when I didn't want to be near people.
After Correa's homer, the M's went down 1-2-3 in the sixth and seventh, but in the bottom of the eighth they got the first two guys on via walk and single. Then bobblehead guy J.P. tried to bunt but popped it up to third. Then Julio hit a slow roller to third, which Twins third baseman Jose Miranda, cousin to Lin Manuel, rushed a throw to first, which first baseman Carlos Santana tried to dig out but couldn't. A run scored and the game was tied. It stayed that way until the bottom of the tenth when we scored our ghost runner on a groundout to short (moving him to third) and a nubber back to the pitcher, whose hurried throw home sailed past the catcher. So we won on two errant throws. So it goes.
The weather was nice anyway.
Friday June 28, 2024
What is Jackie Chan Known For?
Jackie Chan: Who is he? What is he known for?
This one is a little tougher than some of the other IMDb SNAFUs. In the States, Jackie broke with “Rumble in the Bronx,” so we missed out on his long rise from obscurity (small role in “Enter the Dragon”) to kung fu western stardom (“Snake in the Eagle's Shadow,” “Drunken Master,” “Young Master”) to early 20th century fare (“Project A”) to modern stuff (“Police Story”). In Asia, he kept breaking bigger and bigger. I wonder what this looks like on Asian IMDb? Can you see that? Can I see that?
Anyway, this is the U.S. version.
Wrong.
“Police Story,” yes. I'll even give you “Rush Hour” for the American crowd. But “Who Am I?” WTF? Who are you, IMDb? I'll tell you who you are. You're a bunch of fucking morons.
Thursday June 27, 2024
Movie Review: The Harder They Fall (1956)
WARNING: SPOILERS
Trivia question: What is Humphrey Bogart doing the last time we ever see him on a movie screen?
- Walking down a lonely wet street in New York
- Dying gutshot in a lonely wet street in New York
- Sitting before a typewriter, pecking out a story
- Saluting a friend as he takes a bus out of town
Yes, this is Bogie’s last movie but I doubt he knew it. It was filmed in late 1955, he was diagnosed with cancer in January ’56, and he died a year later, in January ’57, age 56. Half a century later, the American Film Institute would vote him the greatest movie star in Hollywood history—a fate he certainly didn’t foresee when he was a sniveling villain forever being killed at the hands of Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney while wishing for a career like Paul Muni’s.
“The Harder They Fall” isn’t bad—it’s got a 7.5 IMDb rating—but it’s a dated social responsibility movie. Early on, we know what everyone’s doing wrong, and they keep doing it. For nearly two hours.
Dives for the short-end money
Bogie plays Eddie Willis, a respected sportswriter who lost his job when his newspaper folded, and who’s been pursued ever since by gangster Nick Benko (Rod Steiger) to be press agent for his stable of boxers. Eddie always turns him down. This time, Eddie says yes. And this time, he has someone to write about: Toro Moreno (Mike Lane), a 6’ 8” man-mountain from Argentina, who turns heads as he arrives in the U.S. over the opening credits.
Except, in the ring, Toro’s punches are weak and so is his jaw. Eddie still takes the gig. Why? He says he wants a big payout but why does he think this is it? The kid can’t punch. But maybe he knows the boxing game better than we do. Because they scam their way from one victory to the next, getting better boxers to talk a fall. That’s right, two years after “On the Waterfront,” Rod Steiger gets fighters to take them dives for the short-end money. But here it works. And here, there’s no guilt.
Not for Nick Benko anyway. Eddie, yes. Half the movie is Bogie’s face torn with moral anguish.
Eddie’s original take is a mere $250 a week plus expenses. But after Toro’s first suspect victory on the west coast, which leads to boos from the crowd and a potential boxing commission investigation, Nick puts Eddie in charge. And for his troubles, Eddie gets 10% of Toro. Now there’s real money in the banana stand. And off they go, riding from town to town, west coast to Midwest to east coast, in a tour bus with Toro’s outsized image on the side: NEXT HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPION OF THE WORLD. And in each stop, Toro wins a fixed fight. Who knows they’re fixed? Eddie’s colleague Art Leavitt (Harold J. Stone), for one, who hosts a TV show, but Eddie gets him to keep it to himself. Eddie’s wife, Beth (Jan Sterling), figures it out, too. These two are the moral forces of this universe. They’re on one of Eddie’s shoulders, while Nick and the dough are on the other. And he keeps going for Nick and the dough. But with anguish. Always with anguish.
