WARNING: SPOILERS

Imagine DC Comics had the creativity and will in the goofy, moribund 1950s to create epic, two-issue storylines in, say, Action Comics, that cross-pollinated lesser-known superheroes with Superman. Imagine, too, that the cross-pollination was with the future, so we get social media, FOX News-style propaganda, racial and gender progress. Now imagine one of these epic, two-issue storylines involves the machinations of Lex Luthor to: 1) foment a war between two countries, 2) create his own country in its aftermath (Luthorville uber alles), and 3) destroy Superman (natch).

Now imagine you only ever owned the second of that two-issue arc. It was dog-eared, and you read it over and over again, and sure, it summed up that first issue on the first page, but you only ever got to read the second part.

And then somebody made a movie about the second part.

That’s James Gunn’s “Superman.”

From Jesus to Wilt Chamberlain
First, the balls on this guy. Everyone in the world is trying to be cool, and Gunn is like, “Nah, let’s be goofy.” While other directors look toward the moody, rain-drenched and problematic Frank Miller types, he’s like, “Nah, Mort Weisinger and Otto Binder are more my cup of tea.” He ignores Supes’ origin story completely, begins this particular tale in medias res, puts our hero back on his heels for most of the two hours (Superman!), lets the minor-est of characters steal the show, and—most startling—makes Superman’s parents villains.

No, not Jonathan and Martha Kent.

We should acknowledge that for all the tragedy of his origin story, Kal-El/Clark was pretty lucky to have four good parents. Most of us would settle for one. Gunn cuts his luck in half.  And it makes sense! That’s the thing. You’re sending your son, the sole survivor of your race, to a planet populated by the likes of us, wouldn’t you want him to pass on those Kryptonian genes as much as possible? That’s their counsel. Take many mates, son. Procreate. If the metaphor of Marlon Brando’s Jor-El was Jesus (“They only lack the light to show them the way”), the metaphor of Bradley Cooper’s Jor-El is Genghis Khan. Or Wilt Chamberlain.

So yes, I admire the ballsy work James Gunn has done with “Superman.” Here’s my quibble. In doubling down on Superman’s goodness, his innocent nature, does he make him frustrating? And does this upend the movie’s main message about goodness?

A few months ago, a clip from the movie was released of Superman landing like a missile in the Arctic, battered and bloody, and whistling for his dog, Krypto, who shows up only to jump all over his aching master. I loved it but I worried: Should Gunn/Warner Bros. be showing us this scene from the middle of the movie? Isn’t that giving away too much? Turns out, it’s the first scene. And we don’t get flashbacks.

Instead, we get a faster-than-a-speeding-bullet list of factoids, all divisible by three:

• 300 years ago, metahumans arrived on Earth
• 30 years ago, Superman arrived on Earth
• 3 years ago, he revealed himself to the world
• 3 weeks ago, he stopped a war between Jarhanpur and Boravia

Etcetera.

Does everyone call it a war? It’s really an invasion. Boravia, with high-tech weapons from LutherCorp., and under the comic dictatorship of Vasil Ghurkos (Zlatko Buric, the comic Russian oligarch in “Triangle of Sadness”), invades Jarhanpur, and Superman (David Corenswet) puts a stop to it. We get details later during a Q&A with girlfriend Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan), who, yes, already knows his secret identity. Did Superman consult the U.S. president first? Did he talk with Ghurkos? Under whose authority did he stop it? Turns out, no, he didn’t take to the prez, but yes, he did have a talk with Ghurkos. He flew him to the desert and stuck him onto a cactus and told him to never do that again. As for whose authority? “People would’ve died!” he says.

So how did Superman get battered and bloody? That was him losing a fight with the Hammer of Boravia. Except he’s not Boravian, and he’s teamed with the shape-shifting Engineer (Maria Gabriela de Faria), and both are acting under the command of Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult). In fact, the Hammer is Ultraman, and Ultraman is actually (we find out at the 11th hour) a clone of Superman. Kryptonians shed DNA like the rest of us, Luthor scooped up some and created this. Then he treats it like a real-life videogame avatar, shouting codes for punches and count-maneuvers from a command center of tech geeks at LuthorCorp.: A1! F7! J10! It sinks Superman’s battleship.

But Krypto drags the battered, bloody Supes “home,” i.e., to the Fortress of Solitude, which rises out of the Arctic whenever Supes appear, and which is run by robots, particularly “4” (Alan Tudyk), a Jarvis/C3PO-like officiant. There, Supes is repaired while being soothed by an oft-watched message from his Kryptonian parents (Bradley Cooper and Angela Sarafyan), only half of which is playable. The rest is garbled. It takes the Engineer to ungarble it after Luther invades the Fortress. Then they use that ungarbled message—Jor-El and Lara telling their son to create a super-harem and rule the world—mix in some FOX-News style propaganda and legit-media ineptitude, and turn the world against Superman.

How smart is Corenswet’s Superman? Not very. It takes him too long to figure out, “Wait, if they’re using my Kryptonian parents’ message … [pause] … [pause] … they must’ve broken into the Fortress of Solitude!” Right, and where’s Krypto? Gone. Which is when Supes smashes into LuthorCorp., crushes the bones of both of Luthor’s hands, lifts him up by his scrawny neck and semi-torches his balls with his heat vision. Kidding. That’s what I would’ve done, while slowly enunciating. “You-do-not-take-people’s-pets.” Supes just crashes into LuthorCorp. and sweeps aside Luthor’s desk. As for the super-annoying tech geeks, who reminded me of the “OMG, the quarterback is toast!” computer geek of “Die Hard”? I wanted those guys hurt, too.

