WARNING: SPOILERS

Are these Deadpool movies getting funnier or are my standards dropping? Or both?

I tend to suffer through fight scenes and explosions, and this movie has more than its share, but I enjoyed it. I laughed. A lot. With the original “Deadpool,” I had a little problem with the meta stuff. As I put it back in the innocent days of Feb. 2016:

He says about the movie what you and I would say about the movie if we were watching it in your mom’s basement. … But is this a losing strategy? They’re not fixing the problems of the genre, they’re just making snarky comments from within the genre. It’s like Deadpool is winning the battle (this moment) but losing the war. He’s badmouthing the entire enterprise on its way down. 

At the same time, in other posts, I was complaining that there were no great modern-day superhero satires—the way that the Adam West’s “Batman” was a great superhero satire. Watching “Deadpool & Wolverine” last week at SIFF Downtown, I realized, “Oh… This is the great modern-day superhero satire.”

Again, it helps that it’s funnier than the original. We get our share of outré stuff:

B-15: I’m gonna show you something. Something huge
Deadpool: That’s what Scoutmaster Kevin used to say.

But I prefer lines that skewer the culture:

Kid: That’s Wolverine!
Deadpool: Damn straight it is. Fox killed him, Disney brought him back. They’re gonna make him do this till he’s 90.

I say all this even though the movie’s focus is not only on the Multiverse, but the TVA, the Time Variance Authority, which is a bureaucratic, authoritarian organization, introduced in the “Loki” TV series, that ensures timelines don’t overlap or run into each other or whatever. And I’m tired of all that.

But so is Deadpool: 

Deadpool: Can we just be done with the whole multiverse thing? It’s not great. It’s just been miss after miss after miss. … Let’s just take the ‘L’ and move on.

Now that’s a hero!

Snuhkuhtuh
The movie begins at a gravesite, Wolverine’s, which Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) is digging up. In voiceover, he mentions the film’s title, and, right, how can Wolverine be fighting Deadpool if he died in “Logan” in 2017? Well, there’s his regenerative powers. That’s what Deadpool assumes. Mid-dig, though, he comes across something and curses: Logan’s adamantine skull and skeleton. So much for that.

Chronologically, the movie begins with Deadpool applying for a job with the Avengers. Let’s just say he doesn’t interview well. Trying to be polite to corporate boss Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau), he still runs off at the mouth, asking Happy if he didn’t used to be the chauffeur. “What's your super power? Is it parallel parking?” Then he says he needs this. To which Happy tells him that Avengers aren’t the ones who need; they help those in need. 

And just like that, he gives up the superhero biz. As Wade Wilson, he gets a job at some superstore; but like most folks working at such stores, he’s dying inside. He’s not himself. He loses himself and then he loses Vanessa (Morena Baccarin, call me). They break up. And then at a birthday party, the TVA arrives. 

What’s the rationale again? Right, his timeline is dying. Apparently, timelines have “anchor beings” who are so important that when they go everything begins to deteriorate. Ours was Wolverine. A new petty functionary, Mr. Paradox (Matthew Macfadyen of “Succession”), is trying to make a name for himself by speeding up this process via a “Time Ripper.” That’s a good understated bit: that all corporations reward managers who promote efficiencies, and this is true even if the corporation sees itself as moral and the efficiency causes the deaths of trillions. Wade understandably doesn’t want his friends to die, so he steals Paradox’s little iPad thingee and makes for Wolverine’s grave. No luck.

Then he decides to re-anchor his timeline with a Wolverine from another timeline. Smart. Cue montage of Wolverines—including a short one, like in the comic book, and one played by DC’s castoff Superman Henry Cavill. Per Paradox, Deadpool winds up picking the worst one (Hugh Jackman), the Wolvy that let down everyone else. Even his claws come out slowly: less snikt! than snuh … kuh … tuh…

The two fight, of course. Then Deadpool discovers Paradox’s secret—he’s rogue—so they’re banished to “the Void,” the end of the timelines, which is even more “Mad Max” here than in “Loki.” Alioth is a consuming cloud that kills all but the true villain is Cassandra Nova (Emma Corin, who’s great), the twin sister of Prof. X, who runs her fiefdom beneath the long dead corpse of Goliath. (At one point, the helmet opens, revealing a skull. Deadpool: “Huh. Paul Rudd finally aged.”)

The two keep running into the castoffs of long-dead Marvel movies. First there’s Johnny Storm (Chris Evans), whom Deadpool initially thinks is Captain America. After they escape Cassandra Nova and fight each other again, they run into Elektra (Jennifer Garner), Blade (Wesley Snipes), and Laura (Dafne Keen), the little girl from “Logan” who is now a young woman. These last three, along with newbie Gambit (Channing Tatum), team up with our stars to storm the castle, as it were, with a plan to place the helmet of Juggernaut (Aaron W. Reed) onto Cassandra, rendering her useless. And it works! But then they stupidly spare her—a move that won’t look good when she later decides to destroy all the timelines. I.e., everything everyone has ever known. 

