What Trump Said When About COVID
Recent Reviews
The Cagneys
A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935)
Something to Sing About (1937)
Angels with Dirty Faces (1938)
A Lion Is In the Streets (1953)
Man of a Thousand Faces (1957)
Never Steal Anything Small (1959)
Shake Hands With the Devil (1959)
Tuesday November 05, 2024
Vote
The legit media has been one of the great disappointments of the Trump era—even now, 10 years into it, they still haven't figured out a way to cover the guy correctly, and in some ways have actually gotten worse—but Peter Baker's piece in The New York Times last month deserves some praise. Entitled “For Trump, a Lifetime of Scandals Heads Toward a Moment of Judgment,” and subtitled “No major party presidential candidate, much less president, in American history has been accused of wrongdoing so many times,” the piece is exactly that: a tallying up of all the shit the fucker's done over the decades. If you have anyone sitting on the fence in this election, or a favorite relative you can't believe believes in the guy, send it to them. Or just send them paragraphs 5-7 about “the record of scandal stretching across his 78 years,” which includes “so many acts of wrongdoing” that “it requires a scorecard to remember them all”:
His businesses went bankrupt repeatedly and multiple others failed. He was taken to court for stiffing his vendors, stiffing his bankers and even stiffing his own family. He avoided the draft during the Vietnam War and avoided paying any income taxes for years. He was forced to shell out tens of millions of dollars to students who accused him of scamming them, found liable for wide-scale business fraud and had his real estate firm convicted in criminal court of tax crimes.
He has boasted of grabbing women by their private parts, been reported to have cheated on all three of his wives and been accused of sexual misconduct by more than two dozen women, including one whose account was validated by a jury that found him liable for sexual abuse after a civil trial.
He is the only president in American history impeached twice for high crimes and misdemeanors, the only president ever indicted on criminal charges and the only president to be convicted of a felony (34, in fact). He used the authority of his office to punish his adversaries and tried to hold onto power on the basis of a brazen lie.
Which is still only scratching the surface. And yet he's still there, still holding onto power, still transforming the “Grand Old Party” into a club for hucksters and scumbags, opportunists and cowards, with the Federalist Society trying to work levers in the background, and looking increasingly like scumbags and cowards themselves. Tonight, or tomorrow, or some time this week, we'll begin to see how much longer “the Trump era” might last. And how it might end. And what America might look like at the end of it.
Vote.
Saturday November 02, 2024
Things I Learned While Reading 'George Lucas: A Life'
- Lucas' favorite comic book character wasn't Superman or Batman but Scrooge McDuck, “the money-hoarding, globe-trotting uncle of Donald Duck.” (Foreshadow alert)
- He wasn't really a movie-loving kid like Steven Spielberg. “While Lucas recalled seeing a few memorable films either on TV or in the Modesto movie theaters—Forbidden Planet, Metropolis, The Bridge on the River Kwai—for the most part, movies were simply a pleasant diversion.”
- I'd long read that Lucas wanted to remake “Flash Gordon,” which he'd supposedly seen as a kid, and I couldn't understand why. He was born in 1944, serials were dead or dying when he came of age, and no “Flash Gordon” had been made for decades. Answer: “The TV shows that Lucas remembered the most fondly were those 30-minute blocks of local programming in the late afternoon and early evening that broadcasters, looking for content, simply filled with installments of old movie serials. ... 'I especially loved the Flash Gordon serials,' Lucas said.”
- At odds with this? At USC film school, he was a huge fan of foreign and avante-garde filmmaking and into “tone poems” rather than straight storytelling.
- At the same time, Lucas' classmate, future Oscar-winning editor and sound designer Walter Murch, remembers that the USC film school didn't think much of the future of film: “The very first thing our film teacher told us... was, 'Get out of this business now. There's no future in it. There are no jobs for any of you. Don't do this.'”
- Lucas made “American Graffiti” out of spite. His previous film, “THX-1131,” had failed utterly and everyone was telling him to make something that wasn't so cold and impersonal. “Don't be so weird,” Coppola told him. “Why don't you try to write something out of your own life that has warmth and humor?” Lucas responded, as if through clenched teeth: “I'll give them one, just to show that I can do it.”
- While he was struggling to write “Star Wars” (writing was always a chore for him), he saw his wife Marcia driving away with their dog, an enormous Alaskan malamute, sitting in the passenger seat. “Lucas thought the dog, nearly as big as a person, looked like Marcia's copilot,” Jones writes. Yes, that's what led to Chewbacca.
- That malamute inspired an even more famous movie character: His name was Indiana.
- Though he'd cast Harrison Ford in “Graffiti,” Lucas didn't want him for “Star Wars,” but casting director Fred Roos got him into casting sessions by hiring him as a carpenter and then suggesting, “Hey, why don't we get this guy to help them out?”
- Lucas would create casting sessions in groups so he could see which actors had chemistry together. In one, Christopher Walken was Han, Will Seltzer Luke, and Teri Nunn Leia. But Seltzer's Luke was a bit intellectual, while Nunn was still a minor. Plus this group was a bit serious. So he went with the other, more fun trio.
- Lucas didn't want to use Anthony Daniels voice for C-3PO or Frank Oz's voice for Yoda. For the former he envisioned a Brooklynesque used-car salesman(!), and for the latter, who knows? But he realized what he had was better than what he envisioned and kept it in.
- One of LucasFilm's first hires was a computer scientist named Ed Catmull. Lucas wanted him developing tools to make digital movies but Catmull was intrigued with computer animation—so he and team did it on the sly. What they worked on eventually became a company: Pixar.
- Lucas never saw the value in Pixar and sold it in the mid-1980s for $5-10 million. It was eventually worth billions. And counting.