But they aren’t hurt. Nobody is. Instead, Supes surrenders to the authorities, which is less the U.S. military than a public-private partnership with LuthorCorp. It’s paramilitary, and it includes otherworldly “pocket dimensions” where Luthor has imprisoned both his enemies (ex.: a blogger who wrote bad things about him) and those who might be useful to him in the future. It’s slightly reminiscent of the animal experimentation cages in Gunn’s “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3.” Among the useful is Metamorpho, the Element Man (Anthony Carrigan of HBO’s “Barry”), whose body can be transformed into any element. Kryptonite, for example. That’s what happens here. While Krypto runs himself to death chasing phantom squirrels, Superman is slowly poisoned to death by Metamorpho, who is forced to comply because his baby son is being held at gunpoint by a Luthor minion across the way. Eventually, though, Metamorpho figures the most powerful being who ever lived might be a better partner than Lex, and he turns off the kryptonite and turns on a yellow-sun surrogate.

Oh right, before all this, we’re introduced to a nascent organization of metahumans operating out of the Hall of Justice, who call themselves The Justice Somethingorothers! Yeah, they haven’t figured it out yet. Guy Gardner/Green Lantern (Nathan Fillion) wants it to be the Justice Gang but that’s vetoed by Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced) and Mr. Terrific (Edi Gathegi). It’s the latter who winds up stealing the show. I don’t even get Mr. Terrific’s powers, but his personality is vaguely Vulcan, super smart, and super impatient. It's fun, and Gathegi nails him. His assault on the paramilitary org—after Lois beseeches the Justice Somethingorothers to help Supes—with “5 Years Time” by Noah and the Whale playing on the soundtrack, is when we get the biggest whiff of Gunn’s “Guardians” movies. Fun fun fun.

That’s two-thirds of the movie. The final third requires a pep talk from Pa Kent (Pruitt Taylor Vince) about how Clark/Supes is still who he is, the sum of his beliefs and choices, regardless of his Kryptonian parents; then it’s back in the game. As Supes battles the Engineer and Ultraman, and Green Lantern and Hawkgirl stop yet another Boravian invasion (a kid from Jarhanpur hoists a tattered Superman flag), and Mr. Terrific attempts to counteract Luthor’s unstable pocket dimension from tearing a hole in the fabric of the universe—starting with Metropolis—while all of that is going on, we watch our Daily Planet team blow the lid off Luthor’s scams. Better, it’s with evidence provided by Luthor’s moll, Eve Teschmacher (Sara Samaio), who, this time around, is a selfie-loving influencer with a thing for Jimmy Olsen (Skyler Gisondo of “Licorice Pizza”). I know. Somewhere Marc McClure goes, “Wait, what?”

And when all is settled, Superman relaxes once again in the Fortress of Solitude and soothes himself with a video of his parents. The human ones.

Nicely done. So why did I feel frustrated?

50 years time
First, a confession. Ever since about 2004, I’ve sometimes seen political dimensions in movies that don’t have them. This might be more of that. Here it is anyway:

Superman is the Democratic party.

I know! I’m sorry. I didn’t want to go there. But the frustration I felt with this Superman reminded me of the frustration I feel with the Democratic Party on a daily basis:

1. He’s too nice
2. He doesn’t understand the depth of the power and machinations and evil against him
3. When the opposition besmirches him, he just sits there, as if truth will out

Gunn’s overall message is that not only will truth out, but goodness will out. When Superman finally collars Luthor, he gives a speech about how he, Superman, screws up all the time, he makes mistakes, and that’s when he’s most human. Nice message. Except throughout the film, the population in Metropolis was so willing to believe Luthor’s propaganda that they didn’t seem worth saving to me. Even when the Daily Planet correction is issued, and everyone turns on a dime back in Supes’ favor, it reminded me how susceptible we all are. It made me wonder if Jor-El and Lara didn’t have the right idea all along.

A tyrannical Superman (for an issue) has a long history in the comic books.

This is the fourth cinematic Superman incarnation I’ve seen, all on opening weekend, going back nearly a half-century:

• “Superman: The Movie” (1978): I was 15 and I saw it with my movie-critic Dad at (I believe) the Southtown Theater in South Minneapolis—probably for a Wednesday or Thursday night special screening before its Friday opening. Packed house. Fun.
• “Superman Returns” (2006): I took my superhero-loving colleague Ross to a special late-morning screening at a downtown Minneapolis theater, one of those Block “E” things on Hennepin Ave. I was 43 and, in my spare time, writing film pieces for MSNBC. Out of my research, I wrote “Sex and the Superman” for MSNBC and “Truth, Justice and (Fill in the Blank)” for The New York Times. Packed house.
• “Man of Steel” (2013): First showing opening day, Friday, June 14, at the Cinerama in downtown Seattle, and then I wrote a review for this blog. Packed house. I was 50. I’d posted so much about Supes and his history in the preceding months that friends suggested I write a book. I should have.

Superman may live but none of the above theaters do. Isn’t that sad? The Southtown was razed in the mid-90s, the Block “E” theaters were shuttered in 2012, and while the Cinerama is still in downtown Seattle, thank god, it’s now run by SIFF, thank god, the Seattle International Film Festival. This week, though, it’s not showing James Gunn’s “Superman” so I saw it elsewhere.

• “Superman” (2025): I’d planned on going to one of the downtown theaters late Friday, but I was sick; so I waited a few days and saw the first showing Sunday afternoon at Pacific Science Center’s IMAX Theater. Packed house. Families. Fathers and daughters. It’s the latest I’ve seen a new Superman movie—two days after it opened!—but then I’m 62 and slowing down.

James Gunn’s “Superman” is more than a movie, of course; it’s the first salvo in his attempt to reboot the entire DC Universe so that it’s consistent, monumental and (above all) fun. Not a bad stab. It’s certainly a reminder that Gunn doesn’t need the big guns (Superman, Batman) to make his universe work. Indeed, he seems to do better with the characters no one’s ever heard of.

Final thought. The tagline? “Look up”? I get it now. And James, I wish I could.

Trump and Epstein hung together before Epstein hung separately.

I find it amazingly depressing that the president of the United States reneged on a campaign promise to release the “Epstein List,” which supposedly details the clients of the man charged with international and underage sex-trafficking back in 2019 (and who hung himself in his prison cell, or was killed in his prison cell, that same year); and then aftering hearing a roar of disapproval from his base, this same president, the current U.S. president, by the way, claimed that two past U.S. presidents, a past U.S. secretary of state and presidential nominee, and a former FBI director, among others, created the list in the first place. They faked it.

