WARNING: SPOILERS

Trying to explain the box-office disaster of last November’s “The Marvels” before I saw it, I suggested that one of its problems—along with superhero saturation, audience misogyny, and just not being very good—may be Captain Marvel’s personality problem. In that she doesn’t have one. “You need a thread, and you need personality, and you need to give us a reason to go out into the November weather,” I wrote. “And I don’t know if ‘The Marvels’ had any of that.”

Turns out it did. Iman Vellani’s Kamala Khan, the Pakistani-American superhero-worshipping teen turned superhero, first depicted in the Disney+ TV series “Ms. Marvel,” is loaded with personality. Maybe too much of it? She bubbles, and sometimes bubbles over. But I’ll take it. Beats flat.

She’s the gee-whiz fun of the movie. She’s us: the regular person in the realm of the gods.

Both Captain Marvel (Brie Larson) and Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) keep acting like they’ve been there before. Which they have. Which we all have. 

Antiquing
Am I getting too old for this shit? In the first scene, on a barren moonlike landscape, as an obelisk is lifted from the depths of a crater and then smashed open with a Thor-like hammer, I thought Dar-Benn, the hammer-wielding Kree leader with the Romulan shoulder-pads, was Emilia Clarke of “Game of Thrones.” Meanwhile her right-hand man looked a bit like Tom Sizemore with eyeliner and a man-bun. “But,” I said to myself, “Tom Sizemore’s dead, right?” Right. Or would be if this were him. It wasn’t Clarke, either, but Zawe Ashton. All of which makes me feel like the play-by-play man who keeps calling the son by the father’s name. Do I even know what decade it is?

Dar-Benn is basically antiquing. From the smashed obelisk, she culls a cool bracelet that glows purple when she snaps it onto her forearm. She’s just missing its companion piece. “It must be buried elsewhere,” shrugs eyeliner Tom Sizemore. “Elsewhere?” says Dar-Benn with a desperate, humorless need. “Like where?”

Cut to: Jersey City, NJ. 

That’s not a bad gag but it soured me immediately on Dar-Benn as a villain. Like where? Hey, I’m new here myself, lady, I don’t have all the answers.

Now we’re introduced—or re-introduced if we’ve seen the TV series (I haven’t)—to Kamala Khan and her success-oriented immigrant family. They’re fun. Kamala is in her room supposedly doing her science homework but actually drawing a rainbow-and-unicorn inflected adventure comic with her hero, Captain Marvel. But then her forearm bracelet begins to glow purple and pow! she’s sucked through her closet door and into a fight with Dar-Benn.

Well, first we flash back to earlier in the day since we haven’t been introduced to our hero yet. Carol Danvers/Captain Marvel is on a space station of some kind, with her cat, having bad dreams and/or memories. On another space station somewhere, Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) contacts her about “the surge in the jump-point system.” What’s the jump-point system? Exactly. I guess they’re like wormholes that cover up plotholes. A space door opens, allowing you to traverse the galaxy quickly. And those metal bracelets? They’re quantum bands that create these jump points. Or something. Does it matter? Enough to know the surge was caused by Dar-Benn, and as both Danvers and Rambeau investigate, and Kamala’s bracelet glows purple, something symbiotic happens and all three switch places: Rambeau winds up on the desolate moon Danvers was investigating, Danvers in Kamala’s closet, and Kamala in Rambeau’s spacesuit pinwheeling through space*.

* Why do they trade accoutrements like the space suit but not clothes? Isn’t a space suit clothes?

We get a good early fight scene where they battle the Kree in three different spots—including the Kahn living room—and every time they power up they switch places and havoc ensues. And eventually we get the longer backstory that explains both Danvers’ dreams and Dar-Benn’s M.O. Apparently, 30 years ago, Danvers destroyed the A.I. that controlled the Kree Empire (was that in the first movie? I’ve already forgotten) and it led to 30 years of civil war which rendered the Kree planet, Hala, uninhabitable. That’s why Dar-Benn is now stealing air from the new Skrull home planet (rendering them refugees again), water from Aladna (Bollywood by way of a transgender Land of Oz), and eventually the sun from Earth. 

Dar-Benn is targeting each of these planets because each means something to Danvers and she wants vengies. The Kree blame Danvers for everything that’s happened to them, just as the Skrulls blame Danvers for being forced into exile again, just as Rambeau blames Danvers for not returning to Earth sooner. “You said you’d be back before I knew it,” she complains while world are being destroyed. Danvers takes everyone’s concerns seriously, too. It’s tiring. Not to mention boring. How about one “Get the fuck OFF me” line?

On the other hand, maybe she should blame herself. She set everything in motion but didn’t have the wherewithal or imagination to figure out a solution. It’s up to Rambeau, mid-battle with Dar-Benn, to suggest one. Since Hala’s sun is dormant rather than dead, maybe it just needs a jumpstart; and maybe Danvers could do that with her powers. Danvers looks at her, surprised, worried, pained. “But I’ve never done anything like that before,” she responds.

That’s our hero, ladies and gentlemen.

And guess what? She does all that. In the end, she restores the Hala sun without breaking a sweat. Embarrassing.