- I never delved into the “Han shot first” discussion, which I assumed was just a contentious matter within the first “Star Wars” movie. Not quite. In its 20th anniversary update, along with cluttering the screen with gimcrackery, Lucas manipulated what he'd originally filmed in the barroom showdown between Han Solo and Greedo so Greedo shoots first rather than (as in the '77 original) Han shooting first. Lucas wanted his famous characters nice now, while fans felt it ruined Han's arc—from a ruthless solipsist to a semi-true believer. The fans are right. Again.
I still think you can make a good movie about the relationship between Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas. The larger-than-life Coppola takes the young, quiet man under his wing, and Lucas, with “THX,” all but sinks Coppola's production company, and then with “Star Wars,” revolutionizes the industry away from the very types of films that Coppola was made to make. It's Frankenstein.
The book by Brian Jay Jones is recommended.
Thursday October 31, 2024
Dodgers Score 5 in 5th to Win Series in 5
What's that sound? That's the news being spread, Yankees fans.
Five. That seems to be the magic number.
The Dodgers were down 5-0 in the fifth, then scored 5 to tie it, then took the World Series in five games.
That top of the 5th deserves looking at. I'm sure the Yankees and their fans will be staring into its abyss for a long time to come.
Remember, at that point, the Dodgers didn't have a hit. Two walks (Lux in the 3rd, Betts in the 4th) were their only baserunners. No one got to third.
Then Kike Hernandez did the Kike Hernandez thing by starting the Dodgers off—with a single. NLCS MVP Tommy Edman followed with an easy fly ball to center that Aaron Judge somehow dropped, doink, Charlie Brown fashion, so now there were runners on 1st and 2nd with nobody out. Will Smith followed with a slow roller to the right of shortstop Anthony Volpe, who opted to go to third for the force. Not a bad move. But Kike was fast and Volpe hurried a low throw that newbie hot-corner man Jazz Chisholm Jr. couldn't dig out. Bases juiced.
And even then the Yankees nearly escaped unscathed. Gerritt Cole, probably the best starter on either team in this Series, apparently decided he couldn't trust his fielders anymore and did it on his own, striking out No. 9 hitter Gavin Lux and leadoff hitter Shohei Ohtani—who hasn't been himself since he dislocated his shoulder in Game 2. Then he got Mookie Betts, all-world Mookie, to hit a slow roller to first ... and Cole didn't cover the bag. Replays show he began to jog over but stopped. Did he think Anthony Rizzo had it? Well, he didn't. Betts beat him to the bag and it wasn't a contest. If Cole had made the play, it would still be 5-0 heading into the bottom of the fifth. Instead, it was 5-1, and all-world Freddie Freeman followed with a single to center to plate two; and then Teoscar Hernandez, the former Mariner who hit .350 for the Series, followed with a double in the left-center gap that a speedier centerfielder might've nabbed. And suddenly the game was tied.
A triptych of a tripup: Yankees pointing fingers.
Confession: I didn't watch any of this. I was doing work-work. I could've watched it—in fact, my wife was watching it in the next room—but I was suddenly stricken with too much anxiety. Why? Because the Yankees might win their 28th World Series? Nah. If the Yankees had won the Series I wouldn't have been happy but I would've just shrugged. Oh well, 28, what are you gonna do? No, it was the pathway they were taking, and it was a pathway through something that meant more to me than I realized: the 2004 Boston Red Sox, the only major sports team to ever come back from a three games to none deficit in a best-of-7 series to win it all. The Red Sox, of course, did it against the Yankees—the team that bought their best player, Babe Ruth, in 1919 and then became the Yankees. Back then, the Red Sox were the best team in baseball, winners of five World Series titles when the Yankees hadn't even been. How about them apples? After the trade, the Yankees would become the most successful franchise in sports history while the Red Sox wouldn't win another World Series for the rest of the century. Indeed, the next time the one-time super-successful BoSox won the pennant, 1946, the Yankees already had 14 pennants to their name and 10 championships. By the time the BoSox next won a pennant, 1967, the Yankees had 29 pennants and 20 championships. Excruciating. That's the Curse of the Bambino right there.
That's what was so brilliant, so beautiful, about the 2004 ALCS. It was kismet. It was payback. It was history closing the loop in the most exquisite fashion possible. And it began with the smallest of things: a stolen base in the bottom of the 9th by a bench player they'd traded for midseason: Dave Roberts. Who was now the Dodgers manager.
That was what was causing the anxiety. I'd seen a stat flashed on the screen during Game 4, with the Yankees down three games to none: All the other twentysomething times the World Series began with one team taking the first three games, it was usually a sweep, a handful of times it went to five games, but no team had ever taken it to six. The Yankees would be doing this if they won Game 5. And could they go further? Could they reopen the loop, and the wound, that history had so beautifully and exquisitely closed? By beating the team managed by the guy who had stolen that base? God, no. Please, no. So I couldn't even bear to watch it. I did sneak peeks at the score via ESPN.com and it wasn't good: 2-0, 3-0, 5-0. And then that fifth. But I couldn't even watch it then because I didn't want to screw it up. Baseball fans will understand. If something is working, you need to stick with it, even if it has nothing to do with you, even if you're the most peripheral thing within its universe. So I stayed away. I got a lot of work done. Until my wife opened the door to my office and told me, “You can come out now.” Ya putz.
I would've loved a sweep. The Yankees haven't been swept in the Series since the Reds did it in '76. Before then, Koufax in '63, the year of my birth. Losing in five, though, is actually rarer for them. The Yankees are now 27-14 in World Serieses and this is how they lost the 14:
- In eight games: 1921 (when it was best of nine)
- In seven games: 1926, 1955, 1957, 1960, 1964, 2001
- In six games: 1981, 2003
- In five games: 1942, 2024
- In four games: 1922*, 1963, 1976
* That one in 1922 was actually five games, but one ended in a tie and I don't even know how to count that. Because as the man said, “There's no tying in baseball.”**
** The man in question is my friend Mike Busick, Mr. B, channeling Tom Hanks after that All-Star Game that ended in a tie.