Might’ve wanted to kill her when you had the chance, boys.

The Han Solo bit
How do they get out of the Void again? They just do. (Movies are half maguffin these days.) At one point, on a NY city street, they wind up squaring off against a whole host of Deadpools—the funniest of which is Nicepool (also Ryan Reynolds), who’s got white-guy samurai hair, a perpetual smile, and the blandest of personalities. At one point he tries a meta riposte of his own, bringing up a past Ryan Reynolds movie, and it’s brilliant in its nothingness: 

Nicepool: “The Proposal.”
[Pause]
Deadpool: What the fuck is that? Bitch, is that what you think I do?

Throughout, Nicepool’s smile never leaves him. He’s not ashamed at all. His witlessness is his superpower.

How do they win? Oh right, DP and Wolvy battle over who will take on Cassandra in the NYC subway, and even as they do I’m thinking, “Shouldn’t it be both? She’s kind of powerful.” Which is what happens. DP does it alone, then Wolvy does the Han Solo bit of showing up just when he’s needed. Or vice-versa. Anyway they win, Cassandra dies, the Black TVA chick from “Loki” arrives to take away Paradox. This timeline gets this Wolverine, whom DP introduces to his friends. Hugh Jackman can now do it until he’s 90.

Or not. For once, in the MCU,, there’s no midcredits foreshadowing. Instead we get nostalgia—clips of the first days of “X-Men” filming. My friend Jeff commented on how young Hugh Jackman looked in these, but it was a quarter-century ago, and those years haven’t been exactly kind. I was more surprised by something else: that the little girl in “Logan” is now a woman. WTF? But it’s been seven years, and though mine were full of slow deterioration, as I went from 54 to 61, she went from 12 and 19. Bigger deal.

It was also fun being reminded that Brian Cox, the star of “Succession,” created Wolverine. He was the villain in “X2,” just as his successor in “Succession” is the villain here. Nice bookending.

This is the first “Deadpool,” not to mention “Wolverine” appearance, that wasn’t created by the idiots at Fox Studios. As Deadpool tells him, “Welcome to the MCU. You're joining at a bit of a low point.” Indeed. Since Tony Stark died, they’ve given us one great superhero movie (“Spider-Man: No Way Home”), two good superhero movies ( “Black Widow,” “Guardians 3”), and a whole lot of crap. But this helps. It’s the funniest movie I’ve seen this year.

My favorite bit on the Poscast the other day was this exchange:

Joe: [After updating us on the rise of the Astros, the fall of the Mariners, and the general lousiness of Mariners hitting] So the Mariners are playing for their playoff lives, and ... Man, is this going to happen again? Are the Mariners going to just fall short AGAIN?
Mike: Yeah.

It's the way Michael Schur says it—with a “no duh” quality to his voice: “Isn't it obvious? Are you an idiot? What happened to my smart friend Joe?” And the chef's kiss is that Mike's answer was immediately echoed, in the exact same tone, by their guest Justin Halpern, who is a showrunner for the TV series “Abbott Elementary” and a big San Diego Padres fan. 

This has been a theme throughout the year, by the way. Joe keeps pushing for the M's and the M's keep disappointing. Basically the M's are Joe's fetch. He keeps trying to make them happen. And yeah, they're not happening. 

As if to underscore this point, M's manager Scott Servais was fired by the club today. Don't know if other heads will roll. They should. As I said earlier this month, fire the hitting instruction team up and down the org. Whatever hitting philosophy we have, it's a bad one. 2024 numbers:

• Batting average: .216 (30th of 30 teams)
• OBP: .301 (26th)
• SLG: .365 (29th)
• Hits: 903 (30th)
• Doubles: 170 (29th)
• Triples: 12 (28th)
• Ks: 1,308 (1st)

We're also middle of the road in homers (15th). Basically the only good thing we're good at is walks: 5th-best there. We walk a lot, strike out a ton, barely put the ball in play. All walks and many Ks make the M's a dull team.

Interestingly, Halpern is on the Poscast because of the surprising resurgence of his team, who are the opposite of that. They're fun. Someone in the Poscast described them as akin to the 2014-15 KC Royals: a team that doesn't strike out, doesn't walk, puts the ball in play. Amen! I've been waiting for another 2014-15 Royals team to cheer on. Maybe this year's Padres are it. 

When the Servais news broke I immediately texted my friend Tim, who responded with this touching eulogy, borne of watching Servais mismanage the ballclub for the past nine years: “About fucking time.” 

Former Mariners catcher Dan Wilson is purportedly taking over. He has no experience as a big-league coach or a manager at any level. At the same time, he doesn't seem like a bad choice.