Creaking
Not to be a dick but is there too much female bonding in this thing? Tessa Thompson as Valkyrie shows up mid-movie to give Danvers a hug and the Skrulls a place to land. At the end, Hailee Steinfeld shows up as the daughter of Hawkeye, now a crime-fighter in her own right (via yet another Disney+ TV series), who is recruited by Kamala, who is acting the part of Nick Fury/Phil Coulson and using more famous lines from better movies: “I’m putting together a team,” she says. Our heroes even try to enfold Dar-Benn into their matriarchy; they give her an out and allow themselves to be betrayed. Why not, right? It’s just the Earth’s sun.

Plus the thing they fight against comes to pass and it’s no big deal. Oh no, Dar-Benn can’t get both bracelets! When she does, she just destroys herself. And sure, rips a hole in the space-time continuum or whatever, but this allows Rambeau to do her thing, winding up, in a mid-credits sequence, in a different reality, where her mom (Lashana Lynch) is alive and the Beast (Kelsey Grammar) is her doctor. Do we care? Why should we care?

How much don’t we care? “The Marvels” did the unthinkable in the MCU: It opened at $46 million, topped out at $84 domestic, and disappeared. It couldn’t do what “Spider-Man” did on its opening weekend 20 years ago.

It’s not completely its fault. The MCU has lost its way. These are its recent releases:

“Guardians” wasn’t bad, but what a sad bunch of movies. Fool me 10 times, shame on me.

I’m curious who at Marvel said, back in the early going, “What if we insert scenes in the credits hinting at an ‘Avengers’ movie down the road?” That’s what you need: fun new ideas. To quote Zack Greinke: Do more of that.

And the crowd went wild

The announced attendance last night was 14,984 but it felt way sparser than that. It felt like a mid-September game: starting temps in the low 60s dropping into the chilly 50s as the game went on; a handful of fans trying to amuse themselves with scoreboard antics or hydro races; two teams with nowhere players going nowhere fast.

Both teams are actually doing well. Or well-ish. The Mariners, predicted to win the West by some, are in fact in first place in the AL West (by half a game at gamestart), while the Royals, whom nobody predicted to go anywhere, are third in the AL Central but with a better record: 25-17 vs. 22-19. So why wasn't there more excitement?

On the M's side, it's partly that record. We're only in first because everyone else in the division is falling on their faces. We're like the normal guy at the klutz convention, but no one is mistaking us for Fred Astaire. It's also our offense—or lack of it. Halfway through the game, our second baseman and No. 3 hitter Jorge Polanco had to leave with a hamstring pull, and in the reshuffling the new third baseman, Luis Urias, wound up in the three spot. I nudged my friend Tim. “Look at that. Means we have a No. 3 hitter batting below .200.” Then I realized the awful truth. “I guess we began the game that way, didn't we?” In fact three of our starters were below Mendoza: Polanco and the two Mitches—Haniger and Garver—while seven of our starting nine were hitting below .250, and one of those, supposed star Julio Rodriguez, was barely that. In the game he went 1-4 with a single and now sports a .255/.309/.321 line, for a .630 OPS. I know he's a slow starter (a year ago he was at .214/.280./403), but all of that helps account for the meh reaction. This is a meh team. The Mariners are 25th in the Majors in batting (.226) and OBP (.302). The reason we're first in the West is because our starting pitching is superlative: No. 1 in the Majors in quality starts, No. 1 in WHIP, sixth in ERA.

Last night, starter George (“Summer of George!”) Kirby was shaky in the early going. With one out, Bobby Witt Jr. dunked a single to right, then Kirby seemed to lose control: he plunked the next two guys to load the bases. A mound visit seemed to do good for a change: he struck out the next guy, Michael Massey, on three pitches, then got a 6-3 to end the inning. But after two innings he'd thrown 43 pitches and you figured he wasn't long for the game. Except he turned it around. He had a couple of 1-2-3, throwing just 10 and 7 pitches, and he left after seven, ahead 4-0. He threw more than 100 pitches. Can't remember the last guy I saw who threw more than 100 pitches.

Our big bat was Lonesome Luke Raley, a 29-year-old left fielder acquired in the off-season from Tampa Bay, who hit a 2-run homer to dead center in the 2nd. He's an upswing guy—in that last year was his best year by far. He's the opposite of what Jerry DiPoto keeps doing with second base: getting one-time All-Stars who've had bad seasons, thinking they can turn it around. That was Kolten Wong in 2023, Polanco now. In our resumed SubStack the other day, Tim and I went over the black hole that was left field for the 1990s Seattle Mariners and last night we agreed that's now second base. Here are our main second-baggers playing opposite J.P. Crawford for the past few years, along with their OPSes:

• 2024: Jorge Polanco, .606
• 2023: Kolten Wong, .468; Jose Caballero, .663
• 2022: Adam Frazier, .612
• 2021: Abraham Toro, .695
• 2020: Shed Long, Jr., .533
• 2019: Dee Gordon, .663

So Abraham Toro was the high point. Who knew?