I shouldn't overlook that 8th inning. The Dodgers came back in the 5th, fell back again in the 6th, and went ahead in the 8th on solid baseball. Again, Kike started them off with a sharp single. Then Edman with the seeing-eye kind that Volpe smothered but couldn't make a play on. Then a walk. Pitching change. Luke Weaver on no day's rest. Bottom of the order. But Gavin Lux hit one to center, and not only did Kike score from third but Edman advanced to third—a key play. Ohtani, with the chance again, wound up on first because of catcher's interference. So it was Mookie who hit the deep sac fly to center to put the Dodgers on top. And that's where they stayed. And that's where it ended.
Interesting that the Dodgers won Game 5 without a homer. Before then, they'd lived and died (mostly lived) on the homer. Of the 18 runs they'd scored in the first four games, 13 had come on the long ball. This game, none. Just a lot of two-out thunder.
Freddie Freeman was the much-deserved, no-brainer MVP of the Series. He hit .300 and slugged 1.000. He hit homers in each of the first four games, including that walkoff Grand Slam to end Game 1, which set the tone for what followed. He drove in 12 runs, which ties the Series record setting by Bobby Richardson in 1960. Except Richardson did it in seven games. I love what Freddie said when they brought all those ribbies during the postgame ceremonies: Well, these guys kept getting on base.
Both Teoscar and Tommy Edman had .900+ OPSes. Shohei, no: 2-19, a single and a double. Over on the Yankees ledger, I'm glad Aaron Judge finally broke through with a 2-run homer. In the end, despite his struggles, he had the second-best OPS on the team, .832, just ahead of Giancarlo Stanton's .832. Eight of the nine Yankee regulars hit World Series homers (Stanton hit 2). The one missing? Rizzo.
The Dodgers still needed great relief work from Blake Treinen, who came in during the 6th and stuck around until the end of the 8th. Dodgers starter Jack Flaherty lasted 1.3 innings, threw 35 pitches and gave up 4 runs. Treinen lasted 2.3 innings, threw a Jackie Robinsonesque 42 pitches, and gave up zero runs. Joe Posnanski mentions that the last time Treinen threw more than 2 innings? 2018. Then, in the 9th, he handed off to starter Walker Buehler, who had never closed a game during his MLB career, and who was facing the bottom of the Yankees order: five pitches to Volpe, who grounded to third; seven pitches to Austin Wells, who struck out; and four pitches to Alex Verdugo, who struck out to end the ninth, the game, the Series and the season. And Walker Buehler spread his arms wide, “Gladiator”-like, as if to say, “Are you not amused?”
I am. Very. Thank you, Dodgers.
Buehler, amused.
Wednesday October 30, 2024
One With My Genome
“Only 2 percent of the human genome codes for proteins, which is to say only 2 percent does anything demonstrably and unequivocally practical.”
-- Bill Bryson, “The Body: A Guide for Occupants,” which does for biology what he did for other sciences in “A History of Nearly Everything.” Most of it, of course, is going over my head or is tough to grasp: “Unpacked, you are positively enormous. Your lungs, smoothed out, would cover a tennis court, and the airways within them would stretch nearly from coast to coast. The length of all your blood vessels would take you two and a half times around Earth.” And it gets worse. Or we get bigger. Stuff inside us could go to the moon and back. Here's another line, by the way, that I am one with, that helps explain me to me: “What is perhaps most remarkable is that nothing is in charge. Each component of the cell responds to signals from other components, all of them bumping and jostling like so many bumper cars...” Explains all of humanity, really.
Monday October 28, 2024
Movie Review: Bell, Book and Candle (1958)
WARNING: SPOILERS
The movie begins with Gillian Holroyd (Kim Novak) sitting bored in her shop, and I quickly found myself bored by the film. Because of that? Is watching a bored person boring? I’m trying to think of a fascinating movie that focuses on a bored person and coming up blank.
“Bell, Book and Candle” seems like a great idea for a film. Kim Novak plays a witch who seduces “Vertigo” pal Jimmy Stewart on the day he'll get married. My local theater, SIFF Egyptian, played it on a recent Sunday as part of its Halloween program. I didn’t know much about it so decided to check it out. “Maybe there’s a reason it’s being resurrected,” I thought. “Maybe there’s something there.”
There isn’t.
Catty
Gillian runs a shop full of African artifacts on the ground floor of a Manhattan apartment building where both her aunt (Elsa Lanchester, Bride of Frankenstein), and publisher Shepherd Henderson (Stewart) live. She doesn’t have many customers but she doesn’t seem to mind. She just minds the boredom. These are the first lines of the film. It’s Gillian talking to Pyewacket, her Siamese cat:
What's the matter with me? Why do I feel this way? It’s such a rut. The same old thing day after day. Same old people. I know I’m feeling sorry for myself but it’s true. Why don't you give me something for Christmas, Pye? … What would I like? … I'd like to do something different. I’d like to meet someone different.
She decides that Shepherd is that someone. Coincidentally, her aunt already has a hand in. She shows up at his place uninvited, and after he tells her to leave she casts a spell on his telephone, requiring him to borrow Gillian’s phone to call the phone company.
Stewart’s Shepherd is mostly an innocent in this movie, but you gotta wonder: Did he knock on Gillian’s door because Kim Novak was on the other side? Sly dog.