The reneging isn't the thing that's amazingly depressing, of course. Trump reneges daily, hourly, probably by the minute. What's awful is that it's not more of a story in the legit media. The New York Times, to name one band of idiots, hasn't mentioned it in its news coverage. It's on the Opinions page but not in the news. Because, one assumes, they don't considered it “news.”

Think of that. Again: the current U.S. president, in a flailing post on his own social media site, is accusing past U.S. presidents of manufacturing a document that details sex trafficking. How is that not news?

Add in the fact that this current U.S. president, Donald J. Dumpypants, knew the Epstein in question. They hung together. Before Epstein hung separately.

This is what Trump wrote on Saturday: 

“For years, it's Epstein, over and over again. Why are we giving publicity to Files written by Obama, Crooked Hillary, Comey, Brennan, and the Losers and Criminals of the Biden Administration, who conned the World with the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, 51 'Intelligence' Agents, 'THE LAPTOP FROM HELL,' and more? They created the Epstein Files, just like they created the FAKE Hillary Clinton/Christopher Steele Dossier that they used on me, and now my so-called 'friends' are playing right into their hands. Why didn't these Radical Left Lunatics release the Epstein Files?

”If there was ANYTHING in there that could have hurt the MAGA Movement, why didn't they use it? They haven't even given up on the John F. Kennedy or Martin Luther King, Jr. Files. No matter how much success we have had, securing the Border, deporting Criminals, fixing the Economy, Energy Dominance, a Safer World where Iran will not have Nuclear Weapons, it's never enough for some people. We are about to achieve more in 6 months than any other Administration has achieved in over 100 years, and we have so much more to do. We are saving our Country and, MAKING AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, which will continue to be our complete PRIORITY.“

I love his ”It's never enough for some people“ comment, as if he's slaving on our behalf 24/7 rather than out on the golf course again or hocking perfumes and what have yous. I particularly like that the ”some people" he's annoyed with is his base. 

Yesterday, walking around Capitol Hill, I listened to Michael Lewis on the Cautionary Tales podcast talking about Sam Bankman-Fried (per “Going Infinite”), as well as civil servants in government (“The Fifth Risk,” “Who is Government?”), and it's interesting, with the latter, how he keeps refining his argument. He was already super-articulate on the topic and now he's more super-articulate. Feels worthy of posting on the day after the State Dept., at the behest of Marco Rubio, acting at the behest of Donald Trump, began firing more than 1,000 civil servants—people we need more than ever. Alas.

Here's Lewis:

So I wrote a book about the first Trump administration called The Fifth Risk, where I wandered around the administration, the executive branch, and got essentially an education from the various departments that Trump himself refused to get: how the agriculture department worked, how the energy department worked, what went on inside these places.

The longer I spent there, the more taken I was with the actual characters in government. Whatever the stereotype of the bureaucrat is in the American mind, they violated it. There were these breathtakingly devoted public servants, who were experts in all kinds of arcane fields, who were doing the work that kept the society together... 

I'd find this person who'd done this unbelievable thing, and I'd say, “I want to talk to you about it.” They go, “Well, it wasn't really me. It was the team. You really have to talk to my bosses.” It was very little ego. I guess, what it is: these jobs self-select for people who like doing big important things but don't care much about credit or money. It's hard to believe that such people still exist in American life. Everybody else seems to be looking for fame and fortune. These are sort of like the opposite of reality TV stars. They got interested in a problem. They've worried the problem to death for 30 years. It's had enormous consequences and they don't expect anybody to pay attention.

It's a great podcast episode, worth listening to. The government is not the deep state, nor full of the lazy or corrupt. The opposite. It's the lazy and corrupt, elected by a propagandized mass, who are firing them. This is how countries die.

Dipsit Donald and the art of “I thought we had a deal”

“We're not happy with Putin. I'm not happy with Putin, I can tell you that much right now. He's killing a lot of people, and a lot of them are his soldiers. His soldiers and their soldiers, mostly. And it's now up to 7,000 a week. ... We get a lot of bullshit thrown at us by Putin, if you want to know the truth. He's very nice all the time, but it turns out to be meaningless.”

-- Pres. Donald Trump, 07/08/25, Reuters. No one ever sounded dumber in stating the obvious. If you want to know the truth... Dude, we wanted YOU to know the truth for the last 10 years! Don't know how the scales finally fell from your eyes but I'm glad they did. And yes, Dealmaker Don, just because someone's nice to you doesn't mean they're nice. Some people lie. Some of those people are Russian dictators.

FURTHER READING

• “Did Trump Really Just Break Up With Putin?,” Susan B. Glaser, The New Yorker

I don't know if any actor in the last 30 years could show up on screen and make me go “Uh oh” more than Michael Madsen. There was a vibe, man, and as iconic as he was, I don't think he really took advantage of it.

Didn't even matter who he was playing. He was the good boyfriend in “Thelma & Louise,” the good brother in “Wyatt Earp,” the good soldier (the one who can turn the key) at the beginning of “WarGames.” I never saw “Free Willy” but he plays the dad there, and a good dad, but I'm sure if I'd seen it I'd be like ... Get away from him, kid! Don't you know that's Mr. Blonde? He'll cut your ear off!!!!

Yeah, Madsen will always be known for that. It's such an iconic, horrifying moment that no one ... Oh, for fuck's sake, IMDb:

Shit, he's even third-billed in “Reservoir Dogs”! Where is he in “WarGames”? Zillionth?