In Chicago, Toro takes on Gus Dundee (Pat Comiskey) for a title shot at heavyweight champ Buddy Brannen (1930s heavyweight champ Max Baer). Dundee had just fought Brannen and gotten his head knocked in—and he’s still suffering the consequences. So much so that Toro’s limp punches wind up not only winning the match but killing him. Toro was fighting a dead man. But now he feels guilty. Now he feels he’s too powerful.
We keep getting little minidramas. Nick keeps creating storms, forcing Eddie to calm the waters. Example: Before the Dundee fight, Toro’s Argentine manager wonders when they’re going to get paid, so Nick sends him back to Argentina, but then that causes Toro to run away. It’s Eddie who brings him back to the fold. After the Dundee fight, it seems like Toro is being corrupted—he’s boozing it up with a blonde—but that minidrama goes away when Toro gets a letter from a priest in Argentina, his mother’s priest, telling him to stop fighting since he’s killing men. Once again, Eddie returns him to the fold. Just this title fight, he tells him. Then he can go home a rich man.
The drama of the title fight? Brannen is angry because he thinks he should get credit for killing Dundee, not this powderpuff giant, so he’s ready to tear Toro apart. At this point, Eddie lets Toro know he’s not a killer but a fraud. “You don’t punch hard enough to bust an egg,” he tells him. What to do? They conspire with ring man George (Jersey Joe Walcott!!!!) to box in a style that keeps the damage to a minimum.
And then Toro doesn’t follow through. He tries to win, and at one point even knocks down the champ (like Rocky in “Rocky”), but eventually gets his face knocked in (like Rocky in “Rocky). Brannen even breaks Toro’s jaw. And in the aftermath, we get the best line in the movie, spoken by Jersey Joe Walcott:
Eddie: Why did he take that awful beating? Why didn’t he fight like you told him to?
George: Some guys can sell out, and others just can’t.
And Eddie is a guy who can sell out. Thus endeth the lesson, moviegoers.
Except it doesn't end there. There are more betrayals first.
Here’s looking at you, kid
Nick sells Toro to another promoter, Jim Weyerhause (Edward Andrews, the epitome of the mid-century white-collar criminal), who plans to take him on the road once the jaw heals. Meanwhile, the books have been cooked. The gate brought in more than $1 million, but after everyone, including Eddie, take their cut, Toro’s payout amounts to exactly $49.07. He won’t be a rich man returning home but a poor man in indentured servitude.
Which is when Eddie finally chooses a side.
He gets Toro out of the hospital, takes him to the airport, puts him on a plane to Argentina. For good measure, he gives him his $26k cut. Oddly, though Eddie decks one of Nick’s men en route, there’s no confrontation at the airport because Nick can’t imagine he’d take him to the airport. The confrontation takes place at Eddie’s apartment. Nick says Eddie now owes him $75k, but Eddie goes “Oh yeah, what if I tell the public what I know about you?,” and Nick goes “Oh yeah, then you're future ain't worth 26 cents.” But then he and his men just leave. Which is when Nick sits down and begins to write:
THE HARDER THEY FALL
The boxing business must rid itself of the evil influence of racketeers and crooked managers, even if it takes an Act of Congress to do it.
Yeah, not much of a lede.
This actually feels like the real drama of the movie—Eddie risking his life to tell the truth—but it’s where the movie leaves us. And it’s where we leave Humphrey Bogart for the final time: a lone man pecking away at a typewriter, his wife serving him coffee, as he rails against the kind of corrupt man he portrayed throughout the 1930s.
Here's looking at you, kid.
Our last glimpse of Bogie on a movie screen.
Wednesday June 26, 2024
Craig on Donald Sutherland
“I've been hesitant to write about Donald Sutherland since the news of his death crashed on the shore of the world. This modern phenomenon of folks digitally dropping their heartfelt testimonials like singles, memorializing the lost in tidy packets suitable for sharing, seem all too often to be more about them than the deceased, and — perhaps I'm wrong — aren't especially in keeping with the spirit of Mr. Sutherland as I experienced him. ...
”What provoked me to finally embarrass myself in this way was a clip from a 60 Minutes interview someone posted on X in which Mr. Sutherland told the story of how his mother, confronted by her son with the question, 'Mother, am I good looking?', responded: 'Your face has character.' Anderson Cooper soon followed up by asking Mr. Sutherland if he thought he was ugly, and he said, 'Unattractive, I think, is the gentler way to put it,' and that's what sent me running to my computer just now, because that lilting little sentence — which carries with it, in its vocabulary, syntax, punctuation and rhythm so much information, so much implicit wryness, wisdom, humility and grace — made me miss him so much and want to be with him again, so here I am.“
-- Craig Wright, on his Substack ”Fancy!" Read the rest here.