Plus he keeps showing up. It’s Christmas Eve, and though Shepherd is meeting his bride-to-be, Merle Kittridge (Janice Rule), Gillian offhandedly mentions a pub she and her fam will be at, and guess what? Shepherd shows up! With Merle! Then it gets catty. In college, Gillian and Merle didn’t like each other, so Gillian cast a spell to make Merle … what was it … frightened? Of thunder and lightning? In the present day, Gillian casts a spell to make Shepherd fall in love with her.
Could anything be more perfectly Hollywood patriarchal than that? Kim Novak having to cast a spell to make a 50-year-old man fall for her?
It works, of course. He breaks it off with What’s-Her-Name and sets to canoodling with Gillian. Oh, right. She also casts a spell to send a big-name author, Sidney Redlitch (Ernie Kovacs), to Shepherd, and thank god. Kovacs is a breath of fresh air in this thing. Redlitch is interested in the supernatural but mostly interested in his next drink. At one point they offer him bourbon or whiskey, he downs whatever they give him and asks what it was. Told whiskey, he requests the bourbon. Everything Kovacs does works in a way that the rest of the film does not. Kovacs is off-kilter and perfect.
For his next book, Redlitch is sussing out—coincidence alert!—witches in New York, and guess who helps? Gillian’s bongo-playing warlock brother Nicky (Jack Lemmon). For some reason, he’s willing to give up the ghost, and admit everything, to get a few bucks. Apparently blinking money or gold into existence isn’t a thing for these witches.
The bongo-playing makes me wonder, though, if the whole witches enclave idea didn't spring from, I don’t know, someone checking out Beatniks or homosexuals or some other in Greenwich Village. Fifties culture was staid and bland but there were subterranean movements that would soon shift everything. Was this movie a bland harbinger of all that?
Admittedly, it most just feels like 1950s floof, and the last half is pretty convoluted. Gillian confesses about the spell, Shep doesn’t believe her. Then he does believe her and breaks up with her, and goes to another witch to have her spell removed, but he can’t convince Merle about the spell so she'll take him back. Meanwhile, Gillian is falling apart, particularly since Pyewacket keeps running away from her. Because she’s no longer a witch. You lose your witchiness, apparently, if you fall in love, which she’s done with Shep, and the proof is when she cries. Witches can’t cry. When Shep realizes this, he takes her in his arms and kisses her. Happy ending.
Unmentioned is the fact that she cries not when Shep leaves her but when Pyewacket does. That’s the true love story.
Broomsticks
Given the talent in the room, the thing’s a slog. It had some success. It got Novak (and Pyewacket) on the cover of Life magazine, and it (along with “I Married a Witch”) inspired the successful 1960s TV sitcom “Bewitched." But it wasn’t the success they thought it would be. It certainly didn’t last—the screening at SIFF notwithstanding.
Apparently Stewart thought he was awkward in the lead, was tired of romancing women half his age, and stopped taking romantic lead roles thereafter. His next, “Anatomy of a Murder,” was actually perfect for him.
The title is a reference to exorcising a witch—“ring the bell, close the book, quench the candle”—but it’s a bad title. I keep wanting to go “Bedknobs and Broomsticks.” Which, come to think of it, is a better title. For this. Even if we don't see bedknobs.
Sunday October 27, 2024
What to Call the Fourth Indiana Jones Movie?
Per Brian Jay Jones' “George Lucas: A Life,” these were some of the options they considered over the years, particularly as Lucas and Steven Spielberg debated whether there should be aliens in the thing (Spielberg was against it, initially), and if so, how much?
- Indiana Jones and the Saucermen from Mars
- Indiana Jones and the City of the Gods
- Indiana Jones and the Atomic Ants
- Indiana Jones and the Destroyer of Worlds
- Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls
Eventually they singularized the last one and went with that. Shame. The first and third options have a fun 1950s vibe to them. All that schlock Lucas and Spielberg grew up on, then regurgitated back to the masses with A-production values.
Saturday October 26, 2024
Freddie 'Shazam!' Freeman Hits the First Walkoff Grand Slam in World Series History
I paused before celebrating, before shouting with joy, because last night for some reason I was misjudging a lot of fly balls. I'm usually better at that. I usually know, before anyone else at Mariners Park, for example, when it's gone, and, more importantly, when it's not. Crack of the bat, people around me are all “Ooohhh!” and I'm like, “Nah, can of corn.” And it's a can of corn. Tougher when I'm sitting in a different seat than my usual, and last night I wasn't sitting in my usual TV-watching seat, so maybe it was that. I was mostly misjudging Dodgers' batters so maybe it was pure wish fulfillment, too. Dodgers also hit more to the warning track than the Yankees did. Except ... Was it Kike Hernandez's fly out to left in the ninth? Again, it seemed a mighty wallop off the bat but it barely went anywhere. A pop out. Mid-range. Maybe he broke his bat. Maybe I'm just getting to that age.
So that's why I paused even though all signs pointed to YES. But I wanted to see it go out first. And then I wanted to see it go out again. And then I wanted to watch it a billion-zillion times.
In a game in which no one could break through—the Yankees kept stranding runners while the Dodgers kept hitting it to the warning track—the Yankees, the bad guys, took a lead in the top of the tenth on a line single by Jazz Chisholm Jr. (who, if he's not taunted as “Jism” in enemy ballparks, someone's missing a beat), and Jazz promptly stole second, and then third, and then scored when Dodgers shortstop and suprise NLCS MVP Tommy Edman dove for a grounder but couldn't get it out of his glove in time to start the double play to nullify the run. 3-2, Yanks.