Fuck 'em, the rest of us know. We'll never forget. It's not just cutting off the ear, it's the dance beforehand (a little like Trump's schtick, isn't it?); it's how he matter-of-factly toys with the cop, jokes, taunts, talks into the ear he's cut off, while Stealers Wheel's “Stuck in the Middle with You” plays on the transistor radio. Tarantino then takes it to another level but having the camera follow Mr. Blonde outside, to get the gas can from the trunk of the car, and in that moment we lose Stealers Wheel and see it's just an ordinary afternoon in LA, with cars driving by. This horror is happening in the middle of this ordinary fucking day. Can't somebody stop it? But everyone keeps moving. And Mr. Blonde returns to the room, and when we hear Stealers Wheel again it's like Alex DeLarge hearing Beethoven in “A Clockwork Orange” after he's been programmed: nauseating. Fucking brilliant. 

That character, ultimately shot to death by Mr. Orange (Tim Roth), the undercover cop, had a name: Vic Vega. In those days Tarantino was imagining a noirish/pulp fictiony version of the world of J.D. Salinger, who included members of the Glass family in different short stories before he brought them all together in “Zooey” and “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters.” For Tarantino, for example, Vic was supposed to be the brother of “Pulp Fiction”'s Vincent Vega. And the guy he originally wanted to play him? Madsen. But Madsen was busy playing Virgil Earp is Lawrence Kasden's “Wyatt Earp” and couldn't do it. He's called it the biggest mistake of his career since the role went to John Travolta and remade him a star. But here's the thing: Would it have done that for Madsen? Would he have brought what Travolta brought? To be honest, I'm not seeing it. I can't imagine him flirting with or hanging with or doing the twist with Uma Thurma's Mia Wallace in the same goofy, breezy manner. Not seeing it. Sorry, bud. Could be the ear still talking to me. I still haven't gotten over the ear.

He was Virginia's sister. I never knew that until reading the obits. And he was the guy who reprised the role of Mickey Rourke's Boogie from “Diner” for the Barry Levinson-directed TV movie? That makes some sense. Show didn't catch on so he had to play Bump Bailey, the most charmless prima donna ballplayer ever in “The Natural.”

Madsen also went deep into crap. He has 327 acting credits, 17(!) upcoming, and so much of it is straight-to-video or straight-to-the-garbage-can awfulness (“DinoGator”? “The Wraith Within”? “Demon Pit”?) that you wonder if he didn't have gambling debts or a drug addiction or just bad judgment. But he deserved better. Someone needed to tell him that. Or he needed to hear that. He deserved better. 

Mother and children reunion

“Oren Cass, the founder of the conservative think tank American Compass, who has defended Trump's protectionist trade policies but has argued that Republicans need to embrace higher taxes on the rich, was on the right track when, according to The Economist, he joked that the bill is 'zombie Reaganism' or 'zombie Ryanism.' If it proves to be the last significant piece of tax-and-spending legislation passed while Trump is President, a possibility that is far from remote, he could go down in history—or at least in fiscal history—not as the disrupter and agent of change that he likes to see himself as but rather as someone who simply extended the agenda of Ronald Reagan, Grover Norquist, and Paul Ryan to its logical conclusion: utter incoherence and irresponsibility.”

-- John Cassidy, “The Economic Consequences of the Big Odious Bill,” in The New Yorker. Much of the article is about the feint toward closing the carried-interest tax deduction loophole for hedge-fund managers. It was a campaign promise, they seemed interested in doing it, and then POOF they didn't. Would've been a drop of the $3 trillion in red ink that Trump's bill created, but it would've sent a message. Instead, a different message was sent. Or the same message: the rich get richer and the poor die.

An ordinary-looking man with extraordinary talent

I should have written this months ago, but I kept waiting for more info on the circumstances of his death and then life kept getting in the way. Plus I was a little intimidated by the length and breadth of his career. But I couldn't ignore this one. 

As a kid in the 1970s I wasn't into Gene Hackman. He represented the grown-up world in a way that didn't seem palatable with how a weak kid like me might navigate it. He implied it was dangerous in a decidedly unromantic way, corrupt probably, a little mean, exhausting, and amoral if not immoral. And those were his heroes.

I remember seeing “Bonnie and Clyde” in my early 30s and being struck by how genuine he was. Warren Beatty's Clyde was basically doing Beatty schtick, and then Hackman's Buck Barrow shows up and you go, “There's your fucking gangster.” He was so no bullshit. He was life as it is not as you want it to be. Life without the pretty face. He kept showing movie stars the way it was: Robert Redford in “Downhill Racer,” Willem Dafoe in “Mississippi Burning,” Will Smith in “Enemy of the State.” At the same time, he played the perfect comic foil, schlock movie producer Harry Zimm in “Get Shorty,” who trots out Chili Palmer's “Look at me” line on Ray Barboni but can't sell it because he's not really looking at Ray. He is looking at him but his eyes are elsewhere. They dim, they don't announce. I don't know how Hackman did this but it's genius. Particularly since those are the same eyes that announced themselves with such authority in every other movie.

He won his Oscars for grit and toughness (“The French Connection,” “Unforgiven”), but man his comedies. What a triumverate: “Superman,” “Get Shorty,” “The Royal Tenenbaums.” That's a master class. Add on his great cameo as the blind man in “Young Frankenstein,” and you wonder why he wasn't cast in comedies more.

I keep looking at his oeuvre and going, “I want to rewatch that ... and that ... and that.” I've seen “Hoosiers” only once. That seems wrong. When Hackman died at the end of February, Joe Posnanski wrote a nice piece that included an aside on why his Lex Luthor was the perfect supervillain (“they need charm and charisma and the ability to convince people that they're actually NOT supervillains”), but the brunt of the piece was about “Hoosiers” and one scene in particular. He called the piece “My Team is on the Floor” but that's not the scene. It's not when his best player disobeys him and gets benched, and then another player fouls out leaving only four, and he still refuses to let the best player on the court. He goes with four. That's when he says the line. But the scene, Posnanski writes, is the next day, when some townies outside a barbershop razz him: “You gonna play with three next time?”

There's something in the way he smiles and ignores them that feels profound to me. This is a coach who has already seen it all, one who understands that fans will be fans, and that it's his job as a coach to acknowledge them with good humor but never let them think their opinion is worth more than it is.

