At the suggestion of a friend, I finally got around to reading Armistead Maupin's seminal “Tales of the City,” about life among the lost and restless, the gay and the straight, in 1970s San Francisco, which was serialized in the Chronicle despite openly sexual situations: one-night stands, affairs, the baths, etc. My friend lived this life—or at least lived in San Francisco in the 1970s. Can you imagine what a treasure that would be? Revisiting a place you knew from 50 years ago? It's not lost, it's right there. Hell, I got a rush out of the pop cultural references alone.

I don't know if it's much commented upon, but there are two very prescient moments in the text. One of them, a dialogue between Brian (straight) and Michael (not), presaged the coming Reagan revolution: 

Brian: Sometimes I get the feeling that the New Morality is over. Know what I mean? ... I mean, what's left, you know? Guys and chicks, chicks and chicks, guys and guys.
Michael: Right on.
Brian: But now, you know, the pendulum.
Michael: Yeah ... the fucking pendulum.
Brian: I mean, Michael... I think it's gonna be all over, man. People like you and me, we're gonna be fifty-year-old libertines in a world full of twenty-year-old Calvinists.

The other, a thought in the bath houses, unknowingly anticipated something worse:

At times like this, the tubs was an easy way out. Discreet, dispassionate, noncommittal. He could diddle away a frenzied hour or two, then return unblemished to the business of being a doctor.

It's returning unblemished from the baths. I thought of kaposi sarcoma and the rest of it. Soon, few would return unblemished from the baths.

“The mighty E Street Band is here tonight to call upon the righteous power of art, of music, of rock 'n' roll, in dangerous times. In my home, the America I love, the America I've written about that has been a beacon of hope and liberty for 250 years is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration. ...

”They're rolling back historic civil rights legislation that has led to a more just and plural society. They're abandoning our great allies and siding with dictators against those struggling for their freedom. They're defunding American universities that won't bow down to their ideological demands. They're removing residents off American streets and, without due process of law, are deporting them to foreign detention centers and prisons. This is all happening now.

“The America I've sung to you about for 50 years is real and, regardless of its faults, is a great country with a great people. So we'll survive this moment.”

-- Bruce Springsteen, in Manchester, England, opening his “Land of Hopes and Dreams” tour. Encore, everyone.

Lonesome no more? 

A lot of dumb shit has already been written about Pete Rose's recent reinstatement for Hall of Fame consideration, so here's mine. 

It's annoying. It's annoying the way he was annoying—a mediocre athlete that willed his way into being one of the best ballplayers of his generation. Normally I like these guys, the Dustin Pedroias of the world, but Rose was built bigger, more bullying, and more hypocritical. And he became beloved by the big, bullying, hypocritical crowd, particularly as he lasted and records fell—including one of the greatest of all time, the all-time hits record held forever by Ty Cobb. Don't get me started on the Moe haircut.

His reinstatement is annoying because it's just so of the age we live in, the Age of Unaccountability, presided over by the 34-count felon sitting and grifting in the Oval Office. He's the one who got the whole Pete Rose ball moving again in the first place—who said in March or April that the HOF should just let Rose in. The felon loves unaccountability. For white men.

And it's annoying because we're back to the same old boring arguments:

• He's the Hit King!
• But he bet on baseball!
• Half the ads now are about betting on baseball!
• Not for players! Plus there's the statutory rape thing!
• She was of age in Ohio!
• 16? She was younger!

Etc.

Even with all that, the most annoying part of it, for me, was the statement put out by Commissioner Rob “Foot-in-Mouth” Manfred. He talked how, via MLB's Rule 21, certain misconducts will lead to permanent ineligibility from the national pastime, and maybe we need a new intrepretation of that. For the deceased. Here's the line that got me:

Obviously, a person no longer with us cannot represent a threat to the integrity of the game. 

Right, Rose can't bet anymore. He can't do anything anymore. He can't embarrass us. But rescinding eternal banishment means it's not quite the deterrent it once was. Plus a dead person is no longer a threat? Doesn't that ignore the greatest lesson in western civilization? It's as if, on Golgotha, one Roman soldier turned to another and said, “Well, I guess he's no longer a threat to us.” 

Even Joe Posnanski, my man, my forever man, was a little annoying after the news dropped. The reinstatment wasn't just for Rose, after all, but for all banished, deceased players (who cannot represent a threat to the integrity of the game), meaning, famously, Shoeless Joe Jackson and the other men of “Eight Men Out.” So it's led to the inevitable, very baseball-y question: Which would you choose for the Hall if you could only choose one? To which my man wrote: 

In the end, I think you have to twist yourself into a pretty twisted logic pretzel to choose Shoeless Joe...

Let me give it a go:

• Shoeless Joe has the third-highest batting average of all time. Fourth if you count the Negro Leagues.
• Jackson's slash line is .356/.423/.517 in the deadball era. Here's Rose: .303/.375./409. His lifetime slugging is nearly in the .300s.
• Rose's lifetime bWAR is higher, 79.9 to 62.2, but he played longer than anyone in MLB history: more games, more PAs, more ABs, more hits. So if you average it out? Per season? Pete Rose is a 3.6 bWAR player, while Joe Jackson is a 7.6 bWAR player. That has to be one of the higher bWARs per season of anyone.
• Jackson's swing was emulated by Babe Ruth, which changed the game more than anything not named Jackie Robinson.