ADDENDUM: Hitting instructor Jarret DeHart was also let go and will be replaced by Hall of Famer Edgar Martinez. Per Wiki, DeHart was promoted to M's hitting coach and director of hitting strategy on November 15, 2021. M's team batting averages under his tenure: .230 (27th), .242 (22nd), .216 (30th).

• Tim's take 
• Poz's take

“I believe that leaders must display dignity.
I believe that leaders must tell the truth.
I believe that leaders should be able to laugh at themselves.
I believe that leaders must care for, and love, the people they are leading.
I believe that leaders must possess knowledge and expertise but with the full awareness that none of us has all the answers—and in fact some of the best answers come from members of the team.”

-- NBA coach and former NBA star Steve Kerr last night at the Democratic National Convention. Each one has a negative example, and everyone knows who that is. Even he knows who that is.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Early in the film, our title character gets away with doing the wrong thing (robbing a bank) by doing the right thing (protecting a woman on a train). Near the end of the movie, it looks like doing the right thing (rescuing a child locked in a bank vault) will cause him to be punished for doing the wrong thing (robbing an earlier bank).

That’s not a bad structure. But is “Alias Jimmy Valentine” a good movie?

It’s a silent melodrama, so it’s hard to say. I’d call it historically interesting. A key plot point, for example, turns on a modern-day impossibility but one still plausible in 1915: pretending you’re not who you really are. It would be like a cop showing up at my place and saying, “You’re under arrest, Erik Lundegaard,” and I go, “I’m not Erik Lundegaard,” and the cop goes “Whaaa?” and leaves, scratching his head. Today, the official record of who we are is too overwhelming. We’re trapped as us. Less so then.

There are other improbabilities, too, but the main one was often-seen as the movie industry matured: All a bad man needs to reform himself is a good woman.

Jimmy, on the road to reform, looking a little Leonard Cohen-ish.

Mine is the way of the law
Its star, Robert Warwick, had a long career, acting into the 1960s (a bit part on the TV show “Dr. Kildare”), and along the way appearing in such classics as “The Adventures of Robin Hood,” “Sullivan’s Travels,” and “In a Lonely Place.” But the movie’s biggest names are behind the scenes. 

“Alias Jimmy Valentine” is based upon a 1909 play, which was in turn based upon a 1903 short story, “A Retrieved Reformation,” by William Sidney Porter, AKA O. Henry. And its director was film pioneer Maurice Tourneur, father of Jacques. We see some of his pioneering work during a bank robbery when we get an extended overhead shot of several rooms in the bank, sans ceilings, with the gang moving from room to room, outwitting or outpunching security. Makes it look like a maze. And our guys are the rats? 

We get a Jekyll-Hyde vibe early on. We’re introduced to our protagonist (Warwick) and the intertitles tell us: “By day he is Mr. Lee Randall – respected citizen. By night he is Jimmy Valentine – enemy to society.” In this manner, he walks from his dull office job to his small apartment, where he gets into bed in his clothes, then wakes up and puts on a heavy seafaring jacket and Irish tam cap. Then he meets his boys in a sketchy part of town and off they go to rob a bank.

Here’s an early improbability: the cop on the case, Det. Doyle (Robert W. Cummings), finds a cufflink on the floor, and not only assumes it belongs to one of the crooks (rather than a bank employee), but he knows which one. And where he lives! Nice detectiving. Or is it? Because once Randall/Valentine realizes his cufflink is missing, he feels he’s done. He tells his men, via coded message, “Duck!” Meaning scram, get out of town. I guess they must’ve been some special cufflinks.

On the train out of town, Jimmy travels with a man named Cotton, who makes a drunken pass at a lady; Jimmy fends him off, apologizes. When Cotton tries it again, they fight, and Jimmy literally tosses him from the train. Then he jumps off the train himself to escape detection.

Except Cotton squeals and Jimmy is sent to Sing-Sing for 10 years. The good news? That girl on the train is the daughter of the lieutenant governor. The two of them, Lt. Gov. Fay and daughter Rose (Frederick Truesdell and Ruth Shepley), go to Sing-Sing accompanied by a society matron, Mrs. Webster, who is, she says, “anxious to see some of your prisoners in action.” Meaning doing what got them busted in the first place. Thus a forger forges a large check in the lt. governor’s name. When  Jimmy is called in to demonstrate his safecracking skills, he plays dumb. Or smart. “What safecracking skills?” he basically says.

That’s when the daughter recognizes him. And the Lt. Gov., based on no evidence, begins to think the confession that convicted him was false. He threatens the warden thus: “…and when Valentine secures his pardon—and I hope that will be soon—I am going to ask how he was treated. And if he tells me you ill-treated him in any way, I promise you a little polite hell!”

That gets him out of prison. It’s the good deed that covers the bad one.