M's got two more runs in the 3rd, stringing three singles along. It should've been two singles and a double but when Cal Raleigh's deep drive to center went off the fielder's glove, Polanco, who'd been on first, wasn't ready to run, and could only get to second, stymying Raleigh. Maybe that's when he pulled the hammy? With his bad baserunning? Either way, after Lonesome Luke plated another, it stayed 4-0 until the 8th, when both teams got two: theirs off reliever Ryne “Time to panic” Stanek, ours when Tyrus Raymond France dunked a long fly into the left-field bleachers.

To me, the best-looking player of the game was Bobby Witt, Jr., who went only 1-4 but seemed everywhere: going first to third, running everything out, and with wheels. Right now he's hitting .304/.369/.518, and he's second in the Majors in WAR to Mookie Betts. Those are big boy numbers. Ah yes, I remember them well.

I'm reading Timothy Ryback's “Takeover: Hitler's Final Rise to Power” right now, and there are moments that can't help remind me of You Know Who:

• Following his failed bid for the Reich presidency in April 1932, Hitler went to court to have the election results annulled. “Hitler to Contest Validity of Election,” The New York Times announced in a headline. ... Observing that Hindenburg had beaten Hitler by 5,941,582 votes, the court upheld the election results, ruling that the disparity was “so significant that it would make no sense for a national recount of the ballots.” Hitler nevertheless declared victory, noting that his party had gained two million votes at the polls. “That is a feat that has never been equaled, and I have done this despite the unconstitutional ban placed on my broadcasting election appeals,” Hitler said
• What made Hitler so dangerous, Kessler believed, was his bluster, behind which lay “his intuition, lightning-fast ability to assess a situation, and ability to react with astonishing speed and effectiveness.”
• [Kurt von] Schleicher had a strategy he called the Zähmungsprozess, or taming process, designed to marginalize the party “radicals” and bring the movement into the political mainstream. Schleicher praised Hitler as a “modest, orderly man who only wants what is best” and is committed to the rule of law. Schleicher had equally flattering words for Hitler's storm troopers. [Schleicher was murdered by Hitler's S.S. in 1934.]
• Assembling in columns six men across, the storm troopers marched into the narrow, cobbled streets, provoking sniper fire from windows and rooftops that killed two storm troopers instantly. When the police intervened, a full-blown street battle erupted. By day's end, there were five dead, with another seven fatally wounded, and dozens more with serious injuries. The violence produced the sort of headlines Hitler had hoped for—“Reds Shoot at Nazis from Roofs in Altona,” in The New York Times, for example...
• “The National Socialist movement will achieve power in Germany by methods permitted by the present Constitution—in a purely legal way,” [Hitler] told The New York Times. “It will then give the German people the form of organization and government that suits our purposes.”

Trivia question: Which prominent American's photo was kept in Hitler's office in the Brown House in Munich, the early headquarters of the National Socialist movement? Not surprisingly...

Hitler occupied a large second-floor corner salon whose ceiling was decorated with stucco swastikas. On the walls hung a portrait of Frederick the Great; a painting of Hitler's military unit, the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment, in action during the war; and a framed photograph of Henry Ford. A German translation of Ford's anti-Semitic treatise, The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem, sat on a table in the foyer.

I'm still in the early going. Recommended.

Increasingly it feels like nothing works anymore.

Yesterday afternoon I was meeting a friend at the Mountaineering Club, a rooftop bar atop the Graduate Hotel in Seattle's University District. It was a beautiful day, Seattle's first 80-degree day of the year, and I drove over, parked, starting walking, then ran into what we often run into in Seattle: a bit of unpleasantness. This time it was a shirtless, shoeless man, 30s probably, vociferous and angry, sitting on the sidewalk. Was he talking to me or just talking out loud? I could see blood on his forehead and blood on one of his bare feet and he was asking me to call 911. It was more demanding than beseeching, but I stopped, took in the scene. Yes, he seemed to be bleeding. Yes, I guess I should call.

So I did. I explained to the female operator: I'm passing by, a guy on the sidewalk, bleeding—sotto voce: he might not be all there—and he asked me to call. 50th and 11th. Then there was a bit of a delay. She was asking more questions than I'd anticipated and eventually a male operator got on the line, too.

Male Operator: Are you near the Fire Dept.?
Me: Yes, it's across the street.
Male Operator: Well, can't you just walk him over?

I was a bit stunned. Was 911 part of the Fire Dept.? I thought it was—I guess cops? Or its own entity? Plus I'd never heard a 911 operator make this kind of request before. Wasn't it usually “Wait there.” Instead I got: “We're a little busy, how about coming over here instead.”

Me: Well, I...
Male Operator: Can he walk?
Me: I guess? It's just...
Female Operator: Sir, do you feel safe?
Me: It's more—he's not very responsive. I don't know if he would go. Again, he's not really all there.

Mostly I didn't relish the idea of trying to convince him. Because I didn't care that much. I wanted to do bare minimum. Plus, as I looked over, he no longer seemed to be bleeding from his head. And the blood on his foot seemed pretty red. Too red? Like fake? Was the whole thing a scam?

But I walked across the street, rang the doorbell of the Fire Dept., explained what was up. Everyone seemed confused by my presence, and in the end it turned out an operator had already dispatched someone, and that was that. Just another odd moment in another odd day in another odd, awful year. Walking away, I had this thought: “Even 9-1-1.”

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away...

