The other day, Joe Posnanski posted about whether the Los Angeles Dodgers had usurped the New York Yankees as baseball's No. 1 villains. I was all set to argue with him, it's a silly question, but then he quoted a Yankees fan who made my exact point for me: It's 27 titles vs. nine. The Dodgers are just a third of the way there. Maybe when they get halfway, ask again.

The article itself is great, because even raising the question on social media raised the hackles on both fanbases. I.e., Dodgers fans assume they're not villains (because they're nice!) while Yankee fans assume they are (because they're No. 1, damnit, and no one else is, and stop suggesting otherwise!). He says the dyamic is a bit west coast vs. east coast: please like us vs. who are you? Then he mentions in passing that the current Dodgers are a dynasty, and I was all set to argue with that. At the least, I was curious what his parameters were. Is two titles in a row enough? Or three in six years? I assumed no, but then realized that three titles is more than 16 MLB teams have had for their entire runs—including two original franchises (Phillies, Indians/Guardians). So maybe three in six years is enough for a dynasty. Hasn't been done much, let's put it that way.

I left some of the above thoughts in the comments section, fairly anodyne stuff to my mind, and returned a few hours later to see a reply. Another reader objected to the 27-9 distinction because, during the last 50 years, the Yankees have only won seven titles, and none since 2009, which was a long, long time ago. I wasn't quite sure if he was serious, but his reply led to this reply:

The Yankees have only won seven titles in the last 50 years? Wow, I guess I should take it back. I'm sure many other teams have won way more than that over that span.

Hey, fun experiment!

WORLD SERIES TITLES DURING THE LAST 50 YEARS

• Yankees: 7
• Dodgers: 5
• Red Sox: 4
• Cardinals, Giants, Reds: 3
• Phillies, Twins, Braves, Royals, Blue Jays, Astros, Marlins: 2
• Pirates, A's, O's, Cubs, White Sox, Tigers, Mets, D-Backs, Angels, Nats, Rangers: 1
• Guardians, Brewers, Padres, Mariners, Rockies, Rays: 0

You're right, I don't know how Yankees fans can bear this miserable existence.

59 days to pitcher and catchers.

WARNING: SPOILERS 

My wife loved the set direction and costume design, and I liked the Creature’s story, which we get in the last hour of this 2.5-hour movie, but I was bored for most of it. 

Writer-director Guillermo del Toro has said the problem with his Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) isn’t that he’s a mad scientist, it’s that he’s a bad parent. And yes, that’s the problem with his Victor Frankenstein. It’s an obvious and unsubtle problem. Dude creates life out of dead matter, and almost immediately he puts it in chains in the basement; he gets furious when it can’t annunciate anything more than “Victor”; he calls it “It.”

Apparently del Toro also thought of Victor as a rock star, and you definitely get that vibe. At one point, strutting down the muddy 19th-century street, I flashed on Sly Stone (or Walt Frazier), and was amused for a moment, but that’s nothing to hang a hat on—even a Sly Stone one. The rock star thing has also been done. People think this guy from the past is X, but he’s really a rock star! Where was it again? Oh, right, “Gothic,” the 1986 Ken Russell movie about the debauched weekend in Villa Diodati in Switzerland when Mary Shelley, with husband Percy and Lord Byron, came up with the idea for “Frankenstein.” Russell, too, thought of the poets as rock stars—Byron has to run from screaming fans, etc.—and it totally made sense. When I took a Byron class at the University of Minnesota, I remember a hipster student saying that Byron was the world’s first rock star.

(BTW: Oscar Isaac would make a great Lord Byron if anyone wants to make that movie.)

Byron as rock star, yes. Dr. Frankenstein as rock star, why? What does it add?

I haven’t even gotten to the comic book aspect of it all. The early color schemes (mother red, father black, son white) reminded me of what Warren Beatty did with “Dick Tracy” in 1990: every character a color, straight from the comic books. It was original when Beatty did it, done to death since. Speaking to done to death, how about superpowers? This Frankenstein Creature (Jacob Elordi) isn’t just strong, he’s superstrong. He tears wolves in half, pushes free ships trapped in the Arctic ice. Dr. Frankenstein did more than give him life, he made it so he couldn’t die. His body heals rapidly from mortal wounds. Think Wolverine without the snikt.

Father to the man
The movie opens in the North Atlantic in the 1850s, with a Shackleton-like attempt to conquer the Pole or something. The point is they’re stuck in the ice, and there’s bickering since the Danish captain (Lars Mikkelsen) wants the adventure to continue; but then in the distance, an explosion. Quick excursion, they find Dr. Frankenstein replete with artificial leg. But they’re followed by a growling, howling creature in rags, who tosses sailors around like rag dolls, killing a half dozen, while demanding “VICTOR!” Bullets don’t kill him, they merely pause him, so the Captain, no dummy, trains his weapon on the ice, cracks it, and the Creature goes under. And then, in the captain’s quarters, everyone settles in as Victor tells his story in the most elongated way possible. 

“Wait, didn’t you tell us the Creature who killed six of my men can’t die, hates you, and will soon be back to kill more?” 

“Yes, but please hear about my childhood first.”

As a young man, Victor (Christian Convery) is pushed mercilessly by a surgeon-father who doesn’t love him and doted on by a mother who does—a mother who wears all red. Not a good sign. Yep, she dies in childbirth, for which Victor blames his father, the attending physician, but holds no grudge against the offspring, William. But then family fortunes diminish, father dies, children are sent to separate countries.

Cut to the rock star performing at one of those 19th-century surgical amphitheaters at the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh. He says he’ll supercharge dead matter into life and does exactly that—a head and torso on a table gasp back into existence. In a way, del Toro masterminded the scene too well, because it’s too horrifying for the tepid reaction it engenders from the elders. There’s indignation, and consternation, and God is invoked, but there should be absolute amazement that a man has done this, along with a violent condemnation that he did in fact do this. He should be chased through the streets, like a rock star, but with anger rather than love/sex on the mind of the mob. “Oh my god, that’s amazing! Don’t ever fucking do that again!”

He does find a fan, Harlander (Christoph Waltz), a Cherman who is uncle to brother William’s fiancée, and who is intrigued by Victor’s work enough to bankroll it. They find a castle for the experiments, etc., and it’s appropriately cool—in these scenes, Victor comes off less rock star than film director—but since it’s Christoph Waltz we’re immediately thinking, “OK, what are his ulterior motives?” Ready? He’s dying of syphilis and wants Victor to find a cure. Kidding! Apparently reanimating dead matter is child’s play next to curing syphilis. No, he wants Victor to put his brain in whatever he reanimates. Victor balks. The diseased brain will tarnish his product. It's like he’s the artist, the filmmaker, and Harlander is a producer with “notes.” 