I don't think that's a logic pretzel.

When the vet's committee meets next December to hash it all out, I hope Shoeless Joe gets in. I wouldn't mind Rose getting in, either. It means we can finally stop talking about him.

FURTHER READING

• The Athletic has a nice piece with reactions from 12 HOFers. I wasn't expecting much but we get some thoughtful, nuanced answers. I particularly like Jim Palmer's: Yes, great player, loved the game, but if he loved it so much why didn't he do what he needed to do to get reinstated? He didn't. Then Palmer adds this about general MLB hypocrisy: “Every time I do my broadcast and our opening is sponsored by Draft Kings, I go, 'And Pete's not in the Hall of Fame.'” Amen. Meanwhile, Tony La Russa lays out the case against Rose in the clearest fashion: 1) He gambled on baseball, 2) he lied about it, 3) he never seemed contrite. 

Bisset's wet T-shirt: PG in 1977, “adult content” today.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Yes, the wet T-shirt movie. It caused a bit of a sensation in the summer of ’77. Watching it last week on the Criterion channel, I checked its original rating and then posted the above screenshot on social media with the comment: “Can’t believe it was rated PG.” As if to prove my point, that post was immediately flagged as adult content: “Explicit sexual images,” it said. I guess one generation’s PG is another generation’s X.

The T-shirt is the least dated part of the movie. Most dated: The heroes are white, and just want to scuba-dive and find treasure, while the villains are black, and want to extract 98,000 ampules of WWII-era morphine from the ocean floor for sale on the streets of New York. We get two rape-y scenes with Ms. Bisset: a forced search of her body, complete with pinned hands, spread legs, and smirks; and a voodoo witch-doctor dripping chicken blood on her quivering stomach after her dress is cut off. The latter leads to the worst line in the movie. From the boat, famed treasure hunter Romer Treece (Robert Shaw) notes the lights are out in the hotel and immediately knows; so they rush back and boyfriend David (Nick Nolte) fights through a gaggle of black henchmen on the beach. He finds Gail curled in the fetal position on their bed. Consoling her, he quietly asks what happened. Eventually she’s able to speak. “David,” she says through sobs, “they … painted me!”

A close second: When David and Gail first show the ampule to Treece, he asks if anyone else knows about it. Someone does: Henri Cloche, played Louis Gosset Jr. And then we watch as David, with all the awkwardness of 1970s white America, struggles to describe him: 

Last night, a bald guy came up at dinner, said he was a glass collector. He described that perfectly. [pause] I didn’t show it to him. [pause] Looked like a basketball player.

God, I love that so much. Couldn’t say he was black, because that would seem racist, so he goes with something way more racist. Oh, you mean he was tall, David?

American clod
The movie is based on a novel by Peter Benchley, his first since “Jaws,” and he was given first crack at a script, too, which was found wanting. So it was handed off to Tracy Keenan Wynn, son of, and that wasn’t what director Peter Yates wanted, either. So Yates brought in his script doctor Tom Mankiewicz. Online, you’ll find repeated assertions that Shaw and Nolte wrote a lot of their own lines, but in his memoir Mankiewicz says Shaw didn’t write anything, the two of them simply talked, and Mankiewicz included a lot of what Shaw said. As for Nolte, Mankiewicz was less impressed. 

Nolte: Now, this line. I would never say this line.
Shaw: Nick, are you saying you wouldn’t say it or the character wouldn’t say it?
Nolte: Well, I guess I’m saying I wouldn’t say it.
Shaw [to Mankiewicz]: That’s the trouble with young actors these days. They don’t want to play anything. They just want to be themselves.

At least “The Deep” has the veneer of a ’70s film. It treats its adults as adults—David and Gail, unmarried after three years, bicker around the edges of their disappointments—even as Treece calls David “boy” and Gail “girl” throughout. “Do you believe that, boy?” and “I’m all the government you need, boy,” and “As you please, boy.” (We should be thankful Nolte’s character wasn’t black.) In this manner, he keeps taking David down a notch but bucks him up before Gail. She intuits the stuff they’re finding on the ocean floor was a grocery list that the Duchess of Parma demanded from King Philip of Spain, and then, in an aside, laments the parse offerings she’s received from David over the years: a sweater and a pair of sneakers. “Well,” says Treece, “he isn't the King of Spain, is he, girl?”

They’re a mismatched couple: exquisite British beauty and American clod. Nolte was three years older than Bisset—35 to her 32 during filming—but she’d been a star for 10 years while he was just breaking big in the wake of “Rich Man, Poor Man,” and he comes off as younger. I guess he’s supposed to. I read the novel back in the day and I believe there’s a scene where David takes stock of himself before a mirror: his body, his tanline, the hardness of his feet. And what did he have to show for it? A bunch of T-shirts. In the film, the disparaging T-shirt line is given to Gail, but as a 14-year-old, reading it, I remember thinking, “Sounds like the life to me.” As a 62-year-old, I get it.

