September 5

“September 5” takes place almost exclusively inside an ABC Sports television control room on the eponymous day in 1972 at the Munich Summer Olympics when armed Palestinians took the Israeli contingent hostage. Seen predominantly from the viewpoint of Geoffrey Mason (John Magaro), overnight head of the control room, as he and his cohorts are forced to spontaneously adapt, the real-time sensation and fly on the wall aesthetic lend the feel of a docudrama. Indeed, ABC Sports President Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard) decrees that their job to “put the camera in the right place and...follow the story as it unfolds in real time. News can tell us what it means after it’s over.” In that way, “September 5” is less about the conflict than the coverage of it, the movie’s apolitical nature intertwined with its taut narrative, constant questions of what to show and what not to show, what to say and what not to say, often posed by the head of operations Marvin Bader (Ben Chaplin*). This is effective in so far as it goes but the limited perspective also means the larger idea of the broadcast establishing a dangerous precedent by transforming something grave into spectacle never fully resonates. To his credit, Magaro at least lets that knowledge flood his character at the end, of a new world the characters have all unwittingly entered, one that will have to be made a sense of in a movie called “September 6.”

*I was fortunate enough to see Ben Chaplin in 2018 at The Old Vic in London in Mood Music and my foremost takeaway was wondering why movies could not harness the kind of electricity he emanated on the stage. “September 5” does. 

The Room Next Door

What kind of hospital room has a designer olive green sofa? I suppose the same sort of hospital room that has a view of the Manhattan skyline and a festive floral painting on the wall, the sort of hospital room glimpsed in “The Room Next Door.” I am not nitpicking. No, director Pedro Almodóvar is nothing if not the master of modern melodrama, and though we tend to think of melodrama as an exaggeration of characters, emotions, and situations, in his hands, melodrama is an exaggeration of stuff too. That exaggerated stuff takes on an almost spiritual dimension in Almodóvar’s 25th feature film and first in the English language. After all, “The Room Next Door” is about a terminally ill woman, Martha (Tilda Swinton), who asks an old friend who has just re-entered her life, Ingrid (Julianne Moore), to accompany her to a luxurious rental pad in upstate New York to be take up position in the room next door where Martha plans to take control of her ultimate demise by taking her own life. 

Loosely based (by all accounts, I have not read it) on a Sigrid Nunez novel, Almodóvar is less concerned with the ethics of this dramatic situation, essentially starting from a place of death being a personal situation and a personal decision. Establishing that straight away frees “The Room Next Door” to focus on the morals, of one friend putting the genuine request of the other friend first, an idea that comes alive in Moore’s performance, a true blow burn, fiery but quietly fiery. The emergent investigative subplot with a skeptical detective (Alessandro Nivola) has nothing to do with ferreting out the truth, since we already know it, and more to do with Ingrid defining her own sense of decency and truth. More than that, even, “The Room Next Door” is a contrast of light and dark, of finding the desire to go on when it’s literally hopeless to. 

One might draw parallels to our current world. In fact, Almodóvar does, at least in one scene in which Damian (John Turturro), a friend and former lover to both women, notes an overriding sensation of hopelessness in the face of climate change only to be challenged by Ingrid in the face of what she’s seen being at Martha’s side. Given that it’s the only real time this subject is broached, and that Damian never feels as emotionally integrated to the narrative, it plays a little too much like a septuagenarian movie director decrying someone who is, forgive me, woke than a genuine philosophical back and forth. More’s the pity because otherwise, in the colorful world that “The Room Next Door” presents, in its finely calibrated production and costume design, from that olive green couch to Martha’s array of cozy sweaters and comfy looking soft pants, “The Room Next Door” innately expresses feeling comfort and joy in the moment and finding the wherewithal to meet your maker with the perfectly chosen lipstick on your face. 