Bottom 10, and it was 7-8-9 hitters up, and I'm sure everyone was thinking what I was thinking: Someone has to get on so Shohei can come up. And someone did get on: With one out, Gavin Lux walked. Which brought up Edman. And I'm sure everyone was thinking what I was thinking: Don't ground into a double play, don't ground into a double play, don't ground into a double play. And he nearly did! Except defense replacement at 2B Oswaldo Cabrera overdove for the ball and everyone was safe. Now it was one out, two men on, and the top of the Dodgers lineup due up, Ohtani, Mookie, Freddie, maybe the three best players at the top of any lineup in baseball history. First and third were lefties. And Yankees manager Aaron Boone had two lefties in the bullpen: Tim Hill, a superskinny sidewinder with a wisp of a moustache, who looks more accountant than baseball player—he looks less like a Yankee than any Yankee I've ever seen—and Nestor Cortes, a starter who went 9-10 this season with a 3.77 ERA and a solid 162-39 strikeout-walk ratio, but who hadn't pitched, a TV graphic told us, since Sept. 18 (against Seattle!) because of a flexor strain in his elbow. But postgame Boone said he thought Cortes was looking good. He liked that matchup better, he said. And that's the matchup he got.
Cortes threw only two pitches.
The first, Shohei popped up into foul territory in left field, and Alex Verdugo made a great catch, tumbling into the seats, and recalling that Jeter catch from 20 years ago. Apparently it wasn't a great pitch. Apparently it's the type of pitch Shohei usually eats for breakfast. Not this time. And a collective groan was heard throughout this great land.
Then the Yanks did the automatic-walk thing to Mookie Betts to get to the other lefty, Freddie Freeman, who'd injured his ankle in late September, but kept playing postseason baseball on it, limping around the bases. He'd hit a triple earlier in the game but he obviously wasn't 100%. And Mookie had been smashing the ball.
Even so, we were questioning that intentional walk. “Isn't he putting the winning run in scoring position?” I said to Jeff and Patricia. Jeff agreed. He didn't think much of the strategy. At this point, I was hoping for a single.
Earlier in the game, RE: Freddie, my friend Tim texted, “It just occurred to me how appropriate it is that Freeman has a bum leg,” and then included a link to Freddy Freeman, the “crippled newsboy,” as they used to say, who with one magic word could turn himself into one of the mightiest of mortal beings: Captain Marvel Jr.!
Fifteen seconds after Cortes threw his second pitch, Tim texted me that magic word: SHAZAM!
Fifteen seconds after that, I thought of the obvious precedent: hobbled Dodger comes to the plate in the final inning of Game 1 of the World Series, two outs, one run behind, and hits the walkoff homerun. It's Kirk Gibson all over again. Not quite, of course. Gibson was so hobbled he couldn't play, he was pinch-hitting, and Freeman wasn't facing the best closer in the game, and Gibson had only one man on. The bases were juiced for Freddie; Cortes couldn't walk him. But I doubt he wanted that first pitch to be a midrange fastball middle in. In his stroll toward first, Freddie raised his bat high in the air, as if saluting the game, as if offering a benediction, and then let it roll off his hand and drop to the ground, its mighty work done.
The Dodgers mighty work isn't done yet. They have three games to get to their eighth title and prevent the Yankees from getting to their 28th. But this was a helluva opening act.
Friday October 25, 2024
'Slider, Low and Away': Michael Schur Gives Pitching Advice Before Game 1 of the 2024 World Series
MICHAEL: Before we wrap this up here, can I just put something out into the universe—like the secret? I just want to put something out into the universe. I just want to remind anyone who might be listening who works in the Dodgers organization of a truth about the universe, okay? Giancarlo Stanton has never once in his entire career made contact with a slider. If you throw Giancarlo Stanton a fastball, he will hit it 520 feet. So in my opinion, in my humble opinion, it would be a better idea to throw Giancarlo Stanton sliders. It would be more optimal for the Dodgers to throw him sliders low and away than it would be to throw him fastballs belt high on the inner half.
JOE: What would you think about throwing two sliders low and away that he swings at and misses and then throw three balls out of the zone and then throw a fastball? How would that work?
MICHAEL: I was with you until you got to the point where you throw him the fastball. Here's the way I would suggest you approach Giancarlo Stanton. I would throw him a slider low and away.
JOE: Yep.
MICHAEL: Then on the next pitch, I would throw him a slider low and away.
JOE: OK, good.
MICHAEL: And then as a change up, as a way to like throw him off balance ... I would throw him a slider low and away.
JOE: And then what would you do if he just said, “No, I'm not swinging.”
MICHAEL: It's a great question. I would throw him a slider low and away.
JOE: OK.
MICHAEL: Followed by two sliders low and away.
JOE: Yes.
MICHAEL: And then a slider low and away. And let me say one other thing. At some point, Dodgers pitchers, you may be thinking to yourself—because this is how you were trained as a pitcher—“I need to,” and I quote, “establish the fastball,” end quote. And what I would say to you, Dodger pitchers, “No, you don't.”
JOE: Right.
MICHAEL: You don't. You do not need to establish anything. What you need to do is throw a slider that starts at the knees on the outer half and breaks out of the zone. And if it doesn't work, you should do it 50 more times.
-- Michael Schur and Joe Posnanski, on the latest Poscast, with midseason vaudeville comic timing. It's an exchange that made me very, very happy.
Friday October 25, 2024
The World Series Matchup Everyone But Michael Schur and I Wanted
I guess I'll have to take down my sign:
THE WORLD SERIES: YANKEE-FREE SINCE 2009
They were so close to breaking their own record, too! No one's talking about that. Since they acquired Babe Ruth in 1920 and made the World Series for the first time in 1921, and then became the most successful, insufferable and loathed team on the planet, the New York Yankees have had the following gaps in terms of pennants:
- 2 seasons (1924-25)
- 3 seasons (1929-31)
- 3 seasons (1933-35)
- 1 season (1940)
- 3 seasons (1944-46)
- 1 season (1948)
- 1 season (1954)
- 1 season (1959)
- 11 seasons (1965-1975)
- 2 seasons (1979-80)
- 14 seasons (1982-1995)
- 1 season (1997)
- 1 season (2002)
- 5 seasons (2004-2008)
- 14 seasons (2010-2023)
Another season and they would've broken their own post-Babe Ruth record for futility!