Today's post is brought to you by Immaculate Grid, about which, yes, Tim and I used to do a SubStack, and may again in the future. In the meantime ...

The grid today included a column on players who got 200+ hits in a season crossed with three original-16 teams: Reds, Cards and A's. I went with Frank McCormick, Lou Brock and Al Simmons. McCormick was a guess. Well, all three were, but Brock got 3,000 hits and didn't walk much, and Al Simmons had those amazing early 1930s years, so those weren't fingers-crossed guesses as much as McCormick. I just didn't want to do Pete Rose ... which, yes, turned out to be the No. 1 answer for that square: Something like 85% chose him.

With reason. This is how many guys hit 200+ in a season for each of those franchises:

• Cards: 21
• A's 8
• Reds: 6

SIX?? And get this: no one since Pete Rose in 1977. That's shocking for two reasons. It means Rose didn't get to 200+ hits the year he hit in 44 straight games AND no Cincinnati Red has gotten 200+ hits in a season since 1977! I.e., since “Star Wars” came out! Since Jimmy Carter's first year in office! Since The New York Times first began to let Donald Trump lie all over its pages! That far back. 

It made me wonder if that's the longest 200+ hit drought for any team. Yep, and it's not even close.

LAST PLAYER TO GET 200+ HITS FOR EACH FRANCHISE

The Tampa Bay Rays are the only franchise that's never had a 200+ hit guy. They topped out with—believe it or not—Aubrey Huff, about to embarrass himself yet again a social platform near you, who got 198 in 2003. He and Carl Crawford (194 in 2005) are the only Rays/D-Rays to top 190. 

But the Rays have an excuse. They've only been around since 1998. The Reds have been swinging bats since basically the Civil War—the 19th century one. In case you're curious, here are the Cincy Six:

1. Cy Seymour (1905)
2. Jake Daubert (1922)
3. Frank McCormick (1938, 1939)
4. Vada Pinson (1959, 1961, 1963, 1965)
5. Frank Robinson (1962)
6. Pete Rose (1965, 1966, 1968, 1969, 1970, 1973, 1975, 1976, 1977)

So is Cincy being punished for all the 200+ seasons it got with Pete Rose? Or because of what Pete Rose became? Or is? Is it the Curse of Charlie Hustle? 

What stunned me about the Twins, meanwhile, is that their last guy to do it, Paul Molitor, did it in his age-40 season, just three seasons from retirement, and he managed *225*. Wow. Even Luis Arraez, when he won the batting title as a Twin in 2022, managed just 173. That's how hard it is to do this thing. 

It helps to be a free-swinger, of course. There's a reason Miguel Tejada and Vlad Guerrero are on the above chart twice. There's a reason, too, that Ted Williams, Barry Bonds and Frank Thomas never got 200+: too many walks. That's probably why, in the Moneyball age, the 200+ stat doesn't seem to have the cachet it used to.

But that's no excuse, Cincinnati. 

Rule No. 1: This isn't Ray Harryhausen

WARNING: SPOILERS

For years, as if in a dream, I remembered a film my brother Chris and I saw at the Boulevard Theater in South Minneapolis. Mostly I remembered two scenes. At one point, the hero cuts through the villain with a sword but it has no effect. The blade is pulled clean, and the villain laughs and reveals that his heart is locked in an impenetrable tower far, far away. As a result, at the end, the hero treks to the tower, takes the beating heart—entombed in glass—and tosses it over the side. I had no idea the movie’s name, its stars, or when we saw it.

Thanks to the internet, I now know all of that.

The movie is “Captain Sindbad,” a 1963 King Brothers Production filmed in Germany, with an extra “d” in the title character’s name to avoid copyright infringement. It starred TV’s Zorro, Guy Williams, and German actress and songstress Heidi Bruhl, and Chris and I probably saw it in Oct. 1971—probably Saturday, Oct. 16, or Sunday, Oct. 17—since it looked like it played only one weekend. I would’ve been 8, Chris 10. Third and fifth grade.

And now, after all these years, I’ve seen it again. 

Horrors beyond imagination
Why did I bother? Nostalgia. Curiosity. Basically it was a chance to revisit a childhood dream and see if there was anything there. To see if it explained anything about me to me.

Bruhl plays Princess Jana of the Arabian kingdom of Baristan who is awaiting the return of the titular hero, whom she loves and plans to marry. Unfortunately, Baristan is no longer ruled by her father but by the evil El Kerim (Pedro Armendariz, Kerim Bay in “From Russian With Love”), who wants to marry her. (Yes, marry. This is a kids story.) Apparently El Kerim stole a magic ring from the king’s wizard, Galgo (Abraham Sofaer), and he uses it to control both king and wizard.

Not that Galgo needs much controlling. The movie begins with him creating a rain cloud to water a parched plant and then haplessly losing control of the spell. Everyone’s acting style here is different: Bruhl is earnest, Williams is so self-assured as to be somnambulant, Armendariz is over-the-top but fun, while Sofaer is the Everest of over-the-top. He chews his scenes to bits.