Oh right, during all this, William (Felix Kamerer) and his fiancée Elizabeth (Mia Goth) arrive, and Victor develops a new obsession: Elizabeth. del Toro cast Goth as the mother, too, so there’s an Oedipal thing going on. Meh. One, Goth does nothing for me, and I found her character annoying, so I didn’t feel any of the obsession. Two, it was one obsession too far. Keep the man, and the story, on track, Guillermo. Three, isn’t it the same obsession? Wasn’t he interested in reanimating life because he never got over his mother’s death? Well, here she is! He doesn’t have to do that now. Done and done. Instead, the obsessions coincide and keep bumping into each other. They jostle for space in the story.

But it’s “Frankenstein,” so eventually he has to create the creature. The experiment seems a failure until the next morning when Victor wakes with the creature at the foot of the bed. He’s done it! Plus it’s superstrong and heals super fast! And it can talk! At least it can say a word, his name, Victor. He should be amazed at what he’s done but only sees the errors, and chains it in the basement. William and Elizabeth arrive, see the handiwork, and she and the Creature bond. Sparking Victor’s jealousy? Or is he simply an artist who wants to crumple up that version and start over? After staring the fire, he has second thoughts, tries to save his creation, but is blasted outside by an explosion, losing his leg. The creature escapes.

This is still a tale told on a ship in the Arctic, remember, and at this point there is turmoil outside, and the captain opens his door to find the Creature standing there. Now he tells his tale, or at least everything after the explosion. In the woods, hunters shoot him, he finds refuge in a stable and does behind-the-scenes good deeds for the people there. They call him “The Spirit of the Forest.” He bonds with the blind grandpa (David Bradley, Walder Frey of “Game of Thrones”), and we get echoes of the great James Whale Frankenstein movies. But wolves arrive, CGI wolves, and there goes gramps.

Eventually the Creature realizes he can’t die, that he’s doomed to an eternity of loneliness, and he returns to confront Victor on the night William and Elizabeth are to marry. What the Creature wants? His own bride. Or he wants a companion. Victor assumes he means a mate (so heteronormative!) and refuses. He fears the race they might procreate. There’s anger, Elizabeth gets in the way, is shot by Victor. William arrives and is thrown aside by the Creature. Before he dies, he tells Victor that he is the true monster. In case that hasn’t been underlined enough. 

The rest is a comically quick chase to the Arctic—a pursuit-to-the-ends-of-the-earth feel. I think Victor is planning to destroy the Creature with dynamite (which doesn’t exist yet), but the Creature confronts him, lights the dynamite, blam, doesn’t die. That’s the explosion that alerts the Danes. Stories done, creature and creator, son and father, reconcile before the latter’s death. The Creature is allowed to leave. He faces the morning sun.

Life, give this story … life
Does the movie leave us at its most intriguing point? Like: What now? Isn’t that the question? What do you do with this unique eternal life? Maybe it ends there because there’s no answer. Or there’s a million answers.

Victor was never interesting because he was all over the place: dressed like a rock star, acted like an artist, ignored the science. He created a thing that couldn’t die, that could heal itself quickly, and he never tried to recreate that experiment? Or to see if the experiment could work with living tissue? Say his own? Could he regenerate a leg, for example? He made the greatest discovery in human history and did nothing with it.

The Creature meanwhile, is like Goth Frankenstein: tall and lanky, long stringy hair, hoodie, with a stitched-together face that looks like face tats. It’s a bit too hipster for me. That said, Elordi imbues him with humanity.

That said, I wish we wouldn’t keep making this movie. Feels like dead tissue. And no one’s animating it in a way that feels meaningful.

I'm re-reading George W.S. Trow's “My Pilgrim's Progress” and came across the following. Trow is writing about his first encounter with Avatar, an underground newspaper of the 1960s, whose first issue, or the first issue he read, included a centerfold with just four words on it: fuck, piss, cunt, shit. He was startled, stunned, but got it. But some didn't.

The New York Times made a point of ignoring what we'll call the Avatar energy, the “fuck, piss, cunt, shit” straight through to Kurt Cobain energy. It felt beneath their notice. They decided it could not possibly be true that their own children, for instance, had a homicidal aversion to Eisenhower America. They decided to ignore it. ... They were in, let us say, denial, and denial suited them, because they were in an enormously powerful position, they had a world of their own, and each generation rather likes it when its hegemony is prolonged...

Sub in Trump or MAGA for “Avatar,” and Obama's America (or American democracy) for “Eisenhower's America,” and you've described the last 10 years of media coverage.

Re-reading Trow makes me miss all my past touchstones: Trow, Mailer, Vidal. They couldn't have stopped it but I would've loved their thoughts. I would've felt less lonely.

Just out of prison, one going straight, the other not. “See ya in church.” 

WARNING: SPOILERS

What’s interesting about the movie isn’t the movie—it’s another social reform narrative from Warner Bros. in which society won’t let a good con go straight—and it’s George Raft, so no one you’d want to see in that type of role, no Humphrey Bogart in “The Big Shot” or James Cagney in “The Roaring Twenties,” no, just Raft, the “fetch” of 1930s Warners Bros., the guy they kept trying to make happen.

No, what’s interesting is the guy they got to play his younger brother. William Holden was just 21 years old, tall, broad-shouldered, but also unformed. He’s not quite William Holden yet. He’s a callow youth. There’s something of Tim Robbins’ lack of focus in his eyes. The eyes, at this point, are unsure of the world and his place in it.

And it’s not even Holden who’s interesting (though he’s good), it’s what he represents, particularly in the Warner Bros. line (though he was being borrowed from Paramount).

Warner Bros. truly became Warner Bros., the rat-a-tat studio, because of a bunch of quick-talking, ethnic, mostly New York born-and-bred, turn-of-the-century movie stars: Edward G. Robinson, James Cagney, and Paul Muni. If their ethnicity was Jewish (Robinson and Muni), it was downplayed and transposed into other ethnicities: Italian, Greek, Chinese. If it wasn’t (Cagney), it was played up. You can add the two stars here, George Raft and Humphrey Bogart, just sans the ethnicity and (as yet) stardom. As stated, Warners kept trying to make Raft happen, but he kept fumbling it, and I doubt he’d have gone far anyway. He’s good at one note, the hard, silent stare, and not much else. Meanwhile, Warners kept fumbling Bogart, not realizing what they had in the guy. But all the other descriptors fit: Raft and Bogie are short, quick-talking, turn-of-the-century NYC guys. Sharpies.