Tuesday June 25, 2024
Max and Me
“Share your experiences with Max!,” the email subject line read, which is normally a cause for a quick delete. Particularly because it's Max. What a stupid rebranding that was. They had an iconic, respected name, HBO, and they went with the name Woody Allen and Tony Roberts called each other in life and in “Annie Hall.” Why? For the X? What is it with these douchebag CEOs and the letter X? X, Xbox, Max, stop it already.
And that's the reason why I wound up taking the survey. It took way too long, asking way too many questions about shit I didn't care about at all, but every time there was a chance to write something in, I wrote something in:
It's not TV, it's HBO.
It's not HBO, it's Brand Echhs.
Friday June 21, 2024
No Xanadu
Earlier this week I woke up in the middle of the night with a song in my head. This song:
I'm the morning in your morning
I'm the morning in your evening
I'm the morning in your silvery moon
It had a tune, too, but I don't recall the tune. I don't think it's a real song, just a pastiche of sentiments. No idea what it means. I'm the fresh part of your day? Or is “morning” also “mourning”? That would fit the state of my world for this week/month/year.
Coleridge takes a nap and gets:
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
Right: I ain't Coleridge. I'm lucky I got anything. I also like “silvery moon.”
Tuesday June 18, 2024
In 2019, Michael Schur Described Most of My Freelance Writing Career
“There's a real problem and a disconnect right now between the people who own and operate places where writing is done, and the actual writing that's being done there. The disconnect comes from the fact that the people who own and operate those sites, or those magazines, just don't care whether it's good. They don't seem to have an affinity for it.
”To a certain extent it's true in TV, too. The bare minimum you should be, if you own a place like this, is be interested in what it makes. And I get this really unpleasant feeling that the majority of people who own the majority of places that are producing stuff, don't care about it: They don't care whether it's good, or what it's saying, or why it's saying it, or anything. That's a huge problem."
-- Michael Schur in a 2019 Poscast with Joe Posnanski
Sunday June 16, 2024
Father's Day
This is my first Father's Day without a brother and the first with my father in a hospital with serious health issues.
I'd actually bought him Father's Day gifts last month, before the current shit storm, as the ideas came to me: a biography of Washington Senators shortstop Cecil Travis, who led the AL in hits in 1941, the year Ted Williams hit .406 and Joe DiMaggio hit in 56 straight games, but then lost four years to WWII, and maybe some sense of touch in his extremeties to frostbite during the Battle of the Bulge. He seemed on a Hall of Fame trajectory but came back and wasn't the same; he was gone from the game by '47. A class act, he never blamed the war or the frostbite. He said you lose a fraction of your talents and you're done. Ted Williams, for one, thinks he belongs in the Hall. Cecil was Dad's favorite player growing up.
The other is a T-shirt of a baseball diamond with players' names from Abbott & Costello's “Who's on First?” routine at each position.
I gave him the gifts early, a week and a half ago, in the ICU at M. Hospital: the Travis bio as maybe something to do, the Abbott & Costello T-shirt because the occupational therapist needed a shirt to work with and no other was available. I don't know if he remembers the T-shirt. I'll give it to him again today. Meanwhile, I've read him the foreword of the Travis bio a few times. Would be great if he could feel strong enough to read it on his own but we're not there yet.
He's no longer at M. Hospital. They moved him to a long-care type facility: R. Hospital. Its title includes “Minneapolis” even though it's in Golden Valley. He feels stuck in a system whose goal is to move him forward as he progresses even if he doesn't progress much. Yes, like kids who can't read. At M., he even seemed to regress. R., meanwhile, feels lesser. It feels a little low-rent. It's a place with the various therapists (occ., phys., speech), and he gets all of those weekdays but none of them weekends. The physcial therapist can move him from bed to chair but no one else can; the attendants have to use some lift contraption—to avoid slip-and-falls and litigation, one assumes—but it feels unhelpful and dehumanizing. He needs to use his stuff (mouth, arms, legs) to improve, to move on, but the lift contraption, which can barely fit into his hospital room, just lifts and deposits him. He is without agency. An apt metaphor.
Yesterday I was there about five hours, 11 to 4, and it was nice that he had many visitors, including several old newspaper colleagues, who are fun and funny and no bullshit, and around whom he perks up significantly. I got him to sing yesterday, too, which feels like it'll exercise mouth muscles, and while I served up the first few lines of his favorite Beatles song (“Across the Universe”), he went with Gilbert & Sullivan: “Tit Willow” from “The Mikado.” He'd played that part, KoKo, several decades ago, and was cracking himself up during this rendition. When he was done, he said he was laughing because he was remembering Groucho sing the song on the old Carson Show.
We'll try more singing today.