When does Jimmy truly turn to the good? In the O. Henry short story, which doesn’t go into nearly the detail of the movie, it happens in a flash and without the stint in prison:

One afternoon Jimmy Valentine and his bag arrived in a small town named Elmore. Jimmy, looking as young as a college boy, walked down the street toward the hotel. A young lady walked across the street, passed him at the corner, and entered a door. Over the door was the sign, “The Elmore Bank.” Jimmy Valentine looked into her eyes, forgetting at once what he was. He became another man.

Takes a bit longer in the movie.

Outside the prison gates, he’s met by a colleague, Red (Johnny Hines), who shows him plans for the next bank job. Sure. But first Jimmy needs to thank the Lt. Gov. And when he does, the cute daughter is there, minding children. And then a job opens up, a cashier at a bank, and, wow, it’s offered to Jimmy. That’s what does it. “Red, I’ve got my chance,” he says. “We go straight from now on.”

But … didn’t he already have his chance? At the start, he already had the dull office job. And he did the bank jobs at night for the money/kicks, right? But I guess now there’s a cute girl.

Jimmy not only reforms himself but his gang. First, Red goes along reluctantly. Then when gangmember Avery (Alec B. Francis) gets released, they get him a job in a cigar-rolling factory. Except he’s no good at it and quits. So they test him. They leave him alone with a pile of bank money. And he sweats it, and he sweats it, and at one point he stuffs a whole bunch into his jacket pockets and begins to walk out. But no. He can’t. Good wins. Again.

All the while, Det. Doyle, like some middle-American Javert, is gunning for our man. After he gets the evidence of a crime committed in Boston, he confronts Jimmy, who pulls rank: “I am not Jimmy Valentine, and I don’t know what you mean. Furthermore, if you don’t desist from insinuating that I’m a criminal, I’ll have the watchmen eject you from the bank.” We get this exchange:

Doyle: You will have to prove that you are not Jimmy Valentine.
Jimmy: Pardon me, you will have to prove that I am Jimmy Valentine.

That made me smile. One hundred years later, there’s still idiots who want you to prove a negative. IMDb asked me to do this the other day.

Anyway, using doctored photos, Jimmy proves he couldn’t have done the Massachusetts job, but Doyle isn’t convinced and continues to lurk around. Which is when a little girl, one of Rose’s charges, gets locked in a new bank vault. And the Lt. Gov. with the combo is nowhere to be found! And she’ll suffocate before long! Oh whoa, can’t anyone crack this safe and save the girl?

Right, this is the good deed that may get Jimmy punished for his earlier bad deed. It’s been a while, so Jimmy asks for sandpaper to make his fingertips even more sensitive. His fingers begin to bleed but he gets her out. Which is when Doyle emerges from the shadows with a j’accuse finger pointed at him.

Pause.

Pause.

And then he takes out the evidence and tears it up. “But just to retain your respect,” he says, “don’t think I fell for that fake picture.”

The bank maze. Cufflink not included.

Be my Valentine
Fun fact: The little girl locked in the vault? Madge Evans, age 6, who became a leading lady in the 1930s, co-starring in “Dinner at Eight” (as Lionel Barrymore’s daughter), “The Greeks Had a Word for Them” (as the idealistic one), “Pennies from Heaven” (as Bing Crosby’s welfare dept. love interest), and “The Mayor of Hell” (as James Cagney’s social reformer love interest). She was often the good woman who reformed the bad man.

“Alias Jimmy Valentine” was a popular-enough story that they kept remaking it—both in 1920 (starring Bert Lytell, with Eugene Pallette as Red) and in 1928 (starring William Haines, with Lionel Barrymore as Doyle). In 1936, Republic Pictures released “The Return of Jimmy Valentine,” about a newspaper publicity stunt to find the once nefarious safecracker. (Interestingly, Jimmy turns up as Jimmy Davis—played by Robert Warwick.) This was remade in 1942 as “The Affairs of Jimmy Valentine.”

And then nothing. Why make “Alias Jimmy Valentine” three times within a 13-year span and never again? I assume because safecrackers became less interesting than gangsters—the real-life kind and the Warner Bros. kind. After feeling the force of an Al Capone or Tom Powers, Jimmy Valentine is a little forgettable. 

Here's an obit of Burgess Meredith that ran in 1997 in newspapers across the country. 

If you know this game, the IMDb “Known For” game, you know neither of these roles will be the No. 1 answer. See if you can't think what the No. 1 answer might be. 

Most of the obit headlines for Mr. Meredith, by the way, don't mention any role. They talk up the length and breadth of his career. “Character Actor Burgess Meredith... ”Star of Stage, Screen and TV...“ That kind of thing.

I first knew him as the Penguin, of course (”Waugh, waugh, waugh...“), but I would've led with ”Rocky.“ He got an Oscar nom for it, and it was the No. 1 movie of 1976, spawning sequels that are still being made more than 50 years later. I also associate him as the first screen George from ”Of Mice and Men,“ opposite Lon Chaney Jr. That was his sixth screen role. He would reach 185 such credits. The bookworm ”Twilight Zone“ episode wouldn't be a bad way to go, either. 