In the opening scenes, David and Gail, vacationing and scuba-diving in Bermuda, find two interesting items on the ocean floor near the wreck of a ship: an ampule with liquid inside; and an old encrusted coin/medallion. Gail, probing beneath the hulk with a stick, also almost has her arm pulled out of its socket by a giant moray eel. He’ll be back.

So: two items that point to two vast treasures. Not bad for a couple of tourists. Apparently there’d just been a big storm, and this ship hulk, The Goliath, World War II-era, had shifted, revealing its bounties. It was also on top of the other, older ship.

Initially everyone pretends to be what they are not. Cloche, seeking the ampule, says he is a collector of Reinhardt bottles, while David, pounding on Treece’s lighthouse door, says a friend found the coin/medallion a month earlier. (I get Cloche’s subterfuge, not David’s.) Then the first dangerous encounter. On mopeds, David and Gail are nearly run off the road by a truck and immediately kidnapped and taken to Cloche. There, we get the first rapey scene as Cloche’s men search them for the ampule that (unbeknownst) Treece has pocketed. Gossett is good in a thankless role. “Have a good dinner,” he says. “Go daaaancing. But be off the island by tomorrow.”

Instead they team up with Treece. Kinda sorta. He wants to blow up the Goliath to ensure the morphine doesn’t wind up in some kid’s arm, while David wants to find more treasure, which is why they dive together. So why does it take Treece another hour+ to blow up the ship? Because he finds a triple-lock box, indicating, yes, the great treasure David believes is there. Treece also makes two mistakes. He doesn’t let the Goliath’s sole survivor, Adam Coffin (Eli Wallach), dive with them, setting the stage for his treachery; and they leave Gail on shore, setting the stage for the second rapey scene.

A three-day truce is negotiated between Treece and Cloche at a cricket match (good scene), but no one trusts anyone, and anyway the thrust is to solve the mystery of it all, since, per 18th c. manifests, the ship below the Goliath shouldn’t be there. They need to establish provenance so the stuff they’re finding will be valuable.

We get another dive, this time with Gail, and then a fourth, during which Cloche’s men show up and dump chum in the water to attract sharks. For the fifth and final go, Cloche and his men make the mistake of following our principles into the water. Worse, they go man-to-man rather than zone, while Cloche, per the rules of Hollywood thrillers, attacks master diver Treece. Not smart. Treece doesn’t even have to kill him, he lets the moray eel do that. Which … Hey, wouldn’t that have been a good time to pause the demolition? Since Cloche wasn’t around to move the morphine? And you could preserve the history in that bottom ship?

I remember my father’s disappointment with the ending. The fuse has been lit, and David has to choose between going after the artifact that proves provenance or helping Treece. He helps Treece. But then Treece goes for the artifact, and post-explosion, surfaces with the thingamabob, which he tosses across the water and David catches one-handed. Freeze frame.

He had to choose, Dad said, but he got both.

I nodded. As an anxious teenager, though, I had less a problem with that than Treece throwing the artifact across the water in the first place. If David drops it, or Treece throws poorly, you might never find it again—particularly with the ocean clouded with post-explosion detritus. Can’t someone be careful for a second?

Old log
My father’s review was mixed. He wrote that “while enough of it takes place in the deep to give you the bends,” with “enough on-shore hazards to stock a Pearl White serial,” they didn’t make you feel “the fascination [the ocean] holds for otherwise sensible people.” He liked the scenery, particularly Bisset, compliments Shaw and Nolte, whom he calls “an Old Log Theater alumnus,” and calls out the white/good black/bad stuff. The press-kit photos wound up with Chris and me. Chris kept his, 10 in all, which I came across after his death. See below.

Shaw is great but Romer Treece is an awful name. Bisset is a surprisingly good actress—the subtle emotions on her face, for example, when Cloche interrupts their dinner. Robert Tessier has a nice part as Treece’s strong right-hand man Kevin, who has to battle Cloche’s muscle-bound right-hand man. I liked him. He's Samwise before Samwise. 

I’m curious what the box-office hopes were. They were doing the next Benchley after “Jaws,” had brought back Shaw, and added Bisset in a wet T-shirt. And yes, the movie did well—sixth-highest grosser for the year. It opened in June, the same as “Jaws” two years earlier, and Bisset was a definite conversation piece. But the movie was swamped by an odd little film that opened in 43 theaters a month earlier: something called “Star Wars.” Monsters in the deep were already old news.

Nolte kept going but Shaw didn’t last much longer. After two more films he died of a heart attack in August 1978, age 51. Bisset starred in a movie a year for a while, with some uninspired choices (“Inchon,” “When Time Ran Out…”); and then we blinked and she was Rob Lowe’s mom in “Class.” Benchley’s next novel/film, “The Island,” kind of ended his run as the go-to sea guy. But Yates had one great ’70s film left in him.

Chris' treasure of an all-time beauty searching for treasure.

“Oh, by all means. I'd be quite prepared for that eventuality.”

“He's very fussy about his drums, you know. They loom large in his legend.” 