Thursday June 13, 2024
Movie Review: Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid (1982)
WARNING: SPOILERS
After watching the Steve Martin doc a few months back, I wanted to revisit some of his movies and this seemed a good place to start. With the deep dive I’ve been doing into old films, I assumed I’d recognize more of the clips than I did back in the early 1980s when I first saw it. And I do … it’s just fewer than expected. It doesn’t help that the movie is a spoof of the 1940s hardboiled detective genre rather than ’30s gangster, and that it’s Universal rather than Warner Bros. But we still get Cagney and Bogie. Several Bogies, actually.
Martin plays a private detective named Rigby Reardon. At first glance, that seems an odd spoof on the Sam Spades and Philip Marlowes of the world, but there’s a method to it. In “The Bribe,” Robert Taylor played a man named Rigby, and in “The Killers” Edmond O’Brien played an insurance investigator named Reardon, and both movies keep showing up here—particularly “The Bribe,” which includes the island of Carlotta, which is key to everything. So: Rigby Reardon.
But Martin is kind of wrong for the role, isn’t he? At the time, he was known as a wild-and-crazy guy, but subsequent roles, not to mention time, have revealed him to be its opposite: more lonely guy than anything. He’s a man who yearns to be in love. He's not hard-boiled at all. He's soft-boiled. He's runny inside.
He’s also very, very right for the role. Because he’s very, very funny.
Tie-less
Example: When Alan Ladd shoots at him, Martin contorts his body, over-dramatically, to dodge the bullet, and I burst out laughing. I don't see anyone else doing it that way.
Some of my favorite moments are interactions Martin has with the classic movie stars—where he needles them in by-the-way fashion: telling Bogart to put on a tie rather than that “dumb way of wearing your shirt buttoned”; offering Alan Ladd a cookie and then seeing him nibble one in the clip: “Good, aren’t they?” Or this exchange with Charles Laughton at a tropical bar:
Laughton: We know who you are, Mr. Rigby.
Martin: I'm interested. Who am I?
Laughton: You could be a guy who collects 10,000 dollars just to leave this stinking town.
Martin: I could, could I?
Laughton: You know who I could be?
Martin: The Hunchback of Notre-Dame?
The plot is as convoluted as any plot in the genre—just slightly sillier.
Juliet Forrest (Rachel Ward at her va-va-voomiest) shows up at Rigby’s office with a low-slung Ingrid Bergman hat and her low-slung voice. Her father, Dr. John Forrest (George Gaynes of “Tootsie”), “philanthropist and noted cheesemaker,” is dead, and she thinks it’s murder. In Dr. Forrest’s lab, Rigby finds two lists—Friends of Carlotta and Enemies of Carlotta—and an autographed photo of the singer Kitty Collins (Ava Gardner). But then Alan Ladd pulls a gun on him and takes the list. Ah, but some of the same names are scrawled on a dollar bill left on the underside of a cookie jar at “Lost Weekend” Ray Milland’s place.
The movie keeps doing that. At one point, Rigby tracks down Kitty Collins, and we get the brooch-in-the-soup bit from “The Killers,” as well as the death of Burt Lancaster’s Swede Anderson from same. There’s stuff about a cruise ship, Juliet keeps showing up, and after trying to get several blondes (including Veronica Lake) to meet Fred MacMurray at the “Double Indemnity” grocery store, Rigby goes in drag.
Recurring bits: Rigby keeps getting shot in the arm, and he goes nuts when he hears the words “cleaning woman.” It’s a bit tired, but winds up essential to the plot.
The deus-ex-machina comes from Rigby’s mentor, the tie-less Marlowe (Bogie), who tells him that Carlotta isn’t a woman but a place—an island off the coast of Peru. There, he finds Dr. Forrest alive but held captive by Field Marshall VonKluck (writer-director Carl Reiner) and his band of renegade Nazis, who want his top secret cheese mold for bomb-making. One bomb goes off, eliminating Terre Haute, Indiana, which made me flash on Steve Martin’s “feud” with the city; and just when all seems lost, Juliet gets VonKluck to say “cleaning woman” and Rigby cleans their clocks.
Kinda fun, kinda clever, kinda meh.
Further removed
There’s some good lines: “I planned to kiss her with every lip on my face.” And I loved Ward’s parody of Lauren Bacall’s famous whistle line:
If you need me, just call. You know how to dial, don't you? You just put your finger in the hole and make tiny little circles.