Although ... maybe they did? Shouldn't the 1982-95 dearth eliminate '94 since no World Series was played? In which case, that era went pennantless for 13 seasons, and the Hal Steinbrenner group did 14. We have a new WEINER! And it's pinstriped!
This is the match-up the networks wanted, and some fans wanted, but it's not what I or Michael Schur wanted. The Yankees won their 41st pennant, the Dodgers their 22nd—and the Dodgers are second in all of Major League Baseball. That's how much the Yankees are ahead of everyone.
Actually this is how much the Yankees are ahead of everyone. The Dodgers have a chance to win their eighth World Series title, which would tie them with the Giants for fifth all-time, behind: the Red Sox and A's (nine each), the Cardinals (11), and the Yankees ... who have 27. Twenty-seven. Nearly three times as many as the second-place team. Rooting for them is like rooting for Jeff Bezos to get a tax cut.
Anyway, I'll be rooting for Shohei and the LA Dodgers, and hoping that my new sign, “THE WORLD SERIES: YANKEE-FREE SINCE 2024,” will have a long, long, long life.
Saturday October 19, 2024
John Amos (1939-2024)
John Amos (with Esther Rolle) in “Good Times”: the very definition of a man.
When I was a kid in the 1970s, John Amos seemed the very definition of a man to me. He was forceful and joyous, stern and affable. He put his best face on, and fought as best he could, and usually it wasn't enough—but he was still strong. If you'd asked me what a man was, I would've said that guy: James Evans, Sr., Gordie the weatherman, Kunta Kinte.
I guess I saw him on “Mary Tyler Moore” first, but he made the bigger impression on “Good Times,” and the show was never the same after he left. For some reason, I thought he'd left it, but I guess it was the opposite. The show couldn't sanction his public criticisms of its most popular character, his son, J.J. “Dy-no-MITE” Evans (Jimmie Walker), and let him go. History has since backed up Amos on the matter—though, in a perfect world, where groups controlled their own narrative, and there was much representation rather than a few characters against a sea of white, you might argue that J.J. wasn't dissimilar from what Barney Fife was doing on “Andy Griffith.” But it wasn't a perfect world.
After the dismissal, Amos played one of the most central roles in one of the most watched and impactful miniseries of all time: “Roots.” There was that strength again, to keep running, to be free, only to have his foot chopped off. More heartbreaking, for me, was a later scene. He and another slave, Bell (Madge Sinclair), have a daughter, and he suggests they name her Kizzy, which means “Stay put” in his language. That makes Bell happy because she's tired of Kunta running. But once Kizzy is an adult, now played by Leslie Uggams, a series of unfortunate circumstances (being taught to write by a stupid white girl, then using those skills to help her boyfriend escape, and then him giving her up), all of that lead to her being sold to a man who rapes her. I remember her being tied up in the bag of a wagon that's being pulled away from her crying mother and distraught father, and the father, after she's gone, does something with the dirt, an old African ritual so she will return to them. The wife looks at him with contempt and says:
“I thought her name was supposed to do that!”
The look of utter defeat on the man after that. Was it the last we ever saw of Kunta Kinte in the miniseries? I think it was. That awful moment. (Apologies if I misremembered anything. It's been nearly 50 years.)
It's odd that an actor who will be in your field of vision constantly and then, though they keep working, not at all. Amos appeared in stuff I knew about—“Love Boat,” “The A-Team,” “Trapper John, M.D.,” “Hunter”—but those weren't shows I watched. To be honest, they seemed a step down from MTM and Norman Lear productions. Did he get a bad rep from the J.J. complaints? And relegated here. I don't think I saw Amos in anything until “Coming to America” 10 years later, when he played the overly ambitious restauranteur Cleo McDowell. Then he was in “Die Hard 2” ... as a villain! That was a shocker. James Evans Sr.—the bad guy? And then maybe I saw him on “West Wing” 10 years after that? We just kept missing each other. But during my formative years, John Amos was formative. He meant something.
Friday October 18, 2024
One Strike Away: It's Christmas in October in Cleveland
Bottom of the 9th, 2 runs down, 2 outs, nobody on, 0-2 count. In a best-of-7 series where you're already down two games to none. Against a team you never beat. That was Cleveland last night.
Not enough has been made of the pain the New York Yankees have caused the Cleveland Naps/Indians/Guardians through the years. Cleveland was the first American League team to integrate, second only to the Brooklyn Dodgers, promoting Larry Doby in July 1947 and continuing with others throughout the late '40s and early '50s. The Dodgers, buoyed by such Negro League greats, became perennial pennant winners in the NL during this time but that didn't happen with the Indians. Why? The Yankees. Yes, the Indians won the World Series in 1948, only their second ever, and a third pennant in 1954, winning 111 games during the regular season but losing to the Willie Mays-led New York Giants in the World Series. Otherwise? They kept finishing second. They finished second in 1951, 1952, 1953, 1955 and 1956—all to the Yankees. They could've been a dynasty. But for the Yankees. The racist Yankees.
So instead they became a symbol for such ineptitude that Hollywood had to make a movie, “Major League” in 1989, about how they beat the Yankees and won the pennant. (Shades of Douglass Wallop!) Because after '54? They didn't win the pennant for another 40 years. And in the division era they didn't come close, never finishing higher than fourth in their division between 1969 and 1993.