I watched “A Hard Day's Night” the other night on the Criterion Channel (thanks again, Jordan and Ryan!) and it just reinforced my feeling that George is the best thing in it. Ringo got good notices, critics back then saying his “This Boy” scenes were “Chaplinesque,” while John is John, a force, and Paul is cute and all, but man George rocks. The best scene is his, the “She's a drag, a well-known drag” scene, that I wrote about a few years back (13 years??? WTF!), but this go-round the above lines just leapt out at me. I'd like them to be part of my regular vocabulary. I'd love to say of friends that they're fussy about X, you know, “they loom large in his/her legend” with the casual dryness George manages.

WARNING: SPOILERS

I got a Quentin Tarantino vibe early on—ironically, before everything turned bloody.

It was the scene in town where Smoke (Michael B. Jordan) tells the young girl to watch his car and honk if anyone tries to steal anything, offering 10 cents for every minute she does this. Though initially scared of one of the infamous Smoke-Stack Twins (both played by Michael B.), she quickly agrees. Then he tells her, no, you don’t quickly agree, and he shows her how to negotiate. He schools her even though it means losing money. The old term is “race man,” someone interested in raising his people more than himself, and that’s what Smoke is here.

About a half hour in, I leaned over to my wife and whispered, “Every scene is good.” It was. There was drama within each, and each added to the overall.

I wonder what I would’ve thought if I didn’t know vampires were coming. Would I have been disappointed when they reared their blood-smeared heads at the 50-minute mark? “Damn, I thought I was watching historical drama, man.” Truly, the only time I didn’t think the movie was great was at the juke joint, where some scenes felt overlong. It was as if writer-director Ryan Coogler knew this was the last time we’d see these folks and had trouble letting go.

Resistance is futile
Something else I thought: We don’t make movies like this anymore.

This ain’t exactly news, but there’s a divide these days between eat-your-vegetables movies and empty-calorie movies, and not much bridges it. Some serious films are entertaining (“Oppenheimer”), some popcorn movies contain serious elements (“Captain America: The Winter Soldier”), but mostly they don’t blend. This blends. It’s what Hollywood used to be able to do all the time. It’s both deep and light, historical and entertaining. It treats its audience like it has a brain, but please let’s have fun, too.

It opens in Mississippi 1932, with a young black man driving a jalopy. He stops in front of a one-room church house, and we see he’s been through the ringer—bruised, bloodied, and scarred, like someone thrashed a rake across his face. He grabs something from the backseat, and we’re wondering if he’s there to enact revenge on whoever did this to him. No. Inside, the preacher calls to him, asks him to put down what’s in his hand—a guitar, or what’s left of it. He pauses. And pauses.

Cut to the proverbial “One day earlier.”

Confession: Initially, I thought the Smoke-Stack twins were the vampires. I thought that explained the confidence with which two black men moved through Jim Crow-era Mississippi. Turns out they’re confident because they’re smart, strong, have money and guns, spent years working for Al Capone, and fought in the Great War before that. They’re part of FDR’s “Forgotten Men.” If Coogler had really wanted to go all in on 1932, he could’ve named the film “We Are Fugitives from a Capone Gang.”

They have plans. They buy an old slaughterhouse from a KKK grand dragon named Hogwood (David Maldonado), and get it ready as a juke joint. They want to be impresarios. Much of the first half of the film is rounding up the talent to make it happen, including:

• Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo), an old, hard-drinking blues man
• Cousin Sammie Moore (Miles Caton), a blues guitarist, who looks and sings like Robert Johnson
• Bo Chow and wife Grace (Yao and Li Jun Li), who paint signs and supply food
• Smoke’s ex, Annie (Wunmi Mosaku of “Loki,” “Lovecraft Country”), to cook
• Cotton-picker Cornbread (Omar Benson Miller) to act as bouncer

Who knew that last job was the most important one?

The vampires arrive with Choctaw Indians on their trail. Fifty minutes in, we see a man, Remmick (Jack O’Connell), thump on the foreground, smoke billowing from his back, as he makes his way toward a small house. To the couple inside, he says injuns are after him, and when the Indians come the wife greets them with a shotgun. They warn her the man isn’t what he appears to be, but she ain’t buying it. Bad move. In the back, Remmick is already looking better except for the blood around his mouth, while hubby has already turned. And now they turn to her.

We get traditional vampire tropes:

• Fangs/blood
• Fly/superstrong
• Vulnerable to sunlight, garlic, wooden stakes

But Coogler adds one that I first saw in the “Let the Right One In” franchise:

• If you’re inside a building, vampires can’t just attack; they must be invited in

He also adds a feature that I believe he invented. These vampires are like the Borg from “Star Trek”: Once someone is turned, their knowledge becomes part of the collective. So once Bo Chow is turned, Remmick can speak Cantonese, and he knows the sexual proclivities of Grace; and he knows where their daughter is. It’s a great addition, but it also makes you wonder (as with the Borg) how they can possibly lose. 

Here’s how: time management. They forget when sunrise is. They needed me on the team. I’m someone who has to be at the airport two hours early, so I could’ve helped. “Uh, Remmick? Just two hours until sunrise. Not saying stop, but … [motions toward wristwatch]. Either way, I’m heading back now. You do you.”