My father interviewed him in 1984 in Chicago, part of Hackman's first press tour in 10 years. Dad relayed some of Hackman's then decade-old wish list back to him—how he wanted to direct, to return to the theater, to act in musicals and comedies—and Hackman was no bullshit in response:

“You get locked into the Hollywood deal,” he explained, placing a cowboy boot on the edge of a coffee table in his hotel suite as he chose his words carefully. “Not really, but you do get lazy. It takes so many years to get successful, and when it happens, you don't want to to give it up. You're afraid it may go away.” 

It didn't go away for Hackman but it took many years to get successful. He was friends with Dustin Hoffman at the Pasadena Playhouse, where, infamously, they were both voted least likely to succeed. This was in the 1950s when the Troy Donahues of that troupe didn't see the 1960s and '70s coming. Both men wound up in New York, along with Robert Duvall, scrounging around for gigs. It was the worst of times and it was the best of times. “Simpler and easier to deal with,” Hackman told Dad. “Dusty had a job as a salesman at Macy's, so we'd do improvisation in the aisles. I'd come up and pretend to bother him on my lunch hour. Things like that.” 

At 16, he was so bored with high school that he quit to join the U.S. Marines. This was in 1947. He wound up stationed in China and was there when Mao took over. It was his job to destroy leftover Japanese weapons so the communists didn't get them. You see the former Marine in him in many of his roles.

I can't think of another actor like him. I'm glad we had him for the time we had him. Now if you'll excuse me I'm going to go watch “Hoosiers.”

Dad's Hackman article. He wrote the article not the hed.

Walters between two horrors: “He had fascinating friends.”

WARNING: SPOILERS

“Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything” doesn’t tell us everything. It’s insular. It’s written and directed by a woman (Jackie Jesko), most of the talking heads are female TV journalists (Oprah, Katie, et al.), and most of what they say is supportive. She’s their shining star and they buff her up. It doesn’t help that it was produced by ABC News Studio, the network/news division where she worked for decades. It could’ve used, as we say in the biz, fresh eyes.

Example: The doc talks up early criticism of how Walters blended celebrity and hard-news interviews. We get her in voiceover—reading from her autobiography, I assume, since she died in December 2022:

I was criticized for doing specials that had people in the news along with celebrities: You can’t do both. Well, you can, and I did. And today we see it all the time.

As your parents will tell you, “We see it all the time” isn’t exactly a justification, particularly since that was the very fear behind the criticism. That those realms would blur and it would become the norm, and we wouldn't be able to distinguish between the two. That we would become a less-serious country.

Others in the doc come to her defense but it’s not much of a defense: 

Cynthia McFadden: This was very controversial to put hard-news interviews next to celebrity interviews. And there were many who felt she was just lowering standards.

Bob Iger: She had a vision back then that celebrities are news. She was criticized in that regard because she actually believed it—and I think she turned out to be right, that they were newsmakers.

Sure, but what news? Relationships? Gossip? What Angelina Jolie does won’t affect my taxes or healthcare coverage for my father.

Tellingly, as McFadden says “hard-news interviews” above, we get a shot of Pres. Reagan, and for “celebrity interviews” it’s movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger. Shortly thereafter, of course, Schwarzenegger would become hard news himself when he was elected governor of California, just as Reagan had once been celebrity news as a B-movie actor for Warner Bros. in the 1940s. The lines were already beginning to blur when Walters arrived but she helped erase them.

Here’s what the doc doesn’t begin to ask: Did lowering those journalistic standards to the point where celebrities and U.S. Senators were interchangeable personalities on the idiot box, did that help create an environment where, oh, I don’t know, let’s just say a two-bit huckster TV host and raging misogynist and racist could get himself elected president of the United States and then systematically curtail minority rights, women’s right, and the rule of law?

That was the fear. The fear is what we’re living through.

Not recorded here
If you’d asked me beforehand what stands out about Barbara Walters I would’ve said Gilda Radner’s “Baba Wawa,” the infamous “If you were a tree” question to Katherine Hepburn, and how the “Barbara Walters Special” aired every year after the Oscars. We get 10 seconds of Gilda and none of the rest. I mean, yes, the specials, but no mention of that prestigious timeslot. And no tree question.

I could’ve used more on her early steps in journalism before the “Today” show. We get the childhood—her father ran a NYC nightclub, he went broke, she had to become breadwinner—but this is mostly used in a pop-psychology way to explain her behavior. It’s why she was so driven (breadwinner), why she liked scoundrels (her father was one), why she had a longtime friendship/relationship with Roy Cohn (he helped her father with a tax issue).

The Cohn revelation was a shocker to me, particularly because, per Walters, it went beyond friendship. Peter Gathers, who edited her autobiography, says, “They talked about getting married. I have no idea how serious it was, but I would say to her: But he’s gay.” Her response? Not recorded here. Instead, another BW voiceover:

Roy was very well-known and had a great deal of power. He would take me to the Stork Club, to some of the great restaurants, he had fascinating friends.

Where do you fit in the food chain, in the pecking order? That’s Roy Cohn in “Angels in America." That’s what he cared about, and that’s what she cared about.

Which is why Walters had such a problem when Diane Sawyer showed up all tall and blonde on ABC in the 1990s. She was “a goddess,” per Walters, and Walters was frosty with her. As for what Sawyer thought? Not recorded here. Instead, the doc talks up how Walters opened doors for women everywhere even though she herself admits that wasn’t the goal.

We get her daughter, adopted. We get the example she set for the likes of Oprah and Katie Couric, even as each took the opposite lesson from her: Oprah saw her fumbling motherhood because she was married to work, and decided she herself couldn’t do both and never had kids. Couric thought Walters seemed lonely and became determined to have a family.

We get the exclusives: the first joint Sadat-Begin interview (landed, I assume, because Begin had the hots for her); the first Menendez brothers; the first Monica Lewinsky. That’s our trajectory: from stories that matter to tabloid crap. We’re less serious every day.