You know who really made me laugh? Reni Santoni as Carlos Rodriguez, the police officer Rigby meets in Carlotta. That whole pyjamas thing. Maybe the movie needed fewer ’40s clips? Here’s what in it:
MOVIE | YEAR | STUDIO | STAR | HAVE I SEEN IT? |
Johnny Eager | 1941 | MGM | Robert Taylor, Lana Turner | |
Suspicion | 1941 | RKO | Cary Grant, Joan Fontaine | |
The Glass Key | 1942 | Universal | Alan Ladd, Veronica Lake | |
This Gun for Hire | 1942 | Universal | Alan Ladd, Veronica Lake | |
Keeper of the Flame | 1943 | MGM | Spencer Tracy, Katherine Hepburn | |
Double Indemnity | 1944 | Universal | Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck | X |
The Lost Weekend | 1945 | Universal | Ray Milland | X |
Deception | 1946 | Warner Bros. | Bette Davis, Paul Heinreid | |
Humoresque | 1946 | Warner Bros. | Joan Crawford, John Garfield | |
Notorious | 1946 | RKO | Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman | X |
The Big Sleep | 1946 | Warner Bros. | Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall | X |
The Killers | 1946 | Universal | Burt Lancaster, Ava Gardner | X |
The Postman Always Rings Twice | 1946 | MGM | John Garfield, Lana Turner | X |
Dark Passage | 1947 | Warner Bros. | Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall | X |
I Walk Alone | 1947 | Paramount | Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas | X |
Sorry, Wrong Number | 1948 | Paramount | Burt Lancaster, Barbara Stanwyck | |
The Bribe | 1949 | MGM | Robert Taylor, Ava Gardner | |
White Heat | 1949 | Warner Bros. | James Cagney | X |
In a Lonely Place | 1950 | Columbia | Humphrey Bogart | X |
After this, Reiner and Martin would team up on a spoof of ’50s schlock-horror, “The Man With Two Brains,” and it kinda was meh, too, and I’m wondering if Reiner was attempting his own series of genre satires the way Mel Brooks did with westerns, horror, silent, etc. Either way, it was the next Reiner-Martin collaboration, “All of Me,” where Martin finally broke through with both critics and audience.
The most dated aspects of the film, interestingly, aren’t the classic clips but the Martin-Ward “present.” When Juliet first arrives in his office, for example, she faints, and wakes up to Rigby molesting her. He claims her breasts shifted out of whack and he was merely adjusting them. The funny part is when he holds up his hands, as if in anticipation of them tumbling again, and says “There,” but today we wouldn’t get to the funny part. None of it would fly. All of which underscores the fact that we are now further removed from “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid” (42 years) than “Dead Men” was from the oldest film it used (41 years).
Va-va-voomiest
Wednesday June 12, 2024
Can't Get There From Here, Don'tcha Know, or the Hwy. 100 Two-Step
The other day, after visiting my father at his new post-stroke facility in Golden Valley, Minnesota, and driving south on Hwy 100, I figured crosstown would be rough at 4:30 on a weekday so why not take the 50th/Vernon Ave. exit and just take 50th to my sister's place near Lake Nokomis? I mean, why don't more Minnesotans do that? Avoid the freeway awfulness. See the neighborhoods. See people. Fun!
Famous last words.
After the exit I took a left onto Vernon and immediately ran into a snarl: two lanes merging into one. Then I realized, no, wait, we're also being detoured. Vernon Ave. was under construction and didn't go through. The flow of the traffic, bumper to bumper, stop and go, wound right and around, and to my eye it almost seemed to be going back onto Hwy 100—but north this time—the place I'd just come from. But that couldn't be. As I inched along, I kept trying to figure out where the detour went.
And that's where it went: back onto Hwy. 100, heading north.
Had I missed an alternate route? A path that made more sense? Nope. It wasn't a bug, it was a feature. If you exited Hwy 100 south the way I did, taking a left onto Vernon Ave., the only path for you was to get back on Hwy 100 heading north. Isn't that astonishing? The old joke is there are two seasons in Minnesota, winter and road construction, and this was that, but I'd never seen anything so stupid in my life.
And it didn't end there! Consult the map. Since the detour sent me back north I had to take the next exit, the Excelsior Blvd. exit, but the path I was on, the detour path, was packed and slow-moving and infuriating; so at the first opportunity I tried to get far from the madding crowd. Or, to use another literary allusion, I tried to take the road less traveled. But Edina/Minneapolis wouldn't let me. I might have a clear path for a few blocks, but then I realized why I had a clear path. This road didn't go through, either—construction was everywhere—and I'd have to double back with my tail between my legs. Sheridan didn't go through. Thomas didn't go through. Neither did Upton, nor Vincent. I had to go all the way back to Xerxes just to get to 50th, just to try to get home. It took me an hour.