His next trick? He turns Jana into a “firebird” (a small creature with a tuft of blonde hair) so she can fly to Sindbad’s ship and alert him to Kerim’s machinations. Two problems: Sindbad has no idea this is her and he isn’t smart enough to notice the message tied to her feet until it’s too late. Because Kerim, who is smart, gets wise, and after punishing Galgo (twisting his ring spins the wizard’s head around like Linda Blair in “The Exorcist”), he has Galgo turn his guards into hawks, who then bombard Sindbad’s ship with boulders. For some reason, the hawks are normal-sized while the boulders are huge.

Shipwrecked, and moving through Baristan with his ever-loyal men, Sindbad has himself arrested for stealing a melon in order to get into the palace and get close to El Kerim. Ah, but Jana tears up when he’s lashed, and anyway Kerim knows what’s up, and after they duel and Kerim is bloodlessly run through, Sindbad is sentenced to fight in the arena. Did they have Roman-style arena battles in Arabia? Sure, toss it all in.

His opponent is a giant, slathering, invisible monster, which is both tougher for Sindbad and easier on the film’s budget. After tense moments backing away from giant footprints, Sindbad climbs the arena walls and dumps an oil cauldron on it, then makes his getaway. But how to defeat the literally heartless El Kerim? It’s Galgo, more than halfway through the film, who delivers the great, cheesy line that sets Sindbad and his men on the real adventure:

There, in that tower, surrounded by horrors beyond imagination, lies the living bleeding heart of El Kerim.

That’s the line we were waiting for. I liked it so much I added it to the film’s quote section on IMDb. 

So what are these “horrors beyond imagination”? Everything a low budget will allow:

• After trekking through a desert, they wind up climbing big stairs covered with vines and busted pottery, and half-hidden in fog
• Past a chained door, they encounter a swamp with ferocious animals sounds (monkeys, frogs), where a man-eating plant nabs one guy and a team of slow-moving, animatronic crocodiles another
• Now it’s fire and lava, one man dies, another shouts “We’re all finished! Let’s go back!’ and he gets it
• Sindbad battles a multiheaded dragon with glowing red eyes until his men drop a rock on it
• Inside the tower, Sindbad climbs a thick, dusty rope with the aid of a hook, but at the top, protecting the living bleeding heart of El Kerim, he must fight A GIANT HAND!

Meanwhile, in Baristan, El Kerim gets ready to marry Princess Jana, but only with the blessing of her father—which is charmingly old-fashioned for a dictator. Except the King doesn’t give his blessing. Rebuffed, Kerim’s plans shift from marrying Jana to executing her. This is the point, however, when Sindbad is climbing the humungous dusty rope, and his actions clang the tower bell, whose reverberations shake not only Kerim’s heart but Kerim himself. Figuring it all out (he really is the movie’s smartest character), he has Galgo fly them to the tower to prevent Sindbad from skewering the heart. A duel ensues until Sindbad yells at Galgo to make himself useful and throw the heart over the side. Which he does. And Kerim, already run-through by Sindbad, finally bleeds and dies.

Then Jana gets her fairytale wedding with Sindbad. THE END.

The arena scene, not exactly teeming with extras

Almost inspiring
Yes, my memory was slightly off: the heart has no glass case and it’s Galgo rather than Sindbad who destroys it. The best thing? It’s shaped like a valentine. It’s how you imagine hearts looking when you’re 5 years old.

So did “Sindbad” help explain anything about me to me? Nah. Before she can turn into a bird, Jana has to disrobe, but manages only one layer before the camera pans discreetly away. I’m sure my blood jumped at that. At another point, Galgo concocts a potion that lengthens his arm, and it creeps through the castle to Kerim’s room where it tries to remove the magic ring. Instead, Kerim wakes up, burns the hand and laughs maliciously. I’m sure that creeped me out.

So why was this 1963 movie playing in Minneapolis in 1971? Turns out it was part of the MGM Children’s Matinees series, which ran from 1970 to 1972, and included “Tom Thumb” and “Treasure Island.” I don’t know if Mom shooed us out of the house for this one, or if I, a fan of a 1960s Hanna-Barbera cartoon “Sinbad Jr. and His Magic Belt,” insisted we go.

Its producers, the King Brothers, née Morris, Frank and Hyman Kozinsky, had a several-decade run pursuing the cheap and profitable, generally a step behind whatever the curve was. They made gangster movies in the’40s (including “Dillinger”), westerns in the ’50s, and, post-“Godzilla,” produced the U.S. version of Toho’s “Rodan” as well as the Godzilla knockoff “Gorgo.” “Captain Sindbad,” with its extra “d,” came about in the wake of the 1958 box-office success of “The 7th Voyage of Sinbad.” According to AFI, Variety kept touting the movie’s preproduction promise, including “a chariot race, a battle between two elephants, and an arena scene requiring 3,000 background actors.” Nope, none of it. There’s talent here, certainly. Its director, Byron Haskin, did the original “War of the Worlds,” while its assistant editor became one of the great directors of the 1970s: Hal Ashby. But the budget was low and whoever did the special effects wasn’t exactly Ray Harryhausen. Or wasn’t allowed to become him.

The cast is kind of fun—both Starsky and Hutch's harried captain and Stonn from the “Amok Time” episode of “Star Trek” make appearances—and it is truly international. Sofaer was born in 19th century Burma, Armendariz during the Mexican revolution, and Bruhl in Nazi Germany during World War II. That people from such diverse, turbulent backgrounds could come together in a time of peace to make a piece of crap like this, well, it's almost inspiring.