Instead:

”Clash of the ...“?????

If you sort his credits by number of votes (which the ”Known For“ algorithm supposedly factors in), ”Rocky“ is on top with 637k. Then it's various forms of ”Rocky“: ”II,“ ”Balboa,“ ”IV,“ ”III,“ ”V.“ Then it's that ”Twilight Zone“ episode, and then ”Grumpy Old Men.“ And THEN it's ”Clash of the Titans.“ In ninth place. With 46k votes.

If you sort by the rating of his movie credits, it goes: ”The Crazy-Quilt“ (1966 indy at 8.4, 66 votes), and then ”Rocky“ (8.1), ”The Living Sands of Namib“ (1978 doc he narrated), ”Of Mice and Men,“ and ”Advise & Consent.“ We get a bunch of Hollywood docs in there, and then, in 11th place, ”Rocky II“ (7.3), followed by ”In Harm's Way,“ ”A Big Hand for the Little Lady,“ ”State of Grace,“ ”G.I. Joe“ (the 1945 one, with Meredith as Ernie Pyle), ”Rocky Balboa,“ more docs, ”Grumpy Old Men,“ ”San Francisco Docks,“ and ”Rocky IV.“ And then, finally, at 6.9, ”Clash of the Titans.“ In 24th place.

Is he the star of it? That's supposed to matter. Billing. But of course not. He's Burgess. He's never, or rarely, the star. In ”Rocky,“ for example, he's fifth-billed. ”Big Hand for the Little Lady“? Sixth-billed. And ”Clash of the Titans"? Tenth. 

All of which, of course, adds up to the No. 1 answer to the kids at IMDb.

Waugh, waugh, waugh...

Fowler: You and your like are trying to make a war with the help of people who just aren't interested.
Pyle: They don't want communism.
Fowler: They want enough rice. 

-- from Graham Greene's “The Quiet American,” published in 1955, about early American involvement in Vietnam. Greene was astonishingly prescient.

WARNING: SPOILERS

For someone who loves the early 1960s as much as Jerry Seinfeld, he sure gets a lot of it wrong. “Unfrosted” is set in 1963 and there’s a whole host of anachronisms. Most feel completely unnecessary. 

They reference Gus Grissom dying. Yeah, that was 1967. Marjorie Post calls one of the dumpster divers “Cabbage Patch kid.” Not introduced until 1978. Fruity Pebbles? 1971. Missing kids on milk cartons? Mid-80s. Turns out the “Doublemint Twins” ad campaign was invented before this, so I was wrong on that; but the idea of “Jackie O’s” as a cereal is a few Kennedy assassinations early.

The entire opening is anachronism. A kid lays out one of those classic red bandanas and loads it up with iconic early ’60s items: Slinky, G.I. Joe, Bazooka Joe bubblegum, 1964 baseball card, and Gold Key Woody Woodpecker comic book. Then he ties it all to a stick and hits the road. At a diner, he asks for Pop-Tarts and reads its origin story on the box aloud.

Kid: Wow, that’s a pretty good story.
Adult: You think so? Bunch of baloney.

The mise en scene is Norman Rockwell, though the runaway kid there is talking to a cop; here it’s Bob Cabana (Seinfeld), a Kellogg’s executive who promises to tell the kid the real story. He begins it this way: “Well, in the early ’60s, the American morning was defined by milk and cereal...”

Me: Early ’60s? I thought we were in the early ’60s.

The movie is full of such errors. It feels like everyone was riffing, and the riffs stayed in even if they didn’t connect. As for the real story about how Pop-Tarts came to be that Bob promises to tell the kid? Bunch of baloney.

Gaffigan again
Who cares, right, as long as it’s funny. This isn’t. I’d heard it didn’t have a single laugh in it but that’s not true. Jim Gaffigan, as Edsel Kellogg III, has some good line-readings. Opening the newspaper: “Oh, Vietnam. That seems like a good idea.” I know, but it’s the way he says it. I laughed out loud.

The movie itself seems like a good idea: take the battle between Kellogg’s and Post to launch the first toaster pastry and film it through a “Right Stuff” prism. Make it seem like it matters. But they don’t. They keep shrugging. They keep winking. They keep losing the thread.

In Battle Creek, Michigan, Kellogg’s is on top, particularly at the annual “Bowl and Spoon Awards,” winning everything; but then why is Marjorie Post (Amy Schumer) so smug? What are they working on?

Yeah, toaster pastries. With Kellogg’s own abandoned research into the project! It’s so delicious they have kids diving into their dumpsters for the castoffs. But then why is Post so behind on the project?