Tuesday June 11, 2024
Nothing Works in Three Acts
Act I, Monday: On the light rail to the Seattle-Tacoma airport, I called my ophthalmologist to cancel my Wednesday morning eye appointment. My father in Minneapolis had just had a stroke, so I was heading there, and would not be in town.
Act II, Tuesday: The ophthalmologist's office calls me to reschedule my Wednesday morning eye appointment for next month.
Act III, Wednesday: The ophthalmologist's office calls me to ask “How come you're not at your Wednesday morning eye appointment?”
See the disconnect?
See the cat? See the cradle?
Monday June 10, 2024
Donald Trump's KISS of Death
“I have practiced criminal law for over 20 years, and I have tried and won cases as both a federal prosecutor and criminal defense attorney. I've almost never seen the defense win without a compelling counternarrative. Jurors often want to side with prosecutors, who have the advantage of writing the indictment, marshaling the witnesses and telling the story. The defense needs its own story, and in my experience, the side that tells the simpler story at trial usually wins.
”Instead of telling a simple story, Mr. Trump's defense was a haphazard cacophony of denials and personal attacks. That may work for a Trump rally or a segment on Fox News, but it doesn't work in a courtroom."
-- former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti, now a partner at Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner in Chicago, in a New York Times Op-Ed
About 10 years ago I interviewed class action attorney Steve Berman who initially flummoxed me by giving 10-second answers (rather than 10-minute answers) to every question. But that's his philosophy: KISS. Keep It Simple, Stupid. The Stupid in this case was Donald Trump.
Sunday June 09, 2024
Room 715
It's Friday night at 6:00 and I'm with my 92-year-old father in Room 715 at M hospital in the Twin Cities. I call it the Henry Aaron Room. Dad gets it if not many others do. He's sleeping. We were watching “Jeopardy” but he'd been sitting up in a chair for three hours and that proved wearying.
Last week, Dad had a mild stroke and the paramedics took him here. I had been at the Mariners game in Seattle, had called him with the good news of the Trump convictions (“Guilty on all counts!”), and got his wife Ingrid instead with the news that he was being loaded into the ambulance. Initially, I thought: “This again.” Six weeks earlier, maybe eight, he'd had something similar—suddenly unable to lift his left arm—and been taken to A hospital, where they'd determined that it wasn't a stroke but a TIA. You can look it up—I had to. He recovered from it pretty well. This wasn't that. The paramedics determined this was a stroke, and took him to the nearest hospital, which was M hospital.
I left the game early, and called Ingrid when I got home. On the phone his voice sounded very, very slurred, and I flashed back—not to six or eight weeks ago—but to 2016 when my mother had a stroke in her apartment over the weekend and wasn't found until Monday morning. She lost the ability to speak for the last three years of her life.
“Was he given the TPA drug for immediate stroke aftermath?” I texted.
“I haven't seen the doctor yet,” Ingrid texted back, “and the nurses can't tell me. But the paramedics told me this is a top stroke management hospital. Wish you were here.”
“I'm just googling it. Apparently it's called tissue plasminogen activator.”
“Yes, I know about it, but he doesn't have an IV. Great stuff if you can get it.”
That back-and-forth took place around 6 PM Minneapolis time. At around 6:40, an emergency room doctor burst in on him and Ingrid, demanding to know when exactly the stroke happened because they were thinking they were reaching the outer limits of when the TPA could be given safely. The trouble was, there was no “exactly.” He'd had lunch, felt off, went to take a nap, and when he woke up: this.
I knew about this back-and-forth because I was on the phone with Ingrid. During a pause, I asked what the tests suggested and were they sure it was a stroke? No, they weren't sure. Everything was too inconclusive, and in the end they didn't administer the drug. Instead they ordered an MRI. Which told them—the next day—yes, it was a mild stroke. Therapists (occupational, physical, speech) were assigned to him.
And then things got worse. Over the weekend he kept coughing when he tried to drink water. He ate cut-up meals just fine—so Ingrid and my sister Karen said—but the water was problematic. Too late the hospital staff ordered thickened water. By then he'd aspirated something into his lungs. Now he had pneumonia. Now he was on oxygen. Now he was in the ICU. And I booked a flight to come out to Minneapolis.
I'm still not over this initial fuckup. If you have a stroke patient, even one with a “mild” stroke, how do you not guard against aspiration? What precautions are taken? That seems like the No. 1 thing to watch out for. But they didn't. And things cascaded down. They took a semi-healthy man with a stroke and within days brought him to death's door.
People kept showing up—now PT, now OT, now the nurse to check his blood sugar, now the nurse with the nebulizer, now the RN to move him in bed. Strangers kept waking him up, screaming “BOB!” in his face. They keep asking the same questions:
- Do you know where you are?