At some point in the 1930s, though, maybe as Daryl Zanuck gave way to Hal Wallis, or maybe because of Joe Breen and the Production Code, it feels like the studio stopped looking for the sharpies of the world and went for big, good-hearted WASPs: Wayne Morris, Jeffrey Lynn, Dennis Morgan. Ronald Reagan. They went with tall, conventionally handsome men without a trace of ethnicity, all born at least a decade into the century and usually far, far away from a place like New York City. Maybe it was Warners’ attempt to create their own Gary Coopers or something, but these guys never broke big, they just played second bananas to the sharpies. Or maybe that was their point.

My point is that everything became codified and we lost the Lower East Side of it all, along with a sense of what it meant to be alive in the first decade of the 20th century. And this hit home for me seeing William Holden, born in O’Fallon, Illinois, in 1918, playing  kid brother to George Raft, born in Hell’s Kitchen, New York, in 1901.

Tiers and triumvirates
“Invisible Stripes” is based upon a 1938 novel of the same name by Lewis E. Lawes, who was longtime warden at Sing Sing prison, a social reformer, and someone who had written (and had his writings adapted for Hollywood) before. “Twenty Thousand Years in Sing Sing” was his. So was “Castle on the Hudson” and “Over the Wall.” I’m sure he was a fine guy, and maybe we can blame Warner Bros. scribes Warren Duff and Jonathan Finn for some of it, but prison wardens sure come off swell here.

As the movie opens, a busload of men are being brought into prison while a handful are being paroled, including our two leads, Cliff Taylor (Raft) and Chuck Martin (Bogart). They’re pals but with polar-opposite attitudes. Cliff plans to go straight with the help of a good family, good job, and good girl. Chuck just wants to get back to the rackets and grab a blonde. In their goodbyes to the warden (Moroni Olsen), Cliff is all yes sir, no sir, and Chuck is rebellious and sarcastic. “See ya in church,” he says as he leaves (great line), and then for good measure leaves the door open. A final screw-you to the screw.

All of this is underlined on the trainride to town, where Bogart gets the best lines. Hell, he gives the movie its title:

You think changing your uniform means anything? You’ll still be wearing stripes. You may not be able to see ’em but they’ll be there alright.

Bogie’s going the other way. “I'm gonna make them pay for every day I spent in that crummy stir,” he says bitterly. Man, no one did bitter better than Bogart. He could do it on a dime. Probably why Warners kept him in that role so long.

But he’s already breaking out of that one-dimensional role. You can divide the gangsters in the film into three tiers: the good good gangster, i.e., the nice guy trying to go straight (Raft); the good bad gangster, i.e., the straight-shooter who’s fine with a life of crime (Bogie); and the bad bad gangsters, guys who’d rat you out as soon as look at you. They’re played by the usual late ’30s Warners triumvirate of Paul Kelly as gang leader Ed Kruger, and Marc Lawrence and Joe Downing as scheming underlings. The Kelly role used to be Bogart’s but he’s graduated from it.

Cliff has his own triumvirate, and while the good family is waiting for him, embodied by a doting silver-haired mother (Flora Robson), kid brother Tim (William Holden), and Tim’s girl, Peggy (Jane Bryan), the good girl ain’t waiting. She’s there for the welcome-home party but distant, and that night they break it off. “I couldn’t marry an ex-convict,” she tells him. At least she’s up-front about it. So one leg of the triumvirate gone.

But at least there’s a good job, right? Yeah, no. Cliff is working hard as a mechanic at a garage, but 1) Cliff can’t drive because of his criminal record, and 2) the boss doesn’t trust him alone with the cash register. So there’s no reason to keep him. In the next job, management is cool but one worker isn’t. Next job the boss wants him to be a stoolie. Etc. In the end, he winds up a stockboy being bossed around by “Dead End” kid Leo Gorcey. It's not bad. The stockboys union even has a dance, and when the band launches into “Sweet Georgia Brown” we get a sense of the changing times:

Mom: What are they up to?
Cliff: They’re swinging it, mom.
Mom: Oh, is that what they call clatterbugs?
Cliff: [chuckles] Jitterbugs!

Of course, that night, $40k worth of furs goes missing. (WB can’t get away from the furs.) Cliff is arrested on no evidence and released two days later with a shrug:

Cop: Sorry, Taylor. At first it looked like you were in it pretty deep. But you can’t blame us, we couldn’t take any chances.
Cliff: So I spend two nights in a cell.
Cop: That’s the way it goes.

Still amazes me that Joe Breen’s Production Code was fine with this kind of thing. Separate beds, etc., even for married couples, but the entire system is crooked and nobody says shit? 

It’s Cliff’s guilty-until-proven-innocent stint that sends Tim over the deep end, and Cliff realizes he has to make money but fast to save his brother. So back to Bogie. Now it’s one bank heist after another as Cliff—under the guise of selling tractors—sends his share of the loot home to Tim, who opens a garage and finally marries Peggy.

The story doesn’t go in completely predictable ways. When Cliff wants out, for example, the rest of the guys ain’t happy but Bogie backs him—even though he knows of the next job. You assume that job will go awry and Cliff will get blamed; and it does go awry but that’s not how he’s swept back into it. Bogie is shot, hides out at the Taylor Garage, and forces Tim to drive them to a hideout. When he returns, cops pick him up. Now Tim is gonna have a record and the whole thing will start all over again.

Except! With the angelic prison warden and a parole officer (Henry O’Neill) backing him, Cliff lays out a plan for the cops. He'll get Tim to come clean and they'll cut him loose. After that, Cliff goes to help Bogie against the other gangsters. The whole thing becomes internecine—good gangsters vs. bad gangsters—and everyone dies. Bogie gets the best dying scene:

This is it I guess. That's OK with me, the kid deserved a break. [laughs] What do I care? You can't live forever.

Holden, with Tim Robbins' eyes, just starting out. Bryan, with Diane Keaton eyes, about to marry rich.

Effie, darling
Holden’s great. He acts rings around the Ronald Reagans of the world. Jane Bryan had a thing, too, pretty, fresh-faced, with wide eyes that remind me of Diane Keaton. Sadly, she soon got married to a richie rich, quit the biz, joined Republican politics. So it goes.

Bogie is still the best thing in it. For a time, we don’t see him, but to remind everyone he still exists, the two men run into each other outside a movie theater playing “You Can’t Get Away with Murder.” I loved this for several reasons: 1) It’s a Bogart movie; 2) It’s based upon a book by Warden Lewis E. Lawes; and 3) the blonde on Bogie’s arm is Lee Patrick, who would play Effie, his super-efficient secretary, in “The Maltese Falcon.”

I wasn't thinking about it at the time, but two of the stars here—Holden and Bogart—would act together again, 15 years later and worlds (and world wars) away, in Billy Wilder’s “Sabrina” from 1954. In that one, they’re the brothers, and vying for the same girl. And where was that girl, Audrey Hepburn, when this movie was being made? In Nazi-occupied Europe. She was 10.