And the rest
You know who’s really good in this? Bette Midler. She’s also one of the most articulate about why Walters was good at what she did. Walters made the interviewee comfortable, and familiar, and then suddenly, bam, the tough, rude question. To Harvey Fierstein: What’s it like to be a homosexual? To Muhammad Ali: Are you faithful to your wife? To Midler: Do you do drugs? Do you think you’re good looking? Do you think you’re sexy? The doc also gives us Midler today looking at her responses from back then. Nice touch. I would’ve liked more of that.

The mid-1980s interview with Clint Eastwood is charming, too, particularly the way he flirts with her. She was good at these. She was good with the rich and famous and powerful. I don’t know if she did the rest of us any good.

“Is that a man?” “You damn right it is.”

I knew the 1970s Minnesota Vikings defensive line was called “the Purple People Eaters” long before I knew of the 1958 Sheb Wooley novelty song, “The Purple People Eater,” that went to No. 1 on the Billboard charts in June-July 1958; but once I put two and two together, I had real admiration for whoever came up with that moniker. It's obvious in retrospect—the unis were purple, they clobbered people—but still, kudos.

A newspapers.com search says it goes back at least to 1966. Al Larson, a staff writer at the Press-Telegram of Long Beach, Calif., calls them that in a recap of a 24-10 Vikings preseason victory over the Rams. He also calls them “Stormin' Norman's hungry hitters” and “the Dutchman's defensive gang.” Something would stick, right? At this point, those guys were Jim Marshall, Carl Eller, Paul Dickson and Gary Larsen; but Dickson was soon replaced by Alan Page, and that was the Purple People Eaters that I remember—though I'd always forget Larsen. But the other three? Legends. They formed the backbone of our defense for a dozen years together. Marshall played with the Vikes 1961-79, Eller 1964-78, Page 1967-78. Eller was a five-time All-Pro; Page, too, along with becoming the first defensive player to win the MVP in 1971. Marshall? Two Pro Bowls and one second-place finish as All-Pro. But he was the acknowledged leader of not just the d-line but the team. He was named its captain by Bud Grant.

In a Nov. 1968 article from the Associated Press, on the “Purple People” nickname and why they didn't like it, you understand why he was held in such high regard:

“We're satisfied as being the Vikings defense,” says Marshall, the 258-pound dean of the Vikings foursome. “We like to think of ourselves as an entire team. When you start naming the front four you kind of cheat the linebackers and the defensive backs. ... We would just like to be known as the Vikings defense,” he said, enunciating Vikings. 

Class act.

The Purple People Eaters, a moniker they didn't like (but I still do), in the late 1960s.

Marshall was also the Lou Gehrig of the NFL, setting the record for most consecutive games played in its history: 270. For years, no one was close. The closest was his teammate, Mick Tinglehoff, at 240, and then another teammate, Alan Page, at 215, and then finally a non-Viking, Raiders center Jim Otto, 210, whose record Marshall had broken. Eventually Brett Favre broke Marshall's record, because it's in the nature of Brett Favre to spoil things, but he did it as a QB not a lineman. Marshall is still the No. 1 defensive player in consecutive games. He's still No. 2 all-time. Amazing.

For more bonafides, I give up the floor to Joe Posnanski, who had the class to talk up Marshall's Hall of Fame case months before Marshall passed away on June 3. Poz was passionate about it:

Now that I look at it more closely, I believe that Jim Marshall is, far and away, the biggest snub in any sports Hall of Fame. ...

He didn't just start 270 games in a row — a defensive record that will never be broken — he started those games for Minnesota's legendary PURPLE PEOPLE EATERS defense, who were top three in fewest points allowed in 1969, 1970, 1971, 1973, 1974, 1975, and 1976. How in the world is the defensive end who started in every single one of those games not a Hall of Famer? Were the other 10 players just making up for him?

And it's not like he lacks the numbers. He had 131 unofficial sacks in his career — more than Von Miller, Derrick Thomas and even Dwight Freeney, who was just elected to the Hall of Fame in 2024, based almost entirely on his sacks. Or how about this: He STILL holds the NFL record for most fumbles recovered in a career with 30.*

*Actually, the NFL record for most recovered fumbles is held by Hall of Famer Warren Moon with an astonishing 56, but recovering your own fumble doesn't count.

PLUS, he has one of the greatest lines in sports history. After his famous wrong-way run after he recovered one of those fumbles, he told reporters that his teammates asked him to fly the plane back to Minneapolis. “That way,” he said, “we'd up in Hawaii instead of Minnesota.”

No, I didn't intend to go all-in on Jim Marshall today, but remembering that he's not in the Hall of Fame has really set me off. It's a disgrace. Jim turns 88 in December, and I am making it a JoeBlogs mission to get him elected before we lose him.

We lost him. Godspeed, No. 70.

A more Minnesota photo may not exist.

The other day my friend Mike and I were texting each other about what might make a good Seattle Mariners bobblehead giveaway—this in the wake of the upcoming George Costanza offering at Yankee Stadium—and after several misfires (Frank Costanza complaining about the Buhner trade, Lenny Randle blowing a ball foul), we agreed on one concept, what Mike called “the Double Diego”: Diego Segui pitching on Opening Day for the Seattle Pilots in 1969 and the Seattle Mariners in 1977. I'd suggested this idea not knowing that Segui had passed away at the end of last month, while I was still in France.

As Mariners fans know, Segui is the only player to play for both Seattle MLB teams, but he had his best years with the A's—both in Kansas City, where, as a rookie in 1962, he went 8-5 with a 3.86 ERA, and in Oakland, where in, 1970, he led the Majors in ERA with a 2.56 mark. But he was itinerant. He was born in Cuba, was signed and then quickly dropped by Cincinnati in 1958, made his way to the Arizona-Mexico League for a season, then was picked by and made his way through the Athletics' system. After a few seasons in the big, he was purchased by the Washington Senators (II) in April 1966 and then traded back to the Athletics that July. He was then taken by the nascent Seattle Pilots with the 14th pick of the expansion draft in October 1968.