Why do they converge on the juke joint in the first place? Because cousin Sammie is such a bluesman he calls out the spirits, both good and evil. He’s this universe’s Robert Johnson, the man who met the devil at the crossroads, and that’s who they want. Everyone else is just a bonus. It’s a helluva bonus. The crowd at the juke joint is large, not to mention sweaty and sexy (Jayme Lawson, goddamn), and once things go wrong, once Smoke’s girl Mary (Hailee Steinfeld) is turned and kills/turns Stack, everyone is sent home. I.e., out into the woods where the vampires are.

Everyone in the audience: NO!!!

One of the most chilling moments is when Sammie is in the grips of Remmick and starts reciting the Lord’s Prayer as if to ward them off or save his own soul. Instead, Remmick, and then the group, join in, monotonously, terrifyingly, mockingly. But Sammie still has a weapon—his guitar. Not to play; he hits Remmick over the head with it just as the sun comes up. That’s the winning move. They all fall down.

Oh, right, then Hogwood and the Klan show up. Their plan is to kill the uppity Smoke and Stack, but they find no Stack and a bloodied Smoke manning a machine gun and mowing them all down like it’s the Argonne again. He winds up wounded himself. As he lays dying, he sees the now-dead Annie with their daughter who died in childhood. It’s a vision of what he, God willing, will soon join.

Did we need the Klan scene? I mean, I get it. A black filmmaker makes a movie set in Mississippi 1932, so he better kill some KKK. Just feels tacked on after everything we’ve been through.

Plus we still have to return to the one-room church. What happens there?

The devil finds work
Not much. Earlier, Daddy Preacher (Saul Williams) had warned Sammie to give up his music because one day the devil would follow him home, and man if Daddy wasn’t right. So you’d think, at this point, Sammie might listen and drop the guitar. “Shit, I just got everybody killed. They’d all be alive if it wasn’t for me and my music.”

Instead, mid-credits—a maneuver straight out of Marvel—we get Sammie 60 years later, and now played by 88-year-old blues guitar legend Buddy Guy, doing a show in Chicago. (I love that the vampire scar on his face is a big part of his logo.) So what was it like the first time Sammie played again? Was he worried about summoning demons? Did he play some chords and then look around? Did he hold back?

After the show, having a drink at the bar, Sammie is told some folks are there to see him, and they have to be invited in. Yes, it’s Stack and Mary—vampires all these years. They look just as they did in 1932 except, well, I’ll say it, they lost all sense of style—dressing in loud “In Living Color” type-clothes. “But it was the ’90s!” one friend objected when I objected. Right. Except these two were born in 1900. Why are they looking like clowns in 1992? 

At the bar, Stack recounts a promise he made to Smoke not to kill Sammie—and he’s keeping his promise. But he also extends an offer. You want to live forever? Just say the word. 

I love the weary way Sammie/Buddy Guy responds after a bar: “I’ve had enough of this world.” Damn if that doesn’t resonate in 2025. He also says he wakes up paralyzed with fear recalling that night, but he admits that before the shit went down? It was the best day of his life. Stack agrees: “Last time I seen my brother. Last time I seen the sun. And for a few hours, we was free.”

Apparently Ryan Coogler negotiated a deal with Warner Bros. so the intellectual property rights revert to him after 25 years. So not only is he doing what the Smoke-Stack twins did in the film—getting ownership—but it’s basically the Jimmy Stewart “Winchester ’73” deal for modern times. After the collapse of the studio era, movie stars ruled and wanted a cut. Now what rules? IP. This is the first time Coogler worked on something that wasn’t historical (“Fruitvale Station”) or didn’t have an IP source (“Rocky,” Marvel comics), and he wanted in. Remember what Obadiah Stane (repping every corporation) said to Tony Stark (repping every creator) in “Iron Man”? “You think just because you have an idea that it belongs to you?” Now it is. Coogler’s is not just a black power-play but a creator power-play. And it’s about fucking time.

I’m curious what he might do with it. Post juke joint, you have, in Stack, a black gangster with vampire superpowers moving through the Jim Crow era, and thus possibly intersecting with lynchings, the Scottsborough Boys, 1940s Detroit riots, Emmett Till, and the nascent Civil Rights Movement. Don’t tell me there’s nothing there.

Not a fan of the title—I keep forgetting it—but I’m a fan of everything else. It’s a long time to Oscar season, but I hope “Sinners” isn’t forgotten by then. At the least, it should be part of the conversation.

This is from last week—or about a year ago in Trump administration years:

It's amazing how clueless the “legit” media is to their right-wing slant. Or maybe it's just a dipshit slant. I.e., it's not news when Trump does or says something awful (since he's awful), just when Biden or Harris or other good people do it. Yeah, I wish it were that, but it's not. Biden old, but when he did old man things, man was it news. Old Man Trump doing old man things? Not. It's right-wing bias. It's the media still running scared from 50 years of “liberal media” charges.