Ah, but then the mid-90s! Great team! They had talent everywhere: Belle, Lofton, Thome, MannyBManny, Hershiser, Omar, Baerga. They looked to be a dynasty. Instead, the Jeter-led Yankees became the dynasty. The Indians went to the Series twice and lost both times. The Yankees went to the Series four times (1996, 1998-2000) and won every time.
I could go on. George Steinbrenner came to embody the Yankees but where was he from? Cleveland. Superman came to embody a New York-like Metropolis but where was he created? Cleveland. The only player killed in a Major League baseball game was Cleveland Indians shortstop Ray Chapman, who was hit in the head by a fastball in the helmet-less days of 1920. Who threw the pitch? Joe Mays. A pitcher for the New York Yankees.
In 2017, the year after losing to the Cubs in the World Series, Cleveland got knocked out in the Division Series, 3 games to 2, by the Yankees. In the 2020 Wild Card Series? Lost 2-0 to the Yankees. In the 2022 Division Series? 3-2 to the Yankees.
Last night seemed more of the same. They were finally taking a lead into the late innings, and had the best closer in the world, Emmanuel Clase, at the ready. And with two outs in the top of the eighth, Hunter Gaddis walked Juan Soto on four pitches and so Clase was called for and got two quick strikes on Aaron Judge, but who, on the fourth pitch, hit a line shot to the opposite field. Anyone else hits that, it's an out, or a double at best. Judge is so strong it went over the wall. Tie game. And while Cleveland fans were probing this new bruise, Giancarlo Stanton gave them another one, hitting a homer to center to take the lead.
The Yanks added another in the top of the 9th, and had their new all-world closer, onetime Mariner Luke Weaver, at the ready. Jose Ramirez got on via an error but was erased in a double play. Which brought up Lane Thomas, the epitome of a journeyman. He'd been drafted in the fifth round of the 2014 draft by the Toronto Blue Jays, who, after several years in the minors, traded him to the St. Louis Cardinals for (get this) “international bonus slot money.” I didn't even know that was a thing. In three years barely playing with the Cards, he was a .100/.200/.300 player before being traded to the Washington Nationals, where, for four years playing more regularly, he was a .200/.300/.400 guy. Mid-season he wound up in Cleveland, where he was so-so. He's also the guy who hit the grand slam off of Tarik Skubal to send Cleveland here, to the ALCS, to face the Yankees yet again. But he worked the count. Down 0-2, he didn't bite, and got it back to 3-2. And then he hit a double off the top of the wall in left-center. Life!
Jhonkensky Noel? Called Big Christmas by his teammates. Another midseason player, this one a call-up. DR, 23 years old, apparently signed by Cleveland in .... 2017? When he was ... 16??? Is that legal? Big strong kid, built like a tank, but with a tendency to strike out. Not even 200 plate appearances for the season and 63 Ks. But 13 homers. Against Detroit in the ALDS he got some playing time but went 0-15. He started Game 1 of the ALCS in right field, went 1-2, but was replaced by a pinch-hitter in the seventh. He didn't play in Game 2. This time, he was the pinch-hitter, and on the second pitch sent one screaming into the chilly Cleveland night 404 feet away. And Cleveland erupted. And his bat flip! It wasn't the showy kind. He didn't hold onto it, linger over it. The opposite. He swung ferociously, and then, as if on a rubber band, snapped it back to dismiss it. He's saying This is over. It's a thing of beauty.
So now it's a tie game. Setting up the bottom of the 10th. I was almost hoping for a bloop single, to be honest. One of the Naylor brothers, Bo, led off and singled, was sacrificed to second, and would've been thrown out after a come-backer to one-time Yankees closer Clay Holmes, but Holmes opted for the certain out at first. If David Fry had singled, all of New York would've wanted Holmes' head. I could imagine the hand-wringing, the Daily News and Post headlines calling for Holmes' head. Instead, Fry sent it into the Cleveland night as well. Who is he? Not even a journeyman. He's 29 next month and this is just his second MLB season, both with Cleveland. He did well, .800 OPS, and even became an All-Star. And now this. He'll always have this. We'll always have this.
I'm not holding my breath. Momentum, as Earl Weaver famously said, is the next day's starting pitcher, and Cleveland is throwing out Gavin Williams, a 25-year-old who went 3-10 this season with an ERA near 5.00. He's another midseason guy who strikes out nearly one an inning. We'll see. Either way, it's fun now. There's life. All we want is life. And for Yankee fans to suffer crushing defeats for 100 years.
Thursday October 17, 2024
Movie Review: Nightmare (1956)
WARNING: SPOILERS
The movie poster kind of gives away the goods, doesn’t it? Not that there’s much good in them.
At the outset, Stan (Kevin McCarthy), a big-band clarinetist, is having a nightmare. He’s in a small, mirrored room, where a man is attempting to open a safe with a blowtorch, while a beautiful blonde (Marian Carr), first seen as a floating head, stands nearby. Then the man tries to choke Stan. They go round and round, and the blonde hands the man an icepick, except, oops, she hands it to Stan who sticks it in the other guy. Cue Nelson Riddle-like blare of music. The girl flees, Stan hides the body, steps outside and falls, and falls, and falls…
And wakes up. Whew!
Except! What are these odd bruises around his neck? Why the bloodstains on his sleeve? And where did he get this odd-shaped key?
He calls in sick to work (with Billy May and his Orchestra) and wanders the town. “I had to get out of my room,” he tells us via voiceover. “Out into the sunshine. I had to stay out of the shadows.“
A lot of the movie is this kind of voiceover. It gets old fast. One generation’s arty is the next generation’s eyeroll.