As the camera pans discreetly away

Pinch-hitting for Superman

The last time I saw Chris Sale pitch in person was in July 2017. He was tall and lean and calm, and he dealt with the Mariners at Safeco Field rather handily: 3 hits over 7 innings, one walk, 11 Ks. It was his 13th victory that season—his first season with the Red Sox after seven with the White Sox—and the 87th of his super-promising young career.

Wednesday afternoon I saw him again, a 35-year-old in a Braves uniform, and his interim, like a lot of ours, hasn't exactly been stellar. I guess 37-27 is nothing to sneeze at, but it's over 6+ seasons, which rounds out to about 6-4 per, and that's including a pretty good romp in 2018 when he went 12-4. Injuries, of course, a way-too-common contemporary baseball storyline, are the reason. But is he back? Wednesday he handled the Mariners well enough, allowing 1 run over 5 innings, with zero walks and 9 strikeouts, as the Braves avoided a sweep with a 5-2 victory. He's now 4-1 on the season with a 3.44 ERA and a 0.95 WHIP. More power to him. I miss the days when the best pitchers in baseball stuck around for more than a few years. 

The Mariners, for their part, threw out 24-year-old Emerson Hancock for the ninth start of his career, but a lot of that five-spot wasn't his fault. Yes, he kept walking guys. In fact, in the 1st, the Braves didn't even put the ball in play: K, BB, BB, K, K. I yelled: TRUST THE GUYS BEHIND YOU! Bad advice, it turned out. The game got away from us in the 4th, when, with one out, shortstop Orlando Arcia lofted a high popup into shallow right, and three guys converged. It was RF Mitch Haniger's, but for some reason he didn't seem to be tracking it well, and the ball plopped out of his glove for a two-base error. It was as close to a Charlie Brown moment as you'll see at the professional level. If he'd caught it, Hancock would've had a 1-2-3 inning. Instead, with two outs, Ronald Acuna Jr. singled to left and Arcia scored from second. Then Ozzie Albies singled. Then Austin Riley tripled over Haniger's head—a tougher play, but another where he got his glove on the ball—and that was it for Emerson.

Hancock wasn't stellar but a lot of the loss belongs to Haniger. Besides the Charlie Brown play, he went 0-5 with three strikeouts, and now his season line is down to .217/.278/.368. Mid-April, he was .300/.382/.500. Since April 17, he's got four hits in 41 at-bats. Ouch. Is he injured? Either way, should he be batting second, Scott Servais?

I went to the game with my friend Tim, never a Servais fan, who noticed that the Braves kept tossing left-handers at us: Sale, Dylan Lee, A.J. Minter. And then in the 8th, they tapped rightie Joe Jimenez to face our 6-8 guys, none of whom are hitting above .200, and who bat rightie, rightie, and switch. Tim assumed it was a good time for a lefty pinch-hitter like Josh Rojas, who's been knocking the cover off the ball. Which is exactly what happened. For the switch-hitter. 

“Does that make any sense?” Tim asked the air.

“Maybe he's weaker from the left side?” I offered.

And he is: .211. But the others aren't exactly great shakes against righties, either: .218, .197. Plus the switch-hitter was EL.com favorite Sam Haggerty, he of the “Godfather” walkup music, who made a nice Superman catch earlier in the game. Now that I think about it, so did the No. 6 guy, Dylan Moore, our shortstop. The Braves did blister the ball. I guess we were lucky it was only 5-2. 

“I guess we knew a lot of this, but it's jarring to hear it directly from a witness—that through all of these allegations Donald Trump has made about fake news, and about the media and lying and everything else, there was a whole system he had in place for literally the planting of fake news and the killing or the deep-sixing of correct and true news. I mean, at some point, Pecker testifies on the stand that Michael Cohen would call me and say, 'We would like you to run a negative article on a certain—let's say for argument sake—Ted Cruz. Then he, Michael Cohen, would send me information about Ted Cruz or Ben Carson or Marco Rubio, and that was the basis of our story. And then we would embellish it from there.'

”So I guess there's nothing necessarily unlawful about that. I guess there's a potential seed of a defamation or a libel claim there. But this whole machinery of the creation and dissemination of fake news against the backdrop of Donald Trump making those allegations against the mainstream media, it's a little jarring, isn't it?“

-- Preet Bharara, ”Trump Fined and Weinstein Overturned,“ The Cafe Insider Podcast. 

Completely agree. At the same time, I'm old enough to remember when ”fake news" became news. In the runup to the 2016 election, The New York Times ran several stories about how, particularly on social media sites, misleading information or fake news was being disseminated, and post-election, when we saw the real damage it had done, there was much national hand-wringing over fake news and (Mark Zuckerberg notwithstanding) a brief attempt to come to terms with it. And then Trump took ownership of the phrase. Any story that included negative inferences to him became fake news. He repeated it, over and over, and his acolytes repeated it, over and over, and that became the drumbeat, drowning out any real discussion. And now here we are. And it's a beautiful day.

But I'm glad Preet pulls back like this occasionally for a bigger picture. Not enough commentators do. 