- Do you know what month it is?
- Do you know what day it is?
To see if he regresses in his answers, I'm told. But it bored and annoyed him. He's a sharp man in a weakened body. Dad doesn't suffer fools gladly and now he was being treated like one. One time, he was so bored telling them “June 6,” he just said, “D-Day.”
There's so many of them, and they never seem to know who he is. “BOB! HOW DID YOU GET AROUND AT HOME? DID YOU USE A WHEELCHAIR OR A WALKER?”
Dad, through slurred speech: “I walked.”
A feeding tube was ordered but that was another disaster. On Wednesday morning, the nurse inserted it before I arrived but X-rays indicated it wasn't in the right place. Or it was kinked. So she did it again. I was standing outside the door and could hear his cries of pain. But they still didn't get it. And the third time wasn't right, either. My sister to the nurse: “Should we get someone else to try this?” Even the fourth or fifth go, which seemed OK, didn't work. It got clogged. The processed food wound up overflowing onto the machine. They wound up turning it off and inserting his tube the next morning via X-ray. Fifth or sixth time's the charm.
He still has his sense of humor. We were watching the Twins play the Yankees other night and a nurse interrupted to give him a blood-thinning shot in his stomach. “BOB, I'm going to give you a jab, it'll be a little painful, and then you can go back to watching the Twins!!” Dad: “I don't know which is more painful.”
I keep wondering over the illogic of so much of what they do. When his oxygen levels go below 88%, his monitor beeps, and sometimes someone shows up to investigate; other times nobody shows up to investigate. I asked why. “Oh, we can see it back at the nurse's station. We're monitoring it.” Got it. After she left, I wondered, “So ... why do you need the monitor to beep in his room then? You already know what you need to know. And isn't that keeping him awake?”*
* Apparently they have readings and alarms from one of the monitors (breathing, heartrate, etc.) but not from the feeding tube. Point still stands.
They reduced the nebulizer from four to two times daily. Why? Because he's improving, they said. Is he? I said, listening to his wet cough. We take shifts—Ingrid has the brunt of it—so he has an advocate. So the medical staff gets a sense that it's a person there.
I envision a horror movie, Kafkaesque, about someone entering a facility and slowly, bit by bit, losing mobility, health and agency by a staff of cheerful, chipper people who think they're doing good. They're not evil. They think they're helping. But they keep blowing it. Until there's nothing of him left.
That's all of us eventually.
Friday June 07, 2024
A Bad Week for Dinesh is a Good Week for America
“Last Friday, Salem Media Group announced that it had removed the fabulist film 2,000 Mules from its platform and said it would no longer distribute either the movie or an accompanying book by the right-wing activist and Trump-pardoned felon Dinesh D'Souza. It also issued an apology to Mark Andrews, a Georgia man whom the film had falsely depicted participating in a conspiracy to rig the 2020 election by using so-called mules to stuff ballot drop boxes. After being cleared of any wrongdoing by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, Andrews filed a defamation lawsuit in 2022 against D'Souza, Salem, and two individuals associated with a group whose analysis heavily influenced the film...
Salem's climbdown is worth paying attention to. Salem is one of the most influential right-wing media companies in the United States, and in many ways, 2,000 Mules was the movie version of Trump's election lies. The film was utterly bogus—a mixture of conjecture and falsehoods that were easily discredited by fact-checkers. But it played a major role in shaping Republican skepticism about the election.”
-- Charles Sykes, “A Bad Week for Backers of the Big Lie,” The Atlantic
Yes, and it couldn't happen to a wormier fellow. Here's my review of D'Souza's “2016: Obama's America,” a 2012 documentary about the horrors that awaited America in 2016 if Obama was reelected, and which I watched in 2016, and which is laughable for its scare tactics and zero sense of history and politics. Here's a post on Dinesh's box office going down down down, as everyone realizes what b.s. he's pedaling, and as other guys, as the man once said, are giving it away for free. “2,000 Mules” continued that trend, grossing just $1.5 million. His next, and hopefully last, was “Police State,” which IMDb describes thus: “Conservative film made by Dinesh D'Souza, which alleges the US Government is weaponized against all Christians and Republicans, and that the FBI, CIA, DOJ, and Secret Service all are corrupt, and that Trump is the only man who can stop it.” Read that aloud without laughing. Did it even get a release? It doesn't even have its own Wiki page.
I'm curious about that defamation lawsuit. I'm curious how closely Dinesh is watching what's happening to Alex Jones for his lies. Not to mention the Fox News/Dominion settlement.