Anyway it's impossible to keep up with Trump's batshit bullshit. Here's some of it from the last week:

• Reposted on his own social media site a photo of himself as THE POPE
• Reposted on the White House Twitter account a doctored photo of a muscle-bound Trump with a red light saber and “May the Fourth” message that compares “Radical Left Lunatics” to the Evil Empire (psst: red light sabers = the Dark Side, Donnie)
• Reposted on the White House account an image of Abrego Garcia a la Obama's famous HOPE poster, but with MS-13 below it
• Talked to Meet the Press' Kristen Welker and said the following:
• Some of the economy is his doing. Which part? “I think the good parts are the Trump economy and the bad parts are the Biden economy.”
• He took credit for how well the stock market is doing even though it's down 6% since he took office—and only recovered even that much when he delayed his tariff war.
• Encouraged Americans to buy less.
• Said: “We were losing hundreds of billions of dollars with China. Now we're essentially not doing business with China. Therefore, we're saving hundreds of billions of dollars. It's very simple.”

But the big one? 

Welker: Your secretary of state says everyone who's here, citizens and non-citizens, deserve due process. Do you agree, Mr. President?
Trump: I don't know. I'm not, I'm not a lawyer. I don't know.
Welker: Well, the Fifth Amendment says as much.
Trump: I don't know. It seems — it might say that.

No, it does say that. Fifth amendment, Bill of Rights, U.S. Constitution. Even I know that, and I didn't swear an oath on a Bible to uphold it.

WARNING: SPOILERS

I love me some Michael Mann but I don’t know what he’s doing here. I’ve seen “Ali” three or four times over the years—most recently last week on the Criterion Channel—and it doesn’t exactly float like a butterfly or sting like a bee. It’s a lumbering biopic of a film, with, sure, some great shots and camera angles, a care for history, fantastic supporting acting and a not-bad lead. Will Smith gives us both the quiet, private monotone and the bombastic over-the-top public performances. But was he right for the role?

Muhammad Ali was in-your-face about everything while Will Smith was in-your-face about nothing—until that awful moment he got in Chris Rock’s face. Marc Maron had the best reaction to it:

The guy who’s spent the last 30 years of his career managing his personality to be one of the nicest guys in show business, and have everyone like him, lost his fucking mind. 

Smith managed his career to be liked, and that’s not exactly Ali. And maybe some of that comes through in his performance? Or maybe he’s just not actor enough? It’s just not quite there.

We also get 10 of the most convulsive years in American history, with a Black man saying “I am what I am” and the American power structure losing its fucking mind, and… it’s a little dull. I don’t know how Michael Mann could make so much turbulence this dull.

Betraying Malcolm
Here are a few questions people might have about Muhammad Ali. They’re decisions he made that made him who he was:

• Why the Nation of Islam?
• Why the Nation over Malcolm?
• Why give up everything to resist the draft—particularly when promised a sinecure?
• How did the rope-a-dope strategy come about?

“Ali” shows us all of these moments happening but I don’t have a clearer view of why he did what he did. Was it in-the-moment decision-making? Sussing out the scene and pivoting when necessary? A deep search within and then acting on that search?

Sure, I get some of it. Blonde-haired, blue-eyed Jesus, so fuck that. He opted for the Nation over his own nation, and you get why. “No Vietcong ever called me nigger” is one of the great lines in mid-century political discourse. It’s a knockout punch. There’s no answer for it. The opposition doesn’t answer the bell.

The decision to not step forward when his name was called, to opt out of the draft, is what truly makes the legend. The hero’s journey needs sacrifice and this is his sacrifice. He gives up power, prestige, wealth, security, to avoid fighting in a war he wouldn’t have fought in. There was talk of Germany, like Elvis and Willie Mays, and no talk of Vietnam. Because no matter how much he roiled the powers that be, no way they’re letting America’s enemy kill America’s boxing champion. That’s not a good look. But he didn’t go for the deal. He sacrificed it all. That’s noble.

Less noble? What happened with Malcolm. He betrayed Malcolm for the Nation and then the Nation betrayed him. Herbert Muhammad (Barry Shabaka Henley) and his droopy dog face gets the brunt of it here, but we might as well say it out loud: the Honorable Elijah Muhammad was the furthest thing from honorable. He was a nasty old man that built an empire on hate, lucked into Malcolm X, and then had him killed when he could no longer control him. When Malcolm knew too much. It was a mob hit, basically. Did Ali ever realize any of that? When?

How about the biggest decision of all: When did Ali decide to become The Mouth That Roared? Was that always part of his personality or was it an in—with both the press and into the psyche of the opponent? We get the two halves of the personality (quiet vs. bombastic) but not why the split.

Smith got nominated for an Academy Award, as did Jon Voight for playing Howard Cossell, but they overdo it with Howard. He was there but not that much. I could’ve used more of Ron Silver as trainer Angelo Dundee, to be honest, or Jeffrey Wright as photographer Howard Bingham. Both are classic Mann men: they do the job with alacrity, intelligence, and a minimum of verbiage.

God, I hadn’t even thought of that. Mann’s heroes are men who don’t talk much (Caan in “Thief,” De Niro in “Heat,” Crowe in “The Insider”), and then Mann goes and makes a biopic of … Muhammad Ali? The Mouth That Roared? No wonder it feels off.