Either way, Kellogg’s ramps up. Bob requests his old partner, Donna “Stan” Stankowski (Melissa McCarthy), currently employed by NASA. Stan, in turn, hires a crack team of “the most innovative minds of the 1960s”:

• Tom Carvel (Adrian Martinez)
• Steve Schwinn (Jack McBrayer)
• Harold von Braunhut (Thomas Lennon)
• Chef Boy Ardee (Bobby Moynihan)
• Jack LaLanne (James Marsden)
• The UNIVAC computer

At a press conference, Tom proclaims, in his best “Mercury astronauts” voice: “I give you, Kellogg’s first-ever taste pilots!” Not bad.

Interestingly, all the above people are historical figures. Well, it’s Ignaz Schwinn rather than Steve, while Chef Boyardee is Ettore Boiardi. But yes, Carvel created soft-serve ice cream while von Braunhut was apparently the odd creature who created Sea Monkeys and X-ray goggles and all that crap they sold on the inside covers of comic books.

And here, together, they create … a mess.

I like the subplot about the Milk Syndicate disliking the milk-less turn of events and strong-arming everybody. “It’s the calcium in milk that makes bones strong,” milkman Mike Diamond (Christian Slater) says to Bob outside his home. “Without it, bones can break. They just .. snap.”

Sadly, they don’t do much with it. Too many other subplots. When Post gets close to launch, Kellogg’s talks to “El Sucre” (Felix Solis) in Puerto Rico and cuts off their sugar supply. So Marjorie goes through Nikita Khruschev (Dean Norris) to get Cuba’s sugar, which gets JFK (Bill Burr) involved. There’s a “Mad Man” bit, with Jon Hamm and John Slattery giving the Kellogg’s product an inappropriately sexy French name, so Kellogg’s goes back to the dumpster-diving kids, who tell them knowingly, “Look, the name is the game, people.”

I’m like: Wait, weren’t you kids literally diving into dumpsters for an unnamed product?

More subplots. Marjorie Post and Edsel Kellogg are secretly in love, Von Braunhut and Chef Boy Ardee raise an odd Sea Monkey/ravioli lifeform together, Schwinn is killed in a toaster-pastry experiment, and the actors playing the cereal mascots—including Hugh Grant as Thurl Ravenscroft/Tony the Tiger—not only strike, they storm Kellogg’s headquarters, Jan. 6-style.

Too much, and not enough of it is funny.

Citizen Seinfeld
But the dumpster-diving girl is correct: the name is the game, people, in art and in life. Kellogg’s product was originally called “Pop-Tart,” Post’s was named “Country Squares,” and the former had it all over the latter. It won the space race. 

We get wrap-ups. The Univac is sent to Vietnam (cue unfunny “Apocalypse Now” parody), the Milk Syndicate is implicated in JFK’s assassination (seriously unfunny), and Bob goes on “The Tonight Show” and is shot by Andy Warhol (Dan Levy), angry that Pop-Art is being co-opted. None of this made me laugh.

What did? Stan suddenly becoming a hippy, inventing granola, and pulling out of Dodge in a VW Van. OK, it wasn’t any of that. It was Edsel yelling after her, “Get a job!” Gaffigan again.

Serious question: Is Jerry Seinfeld’s trajectory the Charles Foster Kane trajectory? Rising to unprecedented fame, wealth and power, and all he longs for are childhood playthings. For Kane, it was the red sled; for Jerry, everything in that red bandana.

Maybe that’s all of us. No matter where life takes us, even to great success, we just want to go back.

“Great men, great nations, have not been boasters and buffoons but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it.”

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Posting for no reason.

MUSK: People were asking me in California, “Are you worried about a nuclear cloud coming from Japan?” I am like no, that's crazy. It is actually, it is not even dangerous in Fukushima. I flew there and ate locally grown vegetables on TV to prove it. ... Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed but now they are full cities again.

TRUMP: That's great, that's great.

MUSK: It is not as scary as people think, basically. ...

TRUMP: We will have to rebrand it. We will name it after you or something.

-- Part of the interview/conversation between Elon Musk and Donald Trump last night on Musk's platform, X, which was initially marred by technical issues, and subsequently marred by the two of them talking. The above is taken from The Independent, which adds, for those like Musk who need it, “America dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, destroying the city and killing 140,000 people. Three days later, it nuked Nagasaki and killed 70,000 more people.” Tom Nichols of The Atlantic wrote in response: “I am as big a fan of nuclear power as there is but this is a completely dumbass thing to say.”

WARNING: SPOILERS

Is there a more incongruous moment in a guy’s-guy WWII movie than the opening to this one?

It’s a rain-soaked night in Nazi-occupied Europe and we’re witnessing a traffic jam as officials search and question cars trying to get through. Our titular hero, Pvt. Kelly (Clint Eastwood), sits in a Jeep, seeming to hold a German officer hostage. An official with some authority comes by, barking orders, sees Kelly, does a doubletake, and starts shouting in German. That’s when Kelly guns the engines, crashes through a barrier, and as the chase begins, on the soundtrack, we get a military drumroll that shifts, subtly, quickly, and absurdly, into the worst kind of 1970 fluff-rock imaginable—a song called “Burning Bridges” by Mike Curb Congregation. Imagine if the Brady Kids were overtly Christian. Imagine if Up With People wrote their own songs.