Is it strange that the most moving moment to me in the whole movie was the one when Ingrid and Martha go to Lincoln Center to see a movie? And Ingrid suggests that, hey, they better go find some seats? If I had a terminal illness, I thought, I would probably want to go see a movie too. And I would probably want to have the best seats in the house.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Little Murders (1971)

Based on Jules Feiffer’s stage play, and marking Alan Arkin’s first feature film as director, “Little Murders,” currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, takes place in a New York City that no doubt exemplifies and amplifies the crime and decay of the 1970s but that also might feel to a modern viewer like a sardonic manifestation of the urban hellscapes imagined by every modern-day conservative and F*x News commentator, filled with incessant gunfire and muggings. Indeed, Patsy Newquist (Marcia Robb) wakes one morning not to birds chirping outside her window but to the sounds of a man being beaten up on the sidewalk just below. She calls the police, but they put her on hold and disconnect the call. So, she goes down there herself and intervenes, only for the beaten, Alfred Chamberlain (Elliott Gould), to wander away in a daze, not even acknowledging her. Once she manages to extricate herself from the same attackers, she confronts him over his cowardice, not that he's interested, telling her off and trying to flee in a hilarious long shot where she chases after him, hollering, “Are you really so down on people or are you just being fashionable?!” It’s a Meet Cute by force, triggering something like a dystopian Neil Simon rom com.

Alfred is a self-described “apathist,” lived in Gould’s hilarious checked-out countenance, and in the character’s occupation. A photographer, he sees the world through his camera lens, and what he photographs is literally excrement, one of merely many examples of satire that goes to the extreme. (“I’ve been shooting s*** for over a year,” he says, “and I’ve already won half a dozen awards,” suggesting how art can’t defeat a dystopia or perhaps suggesting how a dystopia deliberately has no art. Hmmmmmm.) Patsy, on the other hand, is an interior decorator, maintaining fastidious control over her own world as the one outside her door has gone to pieces. Then again, the constant phone calls she gets from stalker breathing on the other end of the line go to show such control is a mirage. Listen to the way she speaks, a comical cacophony at a high register impeccably playing off Alfred’s quieter decibels; she sounds like someone screaming on the inside but screaming on the inside on the outside.

Seeking to instill the same sort of desperate convention in Alfred’s life, she brings him home to meet her family and convinces him to get married. The wedding sequence is a riotous interlude, officiated by the pastor of First Existential (Donald Sutherland, momentarily commandeering the movie just as he famously commandeered “JFK”) not so much mocking the ritual of marriage as deconstructing it as a UC Berkeley Professor might, triggering a brawl that ends with him on the floor but still with a smile on his face, the inverse of Alfred, acceptance rather than apathy. True to his prognostication, their union brings no salvation, undone in the one moment when the movie’s brutal comedy gives way to sheer brutality. This leads to Alfred riding the subway in a bloodstained shirt, bringing to mind Tom Cruise in “Collateral” telling the story of the guy who dies on the MTA that “nobody notices.” That 2004 thriller portrayed violence as the logical outgrowth of humanity’s disconnection, but “Little Murders” concludes on an appropriately, explosively droll note portraying violence as perhaps the only thing that brings humanity together.

In Memoriam: Al Trautwig

Al Trautwig, who died in February at 68 from complications due to cancer, was born in New York, and died in New York, and went to college at Adelphi on Long Island, and in his long career as a sportscaster, he spent much of it working for the MSG network covering the Knicks, Rangers, and Yankees. His deep voice was the kind you could imagine cutting through the harsh wilds of New York talk radio, one that left little room for equivocation, for better or worse. As a Midwesterner, however, I only knew Trautwig for his national sports coverage. He started with ABC both on Wide World of Sports and its Olympics telecasts before transitioning to NBC went the Games took up permanent residence on that network. That meant he was at ABC in the final years under industry visionary Roone Arledge. It was Arledge who recast the Olympics in the image of “Bugler’s Dream,” and it was Arledge who invented Monday Night Football. In other words, Arledge did as much as anyone to transform televised sports into spectacle and entertainment, a belief manifestly instilled in his protégé. 

Al Trautwig preparing to eat sugarcane on live TV at the 1987 Sugar Bowl.

During my beloved Nebraska Cornhuskers’ brutal seven-year bowl-less streak between 2017 and 2023, I would instead watch one of their older bowl games on YouTube each December as a semi-satisfactory replacement. One of those games was the 1987 Sugar Bowl in New Orleans against LSU. Trautwig was sideline reporter for that one though rather than reporting in-game news as the role typically requires, he did things like literally eat sugar, check in on the Superdome’s air conditioning system, and interview, in a manner of speaking, LSU’s live Bengal tiger mascot. It’s all corny, even stupid, but I confess, it also evoked a kind of ballyhoo that once went together with bowl games, meaningless exhibitions, after all, that also tended to have their own parades and king and queen courts. Trautwig understood the Sugar Bowl as show business as much as a gridiron showdown. A year later at the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics, ABC aired a feature in which Trautwig sampled pastries in the Canadian host city, contemporarily criticized by both Sports Illustrate and the Los Angeles Times. Yet, if choosing pastries over live events might technically be wrong, I remember how much that sequence appealed to me as a kid, opening my eyes to how the Olympics were intended, underline, as a celebration of the host city itself as much as the feats of strength. 