It doesn’t help that the antagonist is off-screen here. In most boxing movies, the antagonist is the guy you’re fighting, or the demons you’re fighting within, but here it’s the U.S. government, or a general white power structure that is basically telling Ali, “Hey, black people just don’t act this way!” It doesn’t help, too, that his support keeps changing. Who does he rely on? Who does he confide in? Who is he interacting with? For a while it’s Malcolm (Mario Van Peebles), and for a while it’s Herbert (but he’s a clown), and there’s Howard, overdone, and “Bundini” Brown (Jamie Foxx), comic relief. That’s the problem with this 10-year period. Ali goes through friends and wives—we see three of the four: Sonji (Jada Pinkett Smith), Belinda (Nona Gaye) and Veronica Porche (Michael Michele)—like they’re opponents to KO. Maybe that’s his tragedy. 

Meeting Beatles
I expected the movie to get the Nation wrong, but I didn’t expect it to get the Beatles wrong.

Ali, of course, met them in Miami before the Liston fight, and between their appearances of “Ed Sullivan” in February 1964, and the movie has Ali saying this about that: “Only one of ’em is smart, though. The fella with the glasses.”

OK. 

One, John wasn’t wearing glasses in 1964, not in public anyway, and not during the meeting with Ali. Two, John wound up hating the publicity stunt with Ali—the four of them on the canvas while Ali shouted over them. That pissed him off. John was a fighter and didn’t like being treated like a clown. Three, it’s a stupid line. Only one of them is smart? They all had different kinds of intelligence, and they were all very witty (cf., Louis Menand on Ringo), and it just smacks of nothing Ali would say. Or if he did say it, well, it’s not a very smart thing to say.

Most of “Ali” seems like a good idea. It seems like a good idea to focus on 1964-74, the turbulent years, from title fight to title fight, and it seems like a good idea to cast Will Smith in the title role, and it seems like a good idea to have a heavyweight director like Michael Mann in his corner. Shame it turned out this way.

Jeffrey Wright as Howard Bingham: a Mann man, relegated to deep support.

WARNING: SPOILERS

When I lived in Taiwan in the late 1980s, I would occasionally meet older people who struggled with Mandarin but were fluent in Japanese, or who fondly remembered Japan while despising the Kuomintang (KMT), the currently ruling party of Taiwan. This confused me. Wasn’t Japanese rule the result of the spoils of war—a loss during the Sino-Japanese conflict of 1895—and wasn’t post-WWII Chinese rule simply reestablishing historic ties? Letting the Chinese govern the Chinese? I tended to think of Taiwan as Chinese, which is both true and an oversimplification, and I was often referred to an incident that loomed large in private conversation: 2-2-8, February 28, 1947, when KMT soldiers opened fire on anti-government protesters, killing thousands, and beginning an era of authoritarianism that lasted for decades. 

That post-war period felt like a tragic but fascinating fulcrum of peoples and events. Taiwan didn’t suffer overly much from imperial Japan, Mainland China suffered immeasurably from imperial Japan, and now the Mainland Chinese were ruling Taiwan. The viewpoints were at odds. Conflict was inevitable. That would be a great story to tell.

This isn’t it.

Star-crossed
When I heard Lin Cheng-sheng's “March of Happiness” would be playing at Northwest Film Forum, a 15-minute walk from 我的家, I thought: I’m there. But I imagined Edward Yang-like production values. A few minutes in, I realized, “Oh, this is an indie. They had no money at all.” It’s mostly four or five sets: a café, a theater, a street corner, a couch. Along with a bunch of first-time or no-time actors. 

It opens in 1945 with Taipei locals putting on a theatrical production, something new about star-crossed lovers, but when Japanese officials arrive they scurry and switch over to (I believe) Peking Opera. The production is shut down anyway. I don’t think they ever finish that production. That’s part of the joke/tragedy. When the KMT comes to power, they shut it down, too. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. A prologue indicates that during the Japanese occupation, native Taiwanese were encouraged away from professions (lawyer, doctor) and toward the arts, but we, and they, don’t feel much encouragement.

Then we get the movie’s own star-crossed lovers. A Yu (Hsiao Shu-shen), a local beauty, loves A Jin (Lim Giong), a local musician, though both have trouble showing it beyond, as a friend mentions, “stealing glances.” But it’s obvious to everyone. Everyone, that is, except A Yu’s father (Lung Shao-hua), who wants to marry her off to Ren-chang (Yang Csai-Hsai), the son of a prestigious doctor. The one who suffers most from this is Ren-shang, since A Yu is not interested in him at all. But there he is, a quiet, studious type, being pushed forward again to get his heart crushed. 

A Jin, meanwhile, is handsome, laconic, a man of the world. He was once in love with a Japanese girl, and followed her to Japan and Shanghai, where he realized that she and her father were spies for Japan in its war against China. That cooled his ardor. Both father and daughter wound up being killed in the war.

To be honest, I never cared for the young lovers. I found them dull and self-involved. I guess that describes most young lovers, but it’s truer here since the actors are either newbies or non-actors—Lim Giong is a musician—so we lose subtleties or nuances that might’ve helped.

The focus of the film is the café, the titular café in the original Chinese: 天馬茶房: Tien Ma Teahouse. I’ve seen it translated as Tien Ma Café, and in the subtitles they keep asking for coffee, but that’s definitely 茶, or tea, in the title.