“But no one gets everything wrong. I made three huge mistakes early on in my trip around this love shack that radically shaped my life. I see myself (when I look at myself this way) as a just-under-mid-size sea cucumber of clay left behind by a quitter on a wheel in a friendly neighborhood pottery studio, drying to crumbling uselessness in the dark, never to be finished, fired and glazed. But even just going THAT far with it, sparing us all the paralyzing embarrassment of cataloging my three fatal mistakes, even just going so far as to NUMBER them the problem becomes apparent, namely: Wherever the searchlight goes, the prisoner is. By which I mean: ”If you look for the causes of your despair, you'll find them (nevermind that there's only one); and if you go looking for reasons to persevere, you'll find those too! Wherever the searchlight goes, the prisoner is.“ 

-- Craig Wright, ”The Worst Postivie Record Review" on his Substack

WARNING: SPOILERS

A few memories.

After Steve Martin hosted “Saturday Night Live” for the second time, so around Feb. 1977, I took the bus with my friend Peter to buy comics at Shinders in downtown Minneapolis. There was a shoe store across the street that we never went to, but on this day, for some reason, we stopped in. I think Peter needed something. And we began telling the salesgirl about this ad plan we’d concocted about how some shoe store—hey, maybe this one!—could team up with Steve Martin on a Happy Feet campaign. We probably did the little insane dance, too. Poor salesgirl. She didn’t know from Steve Martin (“Who's Steve Martin?” she said) and we didn’t know how the world worked. 

That same year (yes, just checked: Nov. 11, 1977), my brother Chris and I went to a Steve Martin concert at the 5,000-seat Northrop Auditorium on the University of Minnesota campus. I think we got Star-Tribune seats, because we were second row center. At one point, Steve asked for a volunteer with a big voice from the audience, and while I dithered in my head (“Oooh, I don’t know, that’s really putting myself out there…”), my brother shot his hand up. And was chosen. He talked with Steve Martin:

Steve: What’s your name?
Chris: Chris Lundegaard!
Steve [chuckles]: No, what’s your full name?

(I think that’s how it went. I wish Chris were here to corroborate.)

Here's why he was chosen: Steve had Chris pick a card, the King of Hearts, and Steve said he wanted everyone to concentrate on the card; and when the vibes were just right, Chris should shout as loud as he could, “KING OF HEARTS, COME DOWN AND DANCE!!” I think it was a kind of satire on the paranormal shit popular at the time. Because after my brother shouted the line, Steve took the card and danced it down his arm and around the stage, making dopey “Doop-de-doo” sounds.

A month later Steve made the cover of Rolling Stone (“Bananaland’s Top Banana”), and the following spring he was on the cover of Newsweek (“A Wild and Crazy Guy”). His album “Let’s Get Small” (1977) went platinum and his follow-up “Wild and Crazy Guy” (1978) went double platinum, while “King Tut,” reached No. 17 on the billboard singles chart. And suddenly all the kids in my ninth-grade class were huge fans. In English, I remember Tim F. imitating him ad nauseum: “Wild and crazy,” he’d say. “Wild and crazy.” He made the last word sound like creh-see. It drove me nuts. Guy was late to the party, his imitation sucked, and girls liked him better?

Anyway, that’s how Steve Martin broke from my perspective. “Steve! (Martin): A Documentary in 2 Pieces” is how he broke from his. Basically, he kept butting his head against the massive indifference of the world until slowly it began to crack and something trickled out. And then it became a deluge.

Chaplin no Chaplin
Here’s that journey, per the doc:

• Young Steve had an early visceral need to be on stage
• His magic act seemed a dead end unless he added comedy
• He liked a girl who told him to go to college, where he applied the methodology of philosophy to stand-up comedy and became an early disruptor; he broke down the Bob Hope-ian elements, removing the cue to laugh; there was tension without release
• His onstage persona shifted to a parody of the overconfident untalented showman
• He struggled for 10 years

He struggled, in part, because he was doing the opposite of what everyone else was doing. This was a conscious decision. Everyone’s doing politics, so I won’t. Everyone’s serious, so I’ll be silly. Everyone dresses down, I’ll dress up. I’m curious what drove that urge. It’s so smart.

“I always thought of him as the door out of the’60s,” a talking head says in Part I. “You could be silly again.” Yes, but there were a lot of such doors. Our most popular TV shows went from working class and multi-ethnic (“All in the Family,” “Sanford and Son”) to white and cleavage-filled (“Three’s Company,” “Charlie’s Angels”), while our most popular movies went from serious and scary (“The Godfather,” “The Exorcist”) to safe and uplifting (“Star Wars,” “Superman”). That was the zeitgeist. That was the wave. Steve anticipated it and rode it. 

So why did he quit doing standup after he’d succeeded beyond his or anyone’s wildest dreams? When he’d become, per Jerry Seinfeld, the most popular comedian ever? I always assumed he got tired of it. But he also admits he didn’t have anywhere to take it. He’d spent 10 years creating this persona, this concept, and now everyone knew it. Audiences repeated it back to him. He didn’t see a path in standup—except out.