“Maybe seeing this Humphrey Bogart picture will take my mind off things.”

“It's not like we have this opposition to movies into theaters. ... Right now, you should count on everything that is planned on going to the theater through Warner Bros. [to] continue to go to theaters.”

-- Ted Sarandos, Netflix's co-chief executive, during a conference call with investors, after Netflix purchased Warners Bros./HBO for $83 billion, per The New York Times. The Times then adds: “But many people in Hollywood viewed his comments with extreme skepticism. ('Key words: ”right now,“' one agent said.) As recently as April, in response to a question at the Time100 Summit about declines at the overall box office, Mr. Sarandos said: 'What is the consumer trying to tell us? That they'd like to watch movies at home.' He also called theaters 'an outmoded idea' for most people.”

Speaking out against the merger and the general consolidation of the movie industry: a trade org repping 30,000 movie screens; the WGA; U.S. Rep. Laura Friedman; Jane Fonda. 

Reminding us it could've been worse? Mark Harris over on BlueSky.

Reminder for Seattleites: Support SIFF and NWFF if you like watching movies in theaters.

Maximus has a question for America

“This discussion [surrounding air strikes on suspected drug boats with no due process] misses the bigger effort the Trump administration seems to be engaged in. ...  I suspect the question the administration cares about is not 'Is this legal?,' 'Is this a war crime?,' 'Is this murder?,' or even 'Is this good for America?,' but rather, 'Isn't this violence delightful?'

”The president's supporters seem to grasp this. ... 'I really do kind of not only want to see them killed in the water, whether they're on the boat or in the water,' Megyn Kelly, the conservative podcaster, said, 'but I'd really like to see them suffer. I would like Trump and Hegseth to make it last a long time so they lose a limb and bleed out.'

“An Associated Press investigation suggests that the men Ms. Kelly would like to watch slowly die are often poor laborers: a fisherman, a motorcycle taxi driver, a bus driver, living in cinder-block homes with spotty water and power service, making at least $500 per trip ferrying cocaine, a crime Americans normally judge worthy of a prison sentence rather than a torturous death.”

-- Phil Klay, novelist and Iraq War veteran, in a guest essay, “What Trump Is Really Doing With His Boat Strikes,” in The New York Times yesterday. Klay equates what the Trump administration is doing with the Roman Colosseum: suffering as spectator sport. Are we not entertained? Apparently some of us are. Even though, when we watched “Gladiator” 25 years ago, we knew who the hero was, and the villains, and which culture was descending into a debauched senescence. 

Cutting to the chase:

It's upper left. That's No. 1 by IMDb's algorithm. 

And if you crunch the numbers on IMDb's site?

• By IMDb movie rating: “Fantastic Mr. Fox”
• By number of ratings: “Gravity”
• By U.S. box office: “Gravity”
• By Oscar wins: Best supporting actor, “Syrianna”; Best picture, “Argo”
• By Oscar noms: “Good Night, and Good Luck”

And if I had to guess by longevity I'd go with “Michael Clayton.” I guess I should be glad it's in the mix.

Clooney did get nom'ed for “Ides of March:”: best screenplay with Grant Hesolv, and he did do like everything for it: starred, co-wrote, directed, produced. And we had high hopes for it. Came out in October, so-so reviews, good poster, one Oscar nom, $40m at the U.S. box office—good for 77th for the year. But forgotten. No one who thinks of George Clooney goes “Oh yeah, the 'Ides of March' guy.”

If only he could turn some of those homers into doubles...

The first question is my favorite since no one else is asking it. I doubt if many baseball fans are even aware of it.

Is anyone closer to leading the league in doubles, triples and homers at some point during their career?

Reminder: Discounting the 19th century, this has only happened seven times in baseball history, and the most recent player to complete the triumverate was Johnny Mize way back in 1941—almost 100 years ago. That's right: Willie Mays didn't do it (no doubles), Henry Aaron didn't do it (triples), Stan Musial didn't do it (homers). 

But we do have some new contenders—guys who have now led the league in two of the three categories.

In the NL, in 2025, Pete Alonso and Matt Olson tied for the lead in doubles with 41, and both men had previously led the league in homers: Alonso in 2019, Olson in 2023. So each just needs triples. Yeah, I know. Just putting it out there. 

In the A.L., last season's doubles leader, Bobby Witt Jr., was the triples leader in 2023. So now just homers for him. He's got a better shot. He hit 30 HRs in 2023 and 32 in 2024 but fell off a bit last year. But he's young. He could beef up. He could eat some Beefaroni. You never know.

Just as there are only seven guys who have ever done this in the modern era, there are only seven active players who have nailed two of the three. Here they are in order of likelihood of completing the triumverate:

Yeah, none of the triples guys has a shot. That's a young man's game and none of them are young. And not seeing Duran doing homers.

The best shot for doing a thing that hasn't been done in nearly a century is Shohei Ohtani, who keeps doing things that no one's seen in nearly a century. Plus he just needs doubles. Doubles feel doable. As he slows down his triples might become doubles, and as he loses power his homers can also become doubles. And if history has taught us anything, yes, you can kill anyone (cf., “The Godfather Part II”), and yes, never fight a land war in Asia (cf., “The Princess Bride”); but a close third is: Never underestimate Shohei Ohtani.

Did anyone hit. 350?

No. Aaron Judge “flirted,” as we say, with .400 for the first few months of the season. How does that go, by the way? Does .400 say “My, you're tall. Haven't seen anyone as tall as you around these parts,” and Judge goes, “Shucks, ma'am,” and then, well, in June he hit .253 and there went the flirtation. End of May, he was hitting .398, and end of June he was down to .354 and but a memory to her. Yes, he had a season for the ages, hitting 53 home runs, driving in 114, and leading the league in runs scored (137), walks (124), and leading the majors in the triumphant triumverate: BA (.331), OBP (.457), and SLG (.688). But he didn't hit .350. He hit .331. Meanwhile, in the NL, we nearly had a season where a guy didni't hit .300. And the last time that happened? Never. 

I get the feeling we should let these guys know this is something we want to see. If there's cachet in it, someone might do it.

Here's a history of .350 hitters. Just know that the current dearth is unprecedented.

Which team has the longest postseason drought?

Last year it was the Angels and this year it's the Angels and next year it'll probably be the Angels. They haven't played a game of October baseball since 2014 when they went three and out against that great, fun mid-2010s KC Royals team. And they haven't won a postseason game since October 22, 2009, when they were down three games to one against the Yankees and managed to eke out a 7-6 victory to stay alive for another day. Back then the Angels were called the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim and since 2016 they've just been called the Los Angeles Angels (The Angels Angels), and though I think they should just go back to being the California Angels, they do seem well-named. In September, at a Mariners game, I noted to a friend that one-time Dodgers utilityman Chris Taylor, who always was in the mix of things in October, was now, at 35, with the Angels, and “with the Angels” suddenly seemed an apt way to put it. It's the end of a baseball life. Where's Chris Taylor? He's with the Angels. Oh, so sorry to hear that. My condolences.