Friends all tried to warn me but I held my head up high
All the time they warned me but I only passed them by
They all tried to tell me but I guess I didn't care
I turned my back and left them standing there

In subsequent verses a friend tries to find the dude a job, a girl throws him a party, and years pass before he realizes “I guess I should have listened to my friends.” Reminder: This is playing over scenes in Nazi-occupied France. In a Clint Eastwood movie! With Telly Savalas!

And they repeat it. Good god. The song is reprised halfway through and over the closing credits. You know that look Clint Eastwood gives other characters in movies—like he can’t believe this idiot is still talking? That.

Hockey puck
A lot changed in this movie during its inception. The movie’s original title was “The Warriors” and its original director Don Siegel. It originally had an overt anti-war, or anti-Army, or anti-corporate message—part of the appeal to Eastwood, believe it or not, who never thought much of his time in the service. Plus its studio, MGM, changed hands two times during its making. Per Richard Schickel’s excellent Eastwood bio:

The picture had been green-lighted by a management team headed by Robert O’Brien. But then control of the studio’s parent company, Loewe’s Inc., was acquired by Edgar Bronfman Sr. and Seagrams, whose new managers tried to turn this into a backlot picture. … By the time they were in active production, controlling interest in the studio had been acquired by Kirk Kirkorian, the corporate raider, who installed James Aubrey as head of production.

Meaning the people in charge at the end didn’t have a stake in the final product. Which might explain Mike Curb Congregation.

It’s still a liked movie. Among the movies Brian G. Hutton directed, it’s tied with an earlier Eastwood flick, “Where Eagles Dare,” for highest IMDb user rating: 7.6. Nothing else Hutton directed is above 7.0. (Neither of those Eastwood flicks deserves that high a rating, btw.)

I certainly like the idea of combining a war flick with a heist flick; and it’s a helluva cast— particularly for someone like me who came of age in the 1970s. This might’ve been my explanation of the movie back then:

Near the end of WWII, Dirty Harry finds out there’s a ton of gold in a bank across enemy lines, so he convinces Kojak and the hockey puck guy from Dean Martin roasts to use the Army to get it—and without the knowledge of Gen. Archie Bunker. But the movie version of Hawkeye Pierce overhears, and he’s a tank guy, which they’ll need, and he brings along his right-hand man—Murray Slaughter from “Mary Tyler Moore.” Oh, the “Love American Style” guy is in for the ride, too.

Add Lt. Escobar from “Chinatown,” Uncle Leo from “Seinfeld,” James Dean’s brother from “East of Eden,” and Harry Dean Stanton, and you’ve got yourself a party.

It takes a while to get that party going, but once they’re moving it’s not bad—though, to be honest, Eastwood doesn’t have much to do. You know who pops? Telly Savalas and Don Rickles. They should’ve done nothing but war movies (or heist movies) for the rest of the ’70s. Rickles is the supply sergeant—perfect—while Savalas is the Master Sergeant who doesn’t want to endanger the men. Savalas had a thing. You believe him in the role.

You know who I didn’t believe? Donald Sutherland’s Sgt. Oddball. Per IMDb trivia, the movie has a ton of verisimilitude: this gun is accurate, that tank maybe, they’re part of the 35th Infantry in Sept. 1944 near Nancy, France, which is exactly where the 35th Infantry was in Sept. 1944. And then they give us this hippy with long hair and a beard who talks about negative vibes and calls everyone “baby.” What the hell? And what accent is Sutherland doing anyway?

The enemy is less Nazis than the U.S. military high command. We know Kelly was a lieutenant who was scapegoated and busted back to private, and we know the 35th is led by the nephew to Gen. Colt (Carroll O’Connor), a guy named Capt. Maitland (Hal Buckley), who is spending his time trying to ship a yacht back home. Meanwhile, they cut a German tank commander in on the action. He’s more them than American brass.

My favorite scene is the one where Gen. Colt and his immediates overhear Kelly’s team making their way to Clermont, France, each paranoid that the other is going to beat them to the gold, and Colt takes this as the opposite of what it is—a splendid example of the American fighting spirit and rushes to join them. That made me laugh out loud.

I was intrigued by the “Good, Bad and Ugly” homage, too. Near the end, three of our principles, including Kelly, guns at the ready, face off against the remaining Tiger tank in the village square, while a very Ennio Moricone riff plays on the soundtrack. It makes no sense within the film—why risk their lives in this manner?—but outside the film it’s fascinating. We’re only three years removed from Leone’s film, but apparently the scene was already iconic enough to allow for this. And the scene is only grown in stature.

Most everything goes according to plan: the townspeople think they’ve been liberated, the Gen. arrives to take credit, our guys make off with the dough.