Sunday June 02, 2024
Movie Review: Evil Does Not Exist (2023)
WARNING: SPOILERS
It’s not often that you actively contemplate a movie’s title as you watch, but that’s what happens with Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s “Evil Does Not Exist.” The biggest reason, of course, is the title reads like a provocative grad school thesis. You're like: “Really? OK. Interesting to see where you go with this.” We also get many shots that hold for long periods of time on not much happening. So your mind wanders. I know mine did. Generally toward the title.
And it happens immediately. Interspersed with the opening credits are long tracking shots looking up at trees in winter. Then we cut to a man creating logs from those trees. His axe work is quiet and efficient. So is that part of why evil doesn’t exist? Because isn’t he evil from the trees’ perspective? Just not ours? Or am I reading too much into things. (I'm reading too much into things.)
Later, he and a friend cull water from mountain streams, while, off the trail, our quiet axe man, Takumi (Hitoshi Omika), spots wild wasabi. He points out it to his friend, who can use it for his restaurant. It's the first time I realized wasabi was a plant.
Glamping
In the village of Mizubiki, the pace of life is the pace of nature. Then two representatives from a Tokyo corporation arrive to hold a town meeting about an upcoming glamping project. Don’t know “glamping”? I didn’t. It’s glamorous or high-end camping. The meeting is like most such meetings: a chance for residents to air their concerns about what’s happening, but just that: a chance. Everything feels like a fait accompli.
Then quietly, methodically, the townspeople take apart the project.
What I like is the specificity of the complaints. Your septic tank is for 50 people, says Takumi’s restaurant friend, but your camp capacity is greater than that. Right, the reps say politely, but we won’t have maximum capacity all the time. Right, says the friend, equally polite, but as a business you’ll try for it, yes? Maximum capacity is your goal but you’re not preparing for your goal. Because you don’t care about runoff. The townspeople care about runoff. They worry about damage to the environment—which is their environment. They worry they’ll no longer be able to cull water from the mountain streams. Water flows down, Takumi says, and others repeat this like a mantra. And while the complaints are initially deflected in the manner of corporate PR, eventually the townspeople wear down the representatives. By the end, the corporate reps agree with the townspeople.
Back in Tokyo, though, the CEO, via video conference, isn’t moved. He still wants to go through with the project as budgeted, i.e., maximized for profits rather than environmental care. The townspeople want him at the follow-up meeting, since he’s the decision-maker, but he says he’s too busy for that. Hey, that guy everyone admires? The odd-job guy? Takumi? Why not just hire him for glamping manager? That’ll allay concerns. That’s the CEO’s workaround.
Now we get the long car-ride back to the village with the two reps, Takahashi and Mayuzumi (Ryuji Kosaka and Ayaka Shibutani), both of whom, we discover, kind of fell into the work and aren’t enamored of it. Takahashi in particular. He likes the village. He’s thinking of the manager position for himself. And when the two come upon Takumi chopping logs, he asks to do it, too. Later, he’ll say that chopping the log was the best he felt in 10 years.
The three each lunch at the friend’s restaurant, where Takumi turns down the offered position, then they help Takumi gather water from the mountain stream in the manner he did at the beginning. And like at the beginning, Takumi suddenly remembers he has to pick up his daughter Hana (Ryo Nishikawa) from school. Again, he finds out she’s already left to walk home. Except this time he can’t find her. Night falls. The whole village is out looking for her, calling her name. Mayuzumi injures her hand so it’s just Takumi and Takahashi together when they come across the fallen body.
To be honest, I thought they came across Hana, standing, confronting a wounded deer, but apparently that was just a flashback; or it was Takumi taking in the scene and figuring out what happened. In the woods, throughout, we’ve heard distant gunshots, and that afternoon, to a query from Mayuzumi, Takumi had rather serendipitously talked about when deer are dangerous to humans: when they’ve been gutshot. That’s what Takumi now thinks happened to Hana.
And then the oddity: As Takahashi begins to rush toward Hana’s body, Takumi grabs him from behind, takes him down and chokes him until he starts foaming at the mouth.
Loose ends
That’s the movie. Takumi gathers up Hana and takes her home, while Takahashi stumbles for a couple of steps and then falls in the snow. Is he alive? Is Hana? Why did Takumi choke him? Because he, too, is a wounded deer thrashing out at the nearest entity? Evil does not exist, just nature.
Apparently Hamaguchi began this one as a short but it kept getting longer. Either way, it’s not “Drive My Car,” which I thought the best movie of 2021.
Saturday June 01, 2024
Without Fear or Favor
“I did my job. Our job is to follow the facts without fear or favor and that’s what we did here.”
-- Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, after former president Donald Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts by a jury of our peers