Which team has the longest pennant drought?

Still my Seattle Mariners. Though they made a helluva run.

Which teams haven't won a pennant this century?

Last year there were nine, but the Blue Jays did their thing and now there's eight: M's (n/a), Pirates (1979), Brewers (1982), Orioles (1983), Reds (1990), Athletics (1990), Twins (1991), and Padres (1998). Cheer them all on. Let's get this down to zero.

Which team has the longest World Series championship drought?

Still Cleveland, who has not won it all since 1948. Then it's a big jump to the Padres and Brewers (b., 1969). Then my Mariners.

Which teams have never won the World Series?

Same five: Padres and Brewers (1969), Mariners (1977), Rockies (1993) and Rays (1998). 

Addendum: Last fall, we came close to having a World Series between two teams that have never won the World Series, since the Mariners and the Brewers both made the LCS. And when was the last time that happened—a World Series between two teams that had never won the World Series? That would be 1980, when the last of the original 16, the longtime hapless Philadelphia Phillies, finally wore the crown, beating the upstart KC Royals in six. What about before 1980? Would you believe 1920? Cleveland vs. Brooklyn. And before 1920 it was the 19-aughts, the first decade of the event. In other words, it's barely ever happened, and it nearly happened last year, and no one said nothing. There really should've been more talk about this.

Pitchers and catchers in 68 days.

WARNING: SPOILERS

I didn’t believe it enough.

Yes, I believed everyone in his entourage would drop everything to follow the sad whims of movie star Jay Kelly (George Clooney), since they’re in his employ, and moths to flames and all that; but I didn’t get why, within days, they would each abandon him. Everything else was the same and he hadn’t acted awful in the interim. Hadn’t he even caught a purse snatcher? Kinda? But they all fall away because that’s the movie’s trajectory, things falling away, until our guy winds up alone in the woods, the European woods, the dark fairytale forests of our childhood imaginations, even if all that falling away doesn’t make much sense.

Back in college, I thought up a short story along those exact lines: a group of friends heading out for the night, to a party they can't find, and one by one falling away until it was just our protagonist, alone, with nowhere to go. I didn’t write it.

Noah Baumbach’s “Jay Kelly” is a work-life balance movie, but for the title character it’s never in balance. He loves work and is bad at relationships. People around him are either looming up and talking incessantly, or they’re pulling away, bitter. Maybe that’s the nature of that biz. Everyone wants a piece of you until they don’t get it.

Nothing’s in balance with Jay’s two daughters. While Jessica (Riley Keogh), the special-needs teacher, feels abandoned from way back when, Daisy (Grace Edwards), the recent high-school grad, feels smothered in the right now. That’s the sad whim—pursuing Daisy onto a train in France. It’s like he’s making up Jessica’s deficit with Daisy’s abundance. Bad idea. I also found both daughters annoying, particularly the younger and more privileged. Her first line to her father is “I’m smarter than you,” and I wanted him to say something like, “You know who wouldn’t say that? Someone smarter than me”—the way that Clooney once said “You’re about 100 miles from smart” in another, better movie. But this movie isn’t that smart.

Clooney and I are almost the same age—he was born a week after my older brother, in May 1961—and a man sifting through the regrets of his life, well, that’s my wheelhouse. I’m your target audience. But the movie keeps falling short. It keeps delivering scenes I don’t buy or don’t care about.

I’m beginning to think Noah Baumbach and I will never make it as a couple.

Can we go again?
It’s not a bad open, the final days of a movie shoot, with the protagonist, Jay Kelly, wounded in the shadow of a NYC bridge, saying, “I don’t want to be here anymore. I want to leave the party.” The actor is the opposite. They yell cut and print but he says to the director, “Can we go again? I’d like another one.” Apparently Kelly is famous/infamous for not being able to leave productions. Maybe he doesn’t want to return to his life.

Then we return to his life—the “I’m smarter than you” scene as he skims his backyard pool—after which he learns that Peter Schneider (Jim Broadbent), the director who gave him his first big break, has died, and Kelly flashes back on the last time they met. Schneider is old, down on his luck, and wants Kelly to lend his name to a new production but Kelly won’t. He won’t help a friend to whom he owes everything, and that friend is now dead. And now it’s the funeral. I expected comeuppance, but no, he’s greeted well by family. He’s welcomed.

The comeuppance comes a scene later. In the parking lot, he runs into an old roommate, Timothy (Billy Crudup), and the two go to a bar, and what starts out as pleasant but unequal reminiscing—since Jay is where he is, and Timothy isn’t—quickly turns to animosity. Timothy has resentments. Any story about the story of Jay Kelly includes the scene where he accompanies a friend to an audition for a Peter Schneider film and he winds up with the part—and the career! How about that? Well, Timothy is the friend and he’s got 40 years worth of animosity to vent. He feels that Jay Kelly stole his career, and his girl, and the moment Timothy decides to go for it, to punch Jay in the face, the look in his eyes is truly scary. Kudos, Mr. Crudup.

It's after this incident that Jay Kelly tells his entourage they’re going to Europe to follow Daisy and maybe pick up that award in Tuscany his manager, Ron Sukenik (Adam Sandler), wants him to get.

The entourage includes Ron, as well as publicist Liz (Laura Dern), and it’s revealed the two nearly had a thing together. These days he’s always on the phone with wife and kids, everyone Southern California-spoiled, but he nearly had the other. The true thing? Or just another thing? Who knows?

What kept them apart is the need to be there for Jay, and that’s not a bad exploration, but it feels like it would be exploration in a movie called “Ron Sukenik”—or maybe in a movie called “Jay Kelly” if the main character was Ron Sukenik. That’s not this. But they keep having to go to Jay, to prop him up, because there’s a sense he can’t handle the world. Even the trip to the bar with Timothy. Should we let him go? Does he know how to pay for things? Ron keeps calling him “puppy” because that’s what he is.

I just kept waiting for something like wisdom. It was a bad idea to follow Daisy, but I like the reaction when he shows up in her train car: she’s annoyed, betrayed, while the French dude/wannabe filmmaker she’s snogging is agog. Because it’s Jay Kelly. That’s everyone. They’re all agog, and he’s there, and it’s not much. Is that the point? “What do you say to people who say you only play yourself?” says a snooty girl on the train. “You know how difficult it is to be yourself? You try it.” That was someone else’s line, decades earlier, but Jay repeats it here. Same way he took Timothy’s improvisation and made it his own in front of Peter Schneider. All the best lines are somebody else’s; he just reads them.