There’s great drama to be made about what slips through the cracks—and what doesn’t—during violent transitions. A well-liked Japanese official is killed by a sweaty KMT soldier (future director Doze Nui), and there are no repercussions. But when A Yu’s father stores rice for a business deal, KMT officials arrive and crack down on him. He barely escapes prison.

Meanwhile, our young lovers keep stealing glances, and then kisses, and then more, while Dad keeps pushing for marriage to poor Ren-chang. He’s even picked an auspicious date: February 28. The night before, the lovers plan to elope, but shit’s already going down. The precipitating moment for 228 occurred the night before—a widow beaten by officials for selling contraband cigarettes—and we see that here. That’s our street corner. Then soldiers fire into a crowd. Then they shut down the theatrical production, and, while onstage, a loud noise is heard from the wings and our sweaty soldier fires—killing A Jin, who was taking his own sweet time to elope. Cut to A Yu at the pier, waiting.

Whatever happened to...
One of Patricia’s first comments after the screening was how beautiful the actress playing A Yu was, and I was curious if Hsiao Shu-shen kept going or if this was a one-off. She kept going. Kind of. IMDb lists 18 credits for her, but only one since 2012. Apparently there were drug problems in the aughts, prison afterwards. She was paroled in 2012. In 2017, she married. In 2020, she was diagnosed with cancer. 

The movie’s western title comes from a song A Jin writes for A Yu, and it won a Golden Horse award (Taiwan’s Oscars) for best original song. The film garnered five other nominations, including screenplay, art direction and supporting actor (Lung Shao-Hua). Song was its only win.

I’m glad we saw it. I wish it were better. I worry for Taiwan.

Today would've been my brother's 64th birthday. Being us, I imagine we would've serenaded him with a particular Beatles song, which he would've suffered through, unless it was our nephews or brother-in-law singing. That might've worked. They have voices.

When I get older, losing my hair
Many years from now,
Will you still be sending me a valentine,
Birthday greetings, bottle of wine?

If I'd been out till quarter to three,
Would you lock the door?
Will you still need me, will you still feed me,
When I'm 64?

You'll be older too.
And if you say the word,
I could stay with you.

I can still see him pretending to hit the triangle at the moment it comes up in the song—both moments, actually, the second time a beat behind when they do it earlier in the song.

I've been participating in a bereavement group lately, which has been helpful. At the least, it's a reminder that there's a lot of pain in the world.

It's almost 100 days into Trump's second term. What's your read on that milestone?

That's what NPR's Lauren Freyer asked NPR's White House correspondent Asma Khalid. Before I give her answer, think about what your answer would be. Particularly if you framed it by saying “Two things stand out to me”? What would be your two things? Maybe roiling entire economic systems with his tariff war? Maybe shipping undesirables and innocents into foreign prisons without due process and in direction violation of court orders? Attacking law firms with executive orders as a means of getting them to fall in line? Attacking universities the same? Giving the keys of our government to Elon and the DOGE-bags? Floating an unconstitutional third term?  

This is what NPR's White House correspondent Asma Khalid said: 

Two things stand out to me. And the first is that this term feels fundamentally different than the president's first term. He has been acting more swiftly, more boldly, somewhat more agressively than his first term, to enact sweeping change: you look at shrinking government, dismantling agencies, even frankly trying to change the economic system with his tariffs—this is all bigger than what he did the first go-round. 

But the other thing that I think is also very important, is that when you talk about this massive change, it's important to note that, at this point in time, the president's approval rating, as he's reaching his 100-day milestone, is falling, and it is looking lower than other presidents at this point—including, frankly, President Trump himself in his first term. So I will be keen to keep an eye on what the next 100 days look like and how he tries to navigate change—as he moves from this era of unilateral action to working with Congress more. 

Sigh.

OK, let's break down some of this. Look at the adverbs in that first graf: swiftly, boldly, agressively. They seem kind of positive, don't they? Those aren't negative words. We admire those words. We admire people who embody those qualities. And if the word is maybe more mixed, maybe like “aggresively,” hey, let's temper it with a “somewhat.” He's just been acting somehwat more aggressively. Because we don't want people to think we're saying anything negative here. About a president? Lord, no. And then, whoops, despite all those positive words we just trotted out to describe this guy, somehow, his actions aren't that popular. Huh. We don't know why, we're just reporters. This is just our job. We can't begin to break it down for you or give you insight. We don't know. All we know is that—somehow—swift, bold and aggressive isn't popular. You'll have to figure out the rest.

Has there ever been more useless reporting in the history of reporting?

I mean, at least FOX News has the temerity to propagandize. They take a stand, and, sure, it's an awful stand, an un-American stand, one designed to divide, but it's a stand. You might even call it bold and aggressive. 

This? This is fucking worthless.

And what's with “as he moves from this era of unilateral action to working with Congress more”? Where did that come from? What is it based on? Hopes? Dreams? The opposite of everything he's ever indicated about how he does business? Seriously lady, if this is your take on the worst 100 days of any American president ever, I don't give a shit what you think the next 100 days might bring.

NPR, you will be the death of me. Or the country. 

Il est ici. Our former governor on recent tragic events:

We're all the frog in the pot of boiling water—Trump expects us to be the frog in the pot of boiling water—so it's good to pull back like this and remind everyone what's going down.