I would’ve liked the more overt antiwar message, though. Per Schickel:

In general Clint felt [after extensive edits] that the film’s comedy now played too broadly, and specifically he was dismayed at the excision of a transition scene between the picture’s second and third acts in which, as he recalls, he and the character played by Telly Savalas “just sort of summed up the philosophy of these loose ends, and what the war had done to them.” He goes so far as to say that “its soul was taken out, a little bit of its soul was robbed.”

Probably helped it get robbed at the box office, too. In 1970, after 5-7 years of Vietnam playing on the nightly news, America was ready for antiwar messages, and flocked to see them. The third highest-grossing film of 1970 was Robert Altman’s “M*A*S*H,” grossing more than $500 million, adjusted for inflation; the fourth, “Patton,” grossed $350+ million. “Kelly’s Heroes,” despite its cast and star, didn’t make the top 25.

More than ever
Has anyone done a study of how WWII movies changed over the years? How they looked during the war, in its immediate aftermath, and during the Cold War? How Vietnam changed them and how Reagan changed them back? I see there are books out there, I’m just curious if any are good. 

And does anyone know much about Mike Curb? A cursory look around the Web, and on newspapers.com, reveals he was not only an anodyne Christian rocker but such a conservative force that he wrote Nixon’s 1972 campaign song, “Nixon Now (More Than Ever).” He and the Congregation performed at the Jan. 1973 inaugural, along with the likes of Pat Boone, the Les Brown Orchestra, Ray Stevens and Hank Williams, Jr. And then he ran for lieutenant governor of California! And won! That was in 1978, just as the conservative movement was gathering steam, but Curb couldn’t turn it to his advantage. In 1982 he shot too high, running for governor but losing the GOP nom to George Deukmejian. He tried for looie again in’86. Lost.

Per Wiki, he got involved in auto racing. He bought the house Elvis lived in before Graceland. He became a philanthropist. Most online bios sing his praises. The singing sounds like “Burning Bridges.”

Mike Curb (at Yamaha upright) and his Congregation sing the title song. Nothing speaks to Nazi-occupied Europe more.

“I've spoken to the biggest crowds. Nobody's spoken to crowds bigger than me. If you look at Martin Luther King, when he ... uh ... did his speech, his great speech, and you look at ours, same real estate, same everything, same number of people—if not we had more. And they said he had a million people and I had 25,000 people. But if you look at the exact same picture, and everything's the same because the fountains, the whole thing all the way back to ... uh ... from Lincoln to Washington, and you look at it, and you look at the picture, of his crowd, my crowd, we actually had more people.”

-- Donald Trump, two days ago, in a rare press conference. All of the above was cleaned up by the mainstream media for public consumption, of course. If a Democrat slips up, they're hounded for months. This kind of B.S. by a Republican, particularly this Republican, and the MSM polishes the turd until they can see their faces in it. They're cowards. They've been cowards with Republicans since Agnew, or maybe Reagan, but they're always looking for ways to not be “the liberal media,” which they haven't been for decades and decades. They're the opposite of that. Dems get held to tight standards, while Republicans (particularly this Republican) suffer from the soft bigotry of low expectations.

FURTHER READING/VIEWING:

• Tom Nichols, “The Truth About Trump's Press Conference: His obvious emotional instability is frightening, not funny,” in The Atlantic
• Lawrence O'onnell, “The Last Word,” MSNBC

Came across part of a speech he gave in Montana this past week and it's more of the same gibberish: 

“The numbers are much worse. They've let an invasion of our country happen. But I took a look. [Mimes taking a look.] And because I took that look, I mean, what are the chances of that? So I just want to thank everybody, cause, I tell you what, the level of love and compassion and all of the things that we all went through—that was a terrible thing—and we're going to be very careful. We have to be very careful.”

My kingdom for a serious media. 

“People ask me, since I am such a strong anti-pacifist, how I can have this admiration for a pacifist [like Martin Luther King, Jr.]? Well, I have a simple answer. ... King's doctrine of nonviolent resistance is not pacificism. Pacificism of really the classical kind is where you are concerned about your own purity and not responsibility. And the great ethical divide is between people who want to be pure and those who want to be responsible. And I think King has shown this difference.”

-- Reinhold Niebhur, as recounted in Taylor Branch's “Parting the Waters: America in the King Years,” pg. 830

I wrote this down in a notebook 40 years ago but today it pops for me because purity is the issue I have with so many on the left. They want to be pure. The littlest thing is wrong with the candidate, and “Oh, can't have that,” and out they go. They don't fight for them. Bye, Al Franken. Meanwhile those on the right want power. That is the great political divide of the last 10-20 years: purity by any means vs. power by any means. In that dynamic, particularly with purity shooting its own, power wins. Me, I like the responsible. Joe Biden is responsible, Kamala Harris is responsible, Tim Walz. And Donald Trump is about as irresponsible a person as has ever existed.