I like the train bathroom where he keeps repeating his name, along with the names of other great Hollywood actors. I wanted it to lead somewhere.

And why that name, by the way? That plainness. JK? His rival gets Alcock. You don’t need to be Freud for that one. I was hoping Alcock would be a Brad Pitt cameo but Patrick Wilson is fine in the role.

The Crest
You know when the movie became magical? At the end, in Tuscany, in that old operatic theater layered like a wedding cake, when they show scenes from Jay Kelly’s movies. Because they’re actually scenes from George Clooney’s movies: “Thin Red Line,” “Up in the Air,” et al. It’s the magic of movies. Maybe that’s part of it. Jay Kelly is a pain but look at the magic he makes.

I’m glad Patricia and I went to see it at an actual movie theater, the Crest in Shoreline, the last of the Landmark chain in town. All the jobs are one now—you buy the ticket from the guy who sells you your popcorn, who tears the ticket, etc.—but it’s hanging on. The theater smells old, the audience was older, and a moth, an actual moth, kept flitting in front of the screen during the show, but it’s hanging on. Not a wedding-cake theater but still there. 

It's been a while since I’d seen a George Clooney movie. He’s such an omnipresent cultural figure that it’s easy to look track sometimes, but I think the last time I saw him on the screen was “Hail, Caesar!” in 2016. Another role where he plays an actor. Back then he was making everything everywhere all at once—“Good Night, and Good Luck,” “Syrianna,” “Michael Clayton,” “Burn After Reading,” “Up in the Air,” “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” “The Descendants,” “Gravity,” boom boom boom—plus his own directing efforts, all during a 10-year run. And then, poof, not. Where did he go? Where did I go? Can’t believe we didn’t stay in touch. We should work harder at staying in touch. We're not getting any younger. 

WARNING: SPOILERS

I’m still unclear if producer A.C. Lyles asked James Cagney to direct this or if Cagney suggested himself for the role. Cagney’s 1976 memoir, “Cagney By Cagney,” implies it was Lyles:

When my old friend A. C. Lyles came to me in 1957 and asked me if I would direct his Paramount production of Short Cut to Hell, I was moved to do so out of friendship only.

Twenty years later, the ghostwriter for that one, John McCabe, in his biography “Cagney,” flips the script:

A. C. Lyles, badly needed a competent director for a screenplay, Short Cut to Hell, based on the Graham Greene novel This Gun for Hire. Jim said, “I knew A.C. was searching for someone, and I said to him, ‘May I suggest someone? I’ll try it.’”

To be honest, neither path makes much sense. If you’re a fledgling producer, as Lyles was, and have access to Cagney, as Lyles did, why wouldn’t you put Cagney on the screen, where he’ll help your bottom line, rather than behind the camera, where he won’t? And if Cagney had directing aspirations, well, he quickly disabused himself of them. Even this 20-day shoot was too long. “Directing I find a bore,” he says in the memoir. “I have no interest in telling other people their business.”

So it was ill-conceived either way, and made more so by the project: remaking the 1942 noir “This Gun for Hire.” Yes, the source material from novelist Graham Greene and screenwriters Albert Maltz and W.R. Burnett wasn’t bad; and since director Frank Tuttle was more journeyman than auteur, a first-timer like Cagney didn’t have too much to live up to.

But the success of the ’42 film relied upon a stunning star-turn from Alan Ladd, and, as the man said, you don’t find those around every corner. It also relied on otherworldly chemistry between Ladd and Veronica Lake. You’re basically asking lightning to strike twice. It didn’t.

Fresh young talents
Cagney introduces our new stars from the director’s chair at the start of the film. Addressing the camera, he says lights, cameras, all well and good, but it’s “the human personality” that really counts, and every few years you need to replenish them. Here they’ve found “two, fresh, exciting young talents in the persons of Robert Ivers and Georgann Johnson. … Hope you’ll agree when you meet them that they’re heading for a great future.

Auteur intro: trying to pass the torch.

They weren’t. In his fedora and trenchcoat, Ivers comes off less Alan Ladd than a kid playing dress-up. To be honest, I was reminded of Matt McCoy—Lloyd Braun on “Seinfeld.” He just doesn’t pop. But Johnson is worse. They decided to replace Veronica Lake’s sexy slinkiness with mid-50s Doris Day perky gumption, and it’s just … grating.

The story proper begins in the same spot, a two-bit dive, and with the same situation: man, cat, landlady’s sexy daughter there to clean up. In the original, though, she wanted to clean. Here, Daisy (Yvette Vickers), in a hip-hugging Monroe-esque dress, is trying to entice Kyle Niles (Ivers), and gets upset when he prefers cuddling his cat.

A few thoughts on the name changes. I don’t mind them dropping “Raven” but for Kyle Niles? Was Lloyd Boyd taken? Or Lucas Doofus? Gates, the fat man, becomes Bahrwell—to cut down on the killer’s search, one assumes. There’s just one Bahrwell in the LA phone book as opposed to six Gateses. Ellen Graham becomes Glory Hamilton. The villainous sourpuss, Brewster in the original, is here reduced to initials: AT, which … Wait, is all this a play on AC Lyles’ name? Lyles = Niles, AC = AT. To what end? 

The maguffin is changed, too. In the original, the man Raven was hired to kill was blackmailing a chemical co. selling its formula to America’s enemies. It’s a bad guy killing a bad guy for a bad guy. The secretary gets it, too, but she was hardly a secretary—more sexpot—and it’s Raven’s call. He’s getting rid of witnesses. Here, the target is a city engineer indicting AT’s company for shoddy building practices. He’s a reformer. His secretary is the real deal, but a traitor. A dirty rat, to coin a phrase. Working for AT, she gets hers at AT’s behest.

But I can’t believe they lost the little girl! It’s the most chilling scene in the original—the little lame girl who talks to Raven as he ascends and descends the stairs, and who, as a result, is a witness. You see it in Raven’s eyes: Do I kill her? He doesn’t, but it’s like 60-40. Here, no girl, no chilling moment. 

We do get the San Francisco diner where Bahrwell (Jacques Aubuchon) pays off Kyle. They add a good back-and-forth (“Don’t you trust me?” “Secretary trusted you”), but a great line in the original, “I’m my own police,” doesn’t land here, and the yin-yang of the fat man, his attraction/repulsion to violence, is lost. Peppermints are now peppermint patties and the man who recognizes Bahrwell is piano player rather than patron. Once Niles realizes he’s been betrayed with marked bills, he returns to get more info from the guy and the modern vernacular enters into it: “That’s all I know, man,” he says. Love that. Hey, here we are. The future was that guy not Ivers in a fedora. 