Eventually he goes to see his brother-in-law, Rene (Edward G. Robinson), who’s in the garage working on his boat, but during the day is a New Orleans homicide detective. Whereas earlier Stan was confused about whether the murder was in a dream or not, now he’s certain. “It happened, Rene, it happened!” he insists. Rene tells him to take a vacation. “C’mon, kid,” he says. “Let’s wrap ourselves around some chow.”
So Stan investigates on his own. In his dream, he remembers a slow, melancholy tune, a dirge, but he can’t place it, and goes around town playing it before bandmates and famed New Orleans musicians—such as Meade “Lux” Lewis making a cameo. “Sorry, Stan,” Lewis says. “I guess I lose the $64,000.”
But guess who he spots at Meade’s bar? The blonde! They drink rye, she suggests going back to her place, they neck for two seconds, and then he sees the reflection of their reflection in the mirror—his back, her front—things get wavy, and he begs off, learning nothing.
Days go by. More fretting and frustration. Then Rene shows up with his wife, Stan’s sister (Virginia Christine, who played Mrs. Olson in Folgers commercials for decades), and Stan’s songstress girlfriend Gina (Connie Russell), for a picnic in the country. Stan relents, then suggests Bayou Lafourche, but doesn’t know why; and when a thunderstorm sends them scattering, Stan tells them where to drive: over this bridge and toward that mansion. It’s like he’s been there before! Nobody’s home, but Stan finds the spare key ... in the flower pot! Then they go in and make themselves at home—as one does.
For some reaason, Rene now believes Stan really did murder someone. “You didn’t have the guts to say, ‘Look, Rene, I went to such-and-such a place and killed a guy!’” he shouts. “You had to cook up a dream!” As they argue in the kitchen, guess who walks in? Deputy Torrence (Rhys Williams), who’s been watching the place, the Belknap mansion, because, yes, a double homicide was committed there. The more they look into it, the more all signs point to Stan. And when Rene drops him back at his place, this is his parting advice: “Run out. I’m giving you that one last chance. When they catch up with you, I want you to meet your finish somewhere else, not here.” Geez, thanks, bro-in-law.
After a suicide attempt that Rene foils, Rene finally asks the question he should’ve asked back at the garage: “Tell me everything that happened that night.” The key to it all? His kooky neighbor, Britten, at the Hotel New Orleans, who foists cough drops and daiquiris on him, and who that night showed up with a candle to say his lights were out, then retreated, telling Stan over and over: “You’re tired… you’re tired.”
Yes, two-thirds of the way through we finally get to the hypnosis that the movie poster spills at the outset.
Nightmare, I did
Britten, Rene figures out, is actually Mr. Belknap (Gage Clarke), and he hypnotized the notoriously suggestive Stan into … I guess showing up at the Belknap place and standing around until someone tried to choke him? And hopefully the girl would hand him an icepick by mistake? Seriously, what was Belknap’s plan? And who did he want killed—safecracker Bob Clune (Sol Gorss) or his own wife, whom we never see, and who is run over by a car even though Stan can’t drive? Or was the blonde his wife? And the pickup at Meade’s bar was in fact a case of mistaken identity? Which makes you wonder why she couldn’t keep her hands off Stan. Was she a prostitute? No offense, Kevin.
As for the dirge no one recognizes? That’s a familiar tune played at a slower speed. So did Belknap play it at a slower speed to aid with the hypnosis, or did Stan hear it at a slower speed because of his hypnotic state? And if Belknap can hypnotize Stan into, whatever, showing up during a safecracking, why doesn’t he hypnotize him into sticking around at the scene of the crime? Or into writing a confession? Think of the work that went into this idiot plot. He stayed at the hotel for a week, priming Stan, and only got what he wanted because the icepick wound up in the wrong hands. And then he has to run over his wife with a car.
Apparently all that’s not enough to exonerate Stan—who, after all, did kill the safecracker. So Rene works with the local cops to record Belknap 1) confessing to the crime, and 2) hypnotizing Stan again (to show the law that it could be done).
“Nightmare” is based on a novella, “And So to Death,” by Cornell Woolrich, who was the source material for dozens of films, most notably Hitchcock’s “Rear Window,” and whose work, someone wrote, tends to be heavy on atmosphere and light on plausibility. Checks out here anyway. The movie was adapted by its director, Maxwell Shane, who did five noir features in 10 years: “Fear in the Night,” “City Across the River,” “The Glass Wall,” “The Naked Street,” and this. This was the end of the line.
I like the location shooting around 1950s New Orleans—including a shot of the vertical neon “Hotel New Orleans” sign with the “s” burned out. I also like one bit of dialogue. After Rene’s “Run out” speech, Stan tries to kill himself by jumping out of his 15th floor window. He’s on the ledge, sweating, fretting, and a crowd gathers. Rene sees, and rushes back in. He tells the elevator operator “15th floor!” A few seconds later, we cut back to them.
Rene (frantic): Can’t you go any faster?
Elevator operator (bored): Got it wide open.
In his memoir, Edward G. Robinson devotes barely a sentence to the film. It was made during the post-HUAC phase of his career, after he’d been accused of disloyalty and made to come hat-in-hand to the likes of Ward Bond so he could keep working. But he’d been relegated to B-pictures, which he did for money and for something to do, hating himself all the while. “Hell on Frisco Bay I did, and it was hell in Beverly Hills,” he writes. “Nightmare, I did, and it was nightmare all around me.”
The car ride to Bayou Lafourche looks like a scene from a failed '50 TV sitcom, “Brother-in-Law Knows Best,” about a New Orleans detective, his coffee-loving wife, her grumpy, twitchy brother, and his big-band-singing girlfriend. Tonight's episode: “Sunday Picnic”!
All previous entries