Though primarily a reliever in 1969, he was the Pilots' best pitcher by bWAR (2.4), going 12-6 with a 3.35 ERA and 12 saves. What did this mean to an org that was so poorly run it traded the eventual 1969 Rookie of the Year (Lou Piniella) before the season even began? Right, trade bait. They sent him back to the Athletics for not much, and he promptly led the league in ERA. He kept pitching not poorly for the A's but in the summer of '72, just as they were beginning their great run, they sent him to St. Louis for a season and a half. Then he was part of a six-player deal to Boston. His '75 season wasn't great (2-5, 4.82 ERA), but he was on the postseason roster and pitched a mop-up inning of the 1975 World Series. In Game 5, with the Reds leading 5-1, Boston's Dick Pole walked Johnny Bench and Tony Perez to start out the bottom of the eighth, so Segui was called on and got three straight fly outs (Foster, Concepcion, Geronimo) that allowed Bench to score but otherwise minimized the damage. The next game was a doozy.

Might that have been his last MLB appearance if the Seattle Mariners hadn't thundered their way into existence? Maybe. He was released by Boston in April '76, spent a not-bad season in AAA for the Padres, who then sold him to this new Mariners club in October 1976. And yes, he was on the mound, the starting pitcher, for the first game at the Kingdome on April 6, 1977. First pitch? A strike on the outside corner. Everything went downhill from there—for him and the M's. He played the entire season without winning a game, going 0-7, and in his last start, Sept. 24, he lasted just 1/3 of an inning against the Chicago White Sox: single to Ralph Garr, double to Chet Lemon, wild pitch scored Garr, K to Royle Stillman but double to Oscar Gamble. And that's all she wrote. He was replaced by Sept. callup Greg Erardi, who pitched only six games in the Majors.

Though now 40, Segui kept going. From '78 to '84 he pitched in the Mexican League, where his ERA was under 3.00 every season except for the last. In the 1984 edition of Jim Bouton's “Ball Four,” which is mostly about that 1969 Pilots season, there's a kind of “Where are they now?” section at the end, with Segui's entry reading: “He's living in Kansas City but no one seems to know what he's doing. Except that he still pitches in the Carribean Winter League.” His son, David, also became a Major Leaguer, and had a good season and a half with the Mariners at first base. We traded him to Toronto, mid-1999, for not much. Plus ca change. 

I still like the “Double Diego” idea.

FURTHER READING:

• More in-depth history on Segui from RIP Baseball
• Segui's Baseball Reference page
• His bio via SABR

I shouldn't care. They're just division rivals. But when I was the right baseball age, meaning 9 to 11, the Oakland A's broke big, becoming the second franchise to win three World Series in a row—and they did it in inimitable fashion: sporting long hair, moustaches, great nicknames, those beautiful gold-and-green unis, and all-time memorable players. So I do care. And it's why I don't like what their current owner, John Fisher, heir to the GAP fortune, is doing to them.

Summation: He moved them out of Oakland for Las Vegas, but Vegas isn't nearly ready, and may never be ready, and in the meantime he stuck the team in a minor-league ballpark in Sacramento; but then he refused to call them the Sacramento A's, pissing people off there. No Oakland, either, or Vegas. He just said they're the Athletics. One name. Like Cher. 

We knew all that going into this season. So how is it going now? Yesterday Joe Posnanski pointed me to a Guardian article by David Lengel, whose title, “Debacle in the Desert,” gives you an idea. The mucky-mucks, including COB Rob Manfred, had a groundbreaking ceremony in Vegas that was all show. Construction costs are already going up—particularly since so much construction in this country is done by immigrants, who are being deported, or who are so fearful of being deported they don't want to leave their homes. People don't know what Fisher's endgame is—whether he miscalculated or is just dumb. Lengel mentions that Oakland's final offer was $750 million in infrastructure and grants to build a new stadium but he walked away from it.

Why would Fisher leave nearly a billion dollars for a park on a 55-acre plot, in a top-10 television market in love with its ballclub, for nine acres and a minuscule market with fans who don't know their A's from their elbow? We still don't know, but there are plenty of new questions to try and answer about a process that doesn't add up to anyone despite Fisher, Manfred, and the Vegas officials who insist that everything is on time and on schedule.

Posnanski thinks Vegas ain't gonna happen. What was supposed to happen in Vegas won't stay in Vegas. So where? As a Seattle fan, I wouldn't mind a rival that's closer than Sacramento or San Diego, so I'd love Porland or Vancouver, B.C. But if MLB really wants to get innovative, why not continue the westward trajectory of this original-16 team? Yes, there's not much west of Oakland in the United States. But...

PHI –> KC –> OAK –> TOKYO

Probably too many legal and logistical hurdles to jump. Fun thinking about, though. 

In my defense, it did premiere at Cannes.

WARNING: SPOILERS

On the last day of my vacation in France, as a way to avoid the afternoon heat and as a kind of experiment, I did something tres gauche: I went to see “Mission: Impossible ­– The Final Reckoning” at the Grand Rex on the Boulevard Montmartre in Paris. 

It was a kind of experiment because the film wasn’t VO (version originale) but VF (version francais). It was dubbed. I was curious:

• Did the French voice actor sound anything like Tom Cruise?
• How much would I understand with my shitty French?
• Would I be able to follow the plot anyway?

Well…

• All the voice actors sounded plain, regressed to the mean. Maybe that’s the nature of that biz.
• My shitty French didn’t help.
• I still understood most of the movie.

It’s an action movie, after all, not complicated, and I know the tropes. I’ve been watching these things about as long as Tom Cruise has been alive.

La cle, boss, la cle
He’s showing his age a little, isn’t he? He’s in fantastic shape—entire scenes are him in his skivvies, Joel Goodsen + 40 years—but in some scenes his face is oddly puffy. I assume because of the stunt work he insists on doing? You know that footage of pilots and astronauts with contorted faces from G-Forces? I think it’s hangover from that. Cruise has been hanging off too many planes during his career. He does it again here—twice. He plunges into Arctic waters—twice. He runs superfast and super-upright to try to save a friend’s life before a bomb goes off. Once.

Here’s what the plot of “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning” seemed like in French with my shitty French.