At least the great coincidences of the original are fixed. The girl isn’t auditioned in SF, she isn’t asked to be a spy for the feds, so when Kyle sits next to her on the train to LA it doesn’t seem absurd that these two strangers are both gunning for the same man.

Georgann is the big difference in casting. Everyone else is almost a mimeograph of the original actor. Aubuchon could be the younger brother of Laird Cregar. Ditto Richard Hale for Tully Marshall, and you could tell they were going for a Ladd type with Ivers. But Georgann Johnson is about 1,000 miles from Veronica Lake. As mentioned, she’s a Doris Day type, and, sure, Doris ruled the box office in this period, but so did Marilyn Monroe. But they moved away from sex toward—I almost hate to say it, given “White Heat”—a mother figure.

And a weird mother figure. There’s that moment when Glory, boarding the train to LA, says goodbye to boyfriend Sgt. Stan Lowery (William Bishop). He gives her a box lunch, says mother packed it, and Glory responds, “Well, here’s one for your mother,” and gives him a long, slow kiss. Ewww.

Half her lines come off like a “Fargo” character:

• “Now when did you last eat? Go on, put some meat on those bones.”
• “You know, you could get yourself in quite a jam taking money. Might’ve ruined your whole future!”

Worse is when she thinks she’s clever. Kyle pulls a gun on her to force her off the train, and she tilts her head and says, “Well, my mother always told me not to talk to strange men…” When she refuses Bahrwell’s invitation back to his place in the Hollywood Hills, she says, with a triumphant smile, “It’s cold in them thar hills.”

Eventually our two heroes are chased by the cops, including Sgt. Lowery, but no railroad yards this time. It’s a factory and a WWII-era air raid shelter. (When they go below, she sees an old newspaper with the headline: ALLIES POUND SIEGFRIED LINE.) It’s a wait-it-out situation, and sadly this means they have time to bond, which means we get lines from her like: “I keep thinking about your hands—so strong and so gentle. … There is so much more to you than you’ll admit!” It was all I could do not to yell “Hey lady, give it up!”

We get less backstory this time, a reprise of the accidental smothering of the cat—in both versions, the most wrenching death in the story. Cagney gives us a couple of good shots of Kyle’s fingers reaching above a sidewalk grating, but they seem swiped from “The Third Man.”

I do like this back-and-forth:

She: Isn’t there just one thing about yourself that you like? That you’re proud of?
He: Yeah. I never miss.

Whaddaya hear, whaddaya say?
The final scenes aren’t in a factory/office building but on AT’s veranda, where Kyle has no reason to get them to confess—in the original, he did it for the girl, and maybe for country on the eve of WWII—but he does it anyway with a Dictaphone running. He dies next to some small steps. There’s nothing grand in it. No top of the world. 

When it was released, “Short Cut to Hell” was put on a double bill with “The Devil’s Hairpin” and quickly forgotten:

Great futures for the two exciting young talents didn’t exactly emerge, though both did well enough. Ivers had a memorable turn as Elvis’ friend Cookie in “G.I. Blues,” and he kept getting bit parts in Jerry Lewis vehicles. He even turned up in two episodes of “Mister Roberts,” them mid-60 TV series based on the Cagney film; but his last screen credit is in ’66. Then he moved back to Yakima, Washington, and became a TV newsman. 

Georgann Johnson, whose face didn’t make the poster (that’s Yvette Vickers), got screen credits into the 21st century. She was one of Joe Buck’s conquests in “Midnight Cowboy,” starred in 1,000+ episodes of a soap opera I’ve never heard of (“Somerset,” 1970-76), kept going. Good for her.

As for AT Nyles/A.C. Lyles? He produced ’60s movies on the cheap, with passé stars (Rory Calhoun) in stale genres (westerns) whose very titles seem tired: “Black Spurs,” “Town Tamer,” “Apache Uprising,” “Johnny Reno,” “Red Tomahawk,” “Fort Utah.” It’s a string of 5.0 IMDb ratings. In ’68, he finagled more work out of the now-retired Cagney, convincing him to narrate “Arizona Bushwackers,” starring Howard Keel and Yvonne De Carlo. In the 1980s, a bit of a switch: a passé star gave Lyles work. He served on a private-sector initiatives council in the Reagan administration.

In the 1950s, Cagney kept doing favors for friends—TV work for Bob Montgomery, etc.—but there was such a shrug to it I don’t know if it was much of a favor. I mean look at this March 1957 headline. Not exactly the publicity you want. Not exactly going to make you drop “I Love Lucy” to run out and see it.

At least the article contains new details. The way Cagney directs, for example—with a soft voice, prefiguring Clint Eastwood—along with Cagney’s concern, via Ivers’ work in “The Delicate Delinquent,” that he would imitate not Alan Ladd so much as Cagney himself. Well, give the director his due. Kid didn't come close to Cagney.

WARNING: SPOILERS 

Yeah, I wasn’t a fan of the ending, either.

A corporate CEO, Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), is kidnapped by two exurb nutjobs and chained to a basement cot because the leader of the two, Teddy (Jesse Plemons), thinks she’s an alien intent on destroying Earth. Her head is shaved so she can’t communicate with the mother ship, her body covered with antihistamine cream for same, and at one point she’s given electro-shock treatments. You wonder how far Teddy will go to prove she’s an alien before he realizes he's wrong.

Turns out he’s not wrong.

We get those vibes throughout but I assumed it was just cultural commentary. I.e., These CEOs with their airless offices and airless terminology (“unpack,” “let’s dialogue”) are like aliens, and certainly of a different species than workaday Teddy, who bikes to his job at a “Fulfillment Center”—another awful corporate term—of Auxolith, Fuller’s corporation, where he slaps addresses on boxes. Plus it’s Emma Stone, with her thin body and big E.T. eyes. Oh, and near the end, after Teddy kneecaps her, she uses her one good leg to crawl, like an injured crab, alien-like, to lift the keys from the now-dead No. 2 man Don (Aidan Delbis). So we get the alien vibe throughout. 

But I assumed she wasn’t an alien because “Bugonia” is directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, and it was a serious film tackling the serious issues of the day—like the near-kidnapping of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan in 2020 by right-wing nutjobs. Overall, too many CEOs are making too much money by creating way too many awful jobs like Teddy’s; and too many people like Teddy are alone with their thoughts and the internet. That’s a lot of life these days. It’s relevant.

And then it becomes absurd. Teddy is right—right down to using hair to communicate with the mother ship. Even Earth in those final shots is flat. I guess we should’ve listened to those guys, too.

I felt oddly rooked. I spent 90 minutes worrying over a person I didn’t need to worry over. I expended emotional capital, a precious commodity these days, on nothing.