That’s part I—his search, rise and supernova status—and it’s a particular kind of documentary: historical footage and talking heads as voiceovers. We hear Jerry Seinfeld, Lorne Michaels and Adam Gopnik; we don’t see them.

Part II is a different particular kind of documentary. It’s recent footage, filmed by documentarian Morgan Neville (“20 Feet from Stardom”), of Steve living his life with his wife, a former New Yorker fact-checker, and their daughter, represented as a stick figure to protect her. He makes a poached egg. Martin Short comes over and they gibe each other and then work on their routines in which they gibe each other. They go to the dry cleaners, they go for a bike ride, they work on “Only Murders in the Building.” It’s not exactly wild and crazy, but it’s sweet and sometimes funny, and anyway Steve was never a wild and crazy guy. One of the big reveals of his great memoir, “Born Standing Up,” was, rather than being the hippest dude in the land, which is what he seemed to us in 1977, he was the squarest. That’s underscored here.

Steve talks through his post-standup life: the movies, the relationships, the depression. He recounts seeing “Flashdance” in a movie theater in London in 1983, and one of the characters, a standup, says he wants to be Steve Martin, and Steve Martin, watching, thought, “No, you don’t.” If part I is the search for success, part II is the search for happiness. It’s less deluge than revelation: “Oh, it’s right over here. I should’ve looked over here before.”

A lot of his unhappiness stems from his relationship with his father, Glenn, who was, like many fathers of the day, emotionally distant. He was also wary of the path his son was taking. “I always thought my father was a little embarrassed by me,” Steve says. “He couldn’t quite be proud of an unconventional showbiz act that he didn’t quite understand.” It’s a reasonable concern but oddly it doesn’t go away even when the son becomes a phenomenon. After the premiere of “The Jerk,” family and friends went out to dinner to celebrate, and one of Steve’s friends asked Glenn what he thought of seeing his son in the movie. “Well,” Glenn said, “he’s no Charlie Chaplin.”

Watching, I wondered if we all weren’t a little hard on Steve Martin’s movie career. There was this expectation that because he’d remade standup comedy he would remake movie comedy, too, and that’s a big ask. It’s a bit Paul McCartney after The Beatles. “What's this Ram shit?” Interestingly, or poignantly, Martin did become one of the most gifted physical comedians since Chaplin, particularly with his mid-80s output: “All of Me” and “Roxanne,” in particular. A personal favorite of mine was his insanely joyous and childish dance after his son makes a catch in a little league baseball game in “Parenthood.” I don’t think I’ve ever seen it without laughing. 

The wave
What I’d like to know that Neville doesn’t ask? Did Martin anticipate anything with film the way he did with standup? Did he try to do the opposite of what everyone else was doing? Or is that not possible in such a collaborative and established medium, where failure means millions of dollars rather than a rough night?

There’s no inkling in the doc of this grand irony, either: The less-serious, post-sixties wave Steve rode to massive success never ebbed; and it kind of stranded him in the 1990s as he tried to smarten up—doing essays for The New Yorker, Mamet on film and Beckett on stage. When, that is, he wasn’t doing meh reboots of “Sgt. Bilko,” “Cheaper By the Dozen” or “The Pink Panther.” (I know Scorsese talks about doing one of them and one for yourself, but those are some extremes.)

I’m also curious why the doc contains no mention of Carl Reiner, Robin Williams and Bernadette Peters. I could’ve used some discussion there rather than more shots of Steve putzing around the house. But we do get a poignant remembrance of a John Candy speech that was cut from “Planes, Trains and Automobiles,” and that, even to this day, moves Martin to tears.

Is that his most beloved film? Seems like it. 

I am surprised that “Roxanne” is so ill-thought-of while “Grand Canyon,” which felt insufferable to me three decades ago, makes the cut. Maybe I should rewatch some of these.

Today is my brother's birthday. First time he's not around to celebrate it. He would've been 63.

I talked to my sister the other day, and she has a bit of a phantom-limb thing going: “I should see if we should pick up Chris on the way to Dad's.” That kind of thing. I don't. For most of the last 30 years, Chris and I didn't live in the same city, so there's not those automatic thoughts for me. I'd say I'm painfully aware that he isn't here but after five months it's more numbly aware. I also know, more than before, that Death doesn't stop to let you lick your wounds. It doesn't care. It keeps going. And going. And it'll get to you soon enough. And it's not personal. Life keeps going, too. That litter box still needs cleaning. Groceries still need buying. 

Here's what I keep thinking: “I wish Chris were here to see this.” “I wish I could talk to Chris about this.” “I wonder what Chris remembers about this.”

There's no real point to this post. Just another day where I feel like I should do or say something and don't know what that is.

“It's important to recognize the historical moment: that notwithstanding all the dilatory tactics, the delays, the whining, the yelling, the motion practice, that even though you have three trials that are delayed for some reason—whether it's the Supreme Court or this ethics issue that was raised in Georgia, or other appeals issues in the DC case—this trial is going forward, and someone who was the president of the United States, aspires to be the president of the United States again, with secret service agents in tow, is finally facing accountability. ... That's something I think is important and special to acknowledge.”

-- former U.S. attorney for SDNY Preet Bharara, on his podcast “Cafe Insider,” last week as voir dire began in the Trump hush-money trial in Manhattan