Ethan Hunt is in possession of the key from the last movie. He and the girl, Grace (Hayley Atwell), are kidnapped from a swanky opera by the villain, Gabriel (Esai Morales), and Hunt is tortured, Grace is threatened, but they break free. Hunt is with his IM team when he enters a pod that shows him a vision of the end of the world—nuclear destruction. So now we know what he needs to do: prevent that. But first his computer guy, Luther (Ving Rhames), is trapped with a bomb and Ethan races across empty London streets to set him free. He doesn’t. He and Luther talk through the plastic partition, like Kirk and Spock in “Star Trek II,” with Luther most likely saying some version of the needs of the many outweighing him, even though he weighs a lot. Boom.

Now we’re in the North Atlantic. Ethan jumps into frigid waters, is about to die of hypothermia, but he’s saved by doubtful U.S. military scuba forces, one of whom winds up being a traitor.

Meanwhile, his IM team visits a scientist and his Inuit wife on an Arctic island, but uh oh, other forces are there, too. Russians? Gabriel’s? There are discussions and standoffs and gun battles.

Meanwhile, the president of the United States (Angela Bassett), keeps debating with her advisers, including Gen. Nick Offerman, about what to do about the impending nuclear apocalypse.

Hunt is doing more than debating. He scuba-dives into a sunken Russian nuclear sub—didn’t we see it sink in the beginning of the first movie?—and that’s the point of the key, you use it there for something, which Hunt does; but he also lets in a lot of water, so on the ocean floor the sub keeps turning and groaning and turning, and it’s about to fall into a deep chasm. Ethan works frantically to escape, but the only way he can do it is to strip to his skivvies and swim through icy waters to the surface. He swims and swims, and slows, and stops. And dies. And that’s it for that.

Kidding. He passes out, and when he wakes up he’s being warmed by Grace and reunited with his team. Somehow.

Then it’s to an underground facility in South Africa, where there are discussions and standoffs and gun battles between Gabriel, IM Forces, and U.S. intelligence repped by that jerk Kittridge (Henry Czermy). Beloved IM dude Benji (Simon Pegg) gets plugged, Gabriel runs away with the doohickey that matters, and Ethan runs after him.

Now we intercut between:

• The IM girls, including Pom Klementieff’s Paris, trying to defuse a bomb with the help of a wounded Benji.
• The U.S. president still arguing with advisers, and being threatened, and Gen. Nick Offerman getting his Sgt. Al Powell “Die Hard” moment—the sudden savior.
• Ethan pursuing Gabriel, who escapes via biplane.

Actually two biplanes. Gabriel pilots the first, his lieutenant(?) the second, which is the one Ethan latches onto. He pulls himself up, decks the pilot, takes control of the plane, and goes after Gabriel. No, Gabriel sees him first, and decides to have fun, like Snoopy vs. the Red Baron. But then Ethan climbs onto Gabriel’s plane and gets the doohickey from around his neck. And as Gabriel gets swept into a propeller (I think), Ethan parachutes out while plugging that doohickey into another doohickey, and that’s the thing that saves the day at the last second. Whew.

Back in London, the surviving IM members, including Benji, look at each other and nod about saving the world, and then go their separate ways.

Not sure if it made more sense in English.

The pill with the poison is in the podkova going nova
In English I’d have the names and reasons for things. The standoff with the scientist on the island, for example? That’s about getting the Russian sub’s coordinates, which are relayed to Ethan so he can retrieve something called the Podkova, which is the thing you need to defeat the Entity.

Right, the Entity. That’s what’s missing from the above. It’s the movie’s main villain—artificial intelligence. Maybe that’s the takeaway from this French-language experiment: AI makes a lousy villain. Because where is it? Here, there and everywhere. But not on the screen.

It’s the Entity that’s going to launch everyone’s nukes, and Ethan needs to jump through all these hoops to make sure it doesn’t happen. But—I’m curious—does Gabriel want the world to end? He certainly keeps getting in the way of trying to save it. So maybe he’s part of the “undercover doomsday cult” Wiki mentions that I don’t remember seeing either. By the way, I totally dig this line from Wiki on the film’s climax: “Ethan finds a second parachute and plugs the Poison Pill into the Podkova in midair…” That’s a master class in maguffins. Or pornography.

“Final” is the eighth (and supposedly final) of the Cruise “M:I” movies, which seem to have run their course. They're certainly not increasing their take:

* As of June 27-29 weekend

To its credit, it embraces its past. The island scientist (Rolf Saxon), for example, is the CIA analyst Ethan fooled with the zipline-above-the-floor stunt in the first film, while that jerk Kittridge was also a jerk in that first film. Pres. Erika Sloane? Back in 2018, as CIA head, she foisted the traitorous, mustachioed Henry Cavill on IMF. Now she’s the black female president because in real life we can’t have such nice things. Oh, and Shea Whigham and his great skeptical expression turns up as the son of Jim Phelps, the star of the TV series (Peter Graves), and the great betrayer from the first film (Jon Voight). He and Ethan shake hands in the end. Bygones, bro.

After beginning the series with auteurs (Brian De Palma, John Woo, etc.), the last four movies have all been directed by Christopher McQuarrie, the guy who wrote “The Usual Suspects” but now seems in the Tom Cruise business. The last thing he worked on that wasn’t a Cruise movie was in 2013. Since then, it’s the likes of “Jack Reacher,” “The Mummy,” “Top Gun,” “M:I.” They might want to start seeing other people.

Tom Cruise? He was the great brat of the Brat Pack, our forever cocksure cousin, playing guys determined to be the best at a thing—test pilot, bartender, race-car driver—despite the doubt and desperation in their eyes. But he never quite grew up, did he? Did he ever play a father? “War of the Worlds,” I guess. He’s still best-known as a son—“Risky Business,” “Magnolia”—but he’s 63 now and a little old to be hanging off airplanes. Not sure where he goes from here. In the poster for this one he seems oddly serene, the desperation gone from his eyes. Maybe that's a way forward.