Yorgos’ larf
I should mention that my nephew Ryan doesn’t quite align with this interpretation. He thinks the ending is ambiguous. I guess you could interpret it as less sci-fi than fantasy—as in Teddy’s fantasy. As in maybe it’s Teddy’s final thoughts before he blows himself up? Which is why he’s right about everything.

Wish I could see more of a reason to believe that. Right now it just feels like a larf, Yorgos’ larf, a giggle thrown at those sad serious people like me trying to think things through.

The early stuff is haves/have-nots. Michelle Fuller has. She rises early in her modern glass mansion, does her exercise/kickboxing, drives to work and breezes into her glass office and does whatever work she does. Her one human moment is driving and singing along to Chappell Roan’s “Good Luck, Babe.”

Compared to most of the world, Teddy and Don are haves, too; just not compared with Michelle Fuller. Plus what they have they squander. It’s a nice house but falling apart around them. Teddy isn’t lazy—he bikes everywhere, he works, he raises bees, he raises Don—he’s just unfocused, or focused on the wrong things. There’s too much buzzing in his brain.

How crazy is Teddy? That’s our question throughout. Jesse Plemons has made a career out of playing people who seem quietly reasonable about their own horrifically unreasonable viewpoints—all the while seeming slightly off. You just don’t know how off until the reveal. Here there are several—moments when his temper flares and he resorts to violence, or worse, in the electro-shock scene, when everyone is begging him to stop, Michelle, Don, us, and you see him concentrating to ignore that noise and focus on the signal, his signal, the great work he’s doing for humanity.

But Teddy’s true reveal is at the 11th hour. By this point, things have gotten messy. The electro-shock data shows that Michelle is not just an alien but alien royalty, a queen bee, as it were, and entitled to some respect, or something, involving dinner. That ends badly, too. She provokes violence from Teddy, and might’ve been choked to death but for the timely arrival of the cops. Well, one cop, Casey (Stavros Halkias), whom we’d seen stopping and talking with Teddy earlier. He’s actually working the case of the missing CEO, just not well. Mostly he seems intent on trying to reconnect with Teddy and to apologize for molesting him when he was his babysitter years earlier. Yeah. Not sure why Yorgos has to throw that in, too. Worse, Casey's apology doesn't feel deep or thought-through; it just sits there. Is the point that everyone’s distracted? The cop by the past, Teddy by the present? Everyone has shit in their basement.

As Teddy is showing Casey the bee colonies, Michelle, hidden in the basement, is convincing Don she’ll take him to the other planet, Andromeda, and as he acquiesces he shoots himself in the head. That finally alerts the cop that something's amiss, but Teddy bashes his head in with a shovel, then confronts Michelle in the basement.

The oddity here and the rest of the way out is how amenable Teddy suddenly becomes. He was a stubborn shit for most of the film but suddenly every suggestion Michelle makes he follows. Owning up to her alienness, she tells him the antifreeze in the back of her car isn’t antifreeze but a cure for his mother lying in a coma because of an Auxolith product. He believes her. Still blood-splattered, he takes the jug to the assisted living facility, encounters no one, subs it out for her IV drip, and kills her. Now he’s pedaling back with tears in his eyes and rage in his heart.

In the interim, Michelle did the crab thing, got the keys, set herself free. At first she’s crawling up the stairs, but then returns to the basement. Was the upper door locked? That’s what I assumed. I assumed she returned to look for a new exit. But maybe that was never the point. Maybe the point was to find what she finds: Teddy’s secret room, with his computer, his newspaper clippings tacked to the wall, and mason jars full of the body parts of other people he’s killed. She wasn’t his first abductee. There were many, many others. That’s the true reveal. He’s Ed Gein for the sci-fi set.

And somehow, despite killing his own mother on Michelle’s false intel, he remains suggestible. When he returns, she has the upper hand. She demands to know how many of his experiments were Andromedans, he says two, then she peppers him with the true sad history of humanity. How we’re just an alien experiment, a mea culpa for killing off the dinosaurs; but we’re forever haunted, forever problematic, forever in trouble. But she can cure us. She has to return to her corporate office to teleport to the mothership, but then she can cure us. And he can join her.

And he believes her.

Ryan’s theory
Question: in the teleportation closet in her office, wearing that suicide vest, does he blow himself up on purpose, by accident, or is it the Andromedans somehow? Or doesn’t it matter?

The hokiness of that teleportation closet, along with the hokiness of the Andromedan race—reminding me of 1970s-era “Dr. Who”—gives further credence to Ryan’s theory. Maybe Teddy watched those shows growing up. That’s why he imagines the Andromedans that way. Besides, if you take it all at face value, that it all happened the way we’re seeing it, why would the Alien Queen kill off the human race now? We, through Teddy, have finally evolved enough to figure it all out! We’re worthy. Nope. Pop. Gone.

I liked the final images of all the dead around the world as Marlene Dietrich’s version of “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” plays on the soundtrack. But it would’ve felt more poignant if I hadn’t already soured on the film.

Would love to hear other thoughts. I feel like I'm looking for an interpretation of the ending that makes the movie more meaningful, and I'm not finding it at all.

I did walk away wishing to see a movie, or maybe an “Office”-like TV series, called “Fulfillment Center,” about the unfulfilled people working there filling orders for other unfulfilled people trying to fill the holes in their own souls with its various products. A comedy, I imagine.

Michael Schur: I saw a stat that you may have also seen: in 2024, the amount of money bet on sports was higher than the combined amount of money that was spent on, like, music, movies, streaming services—every other form of entertainment. Video games.

Joe Posnanski: Combined.

Schur: Combined, yes! It was $168 billion or something like that. This is a blood-sucking leech situation where these companies are going to happily destroy the host. This parasite will destroy the host if it means that they increase their profits by a certain amount. And the leagues have opened the door to this. They've invited them in with the idea that like, 'No, it's actually good to partner with them and we share the revenue and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.' The leagues now have to go like, 'OK, wait, hang on a second. Hang on. There needs to be rules to this.'“

Posnanski: But will they?

Schur: I don't think so, but that's what they should do.”

-- from The PosCast with Joe Posnanski & Michael Schur: “Sports Have Never Been Better... or More Precarious,” Nov 12, 2025. I tuned in to the episode hoping to hear some talk about the recent and great World Series, and we did get some of that, but most of it was this scourge that Ted Olson, New Jersey and the U.S. Supreme Court have unleashed upon not just the sports world but the world. Also recommend Michael Lewis' podcast on the topic. I find it all revolting, part of the loutish turn in all aspects of American life, and I'm grateful there are a few sane, articulate voices out there to remind us of what we should be. And yes, Michael Schur should be Commissionier of Baseball. Or Michael Lewis, I don't care. One of the Michaels. Anyone but the current guy.