Back then, the Olympics were in limited primetime telecasts and ABC and NBC still packaged many events in heavily edited segments, treating them as stories as much as real-time athletic events. In narrating these, as he did with cross-country skiing, or the cycling road race, Trautwig brought a sense of storytelling melodrama. That approach did not work when he was tasked with traditional play-by-play duties, and even in the settings where it was more suitable, it could rub people the wrong way. For ESPN the Magazine in 2000, Tim Keown lamented that Trautwig turned the inaugural women’s triathlon at the Sydney Summer Olympics “into the Peloponnesian War.” Keown wasn’t entirely wrong, but I remember that women’s triathlon. And though I never became an Olympics agnostic, during the strange period of my life between 1996 and 2000, I sort of lost sight of them, and I will never ever forget how that women’s triathlon and the way Trautwig presented it made the Games instantly click right back into place for me. What drew me to sports, and what continues drawing me still, is competition, yes, and feats of strength, sure, but also, a sense of theater. Trautwig saw sports as theater too. Not for nothing did he appear in the Jamaican bobsled team cult classic “Cool Runnings” (1993) as himself: “Go, Jams!” RIP. 

An Ode to Japanese Breakfast

In a 2023 CNN interview, Michelle Zauner was asked by Chris Wallace to explain the origin of her band name Japanese Breakfast. After all, Zauner was born in Seoul to a Korean mother and American father and subsequently raised in Eugene, Oregon, an upbringing she chronicled in her 2021 memoir “Crying in H Mart.” Maybe by then Zauner had grown tired of the query, not quite giving as full an answer as she has given in other places, just sort of vaguely referencing the pleasing imagery of a Japanese-style morning meal. Indeed, on the A24 podcast a year earlier, Zauner professed regret about her band name and how people reflexively assumed she was Japanese, wishing she could go back and rename it. Just as Patterson Hood has lamented, he never thought his own band Drive-By Truckers would get so big, and once it did, it was too late to change the moniker. And so, in a way Zauner’s own intention got the best of her. In speaking with Sandra Song of Teen Vogue in 2017, Zauner said she liked the name because it combined the familiar with the exotic. “I thought it would make people curious,” she said, “like ‘What is a Japanese breakfast?’”

I missed the first couple Japanese Breakfast albums, catching up with “Jubilee” in 2021 which, as it happened, was the year My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife and I had originally planned to visit Japan. The global pandemic delayed our visit, and we wound up going for two weeks last fall in 2024. All our vacations, long or short, abroad or in the states, make eating a focal point, but in a city like Tokyo, which has roughly the number of restaurants that Syracuse, New York has people, it became even more paramount. Given My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife’s diligent planning of lunches and dinners, and snacks in-between, we were content to keep breakfast simple by having it each morning at the hotel. And though one might not ordinarily think of a hotel breakfast buffet in the same sort of breathtaking terms as, say, a multi-course Kaiseki meal, like the one we had in Kyoto, Japanese breakfast, it turned out, took my breath away, nevertheless.

The layout brought Zauner’s description of her band name to life. Because upon entering the dining room, an American such as myself would first see a familiar western style breakfast spread off eggs, bacon, sausage, and toast. Take a few steps forward, however, and then turn to the left and there it was, an exotic Japanese style breakfast buffet of rice and miso soup and shumai and all manner of side dishes right beside it. I don’t want to go overboard here and say it was like going from black and white to Technicolor in “The Wizard of Oz.” I had some croissants and pastries, and some jam too, and the truth is, they were far better than you will get at virtually any breakfast buffet in the actual west, evoking that Japanese idea that whatever you are doing should be done to perfection. But it did feel like how the late Anthony Bourdain described Tokyo, as a whole window opening up into a whole new thing. “Mesmerizing. Intimidating. Disorienting.” That first morning I went for it, availing myself of almost everything, from candied sweet potatoes to fish cakes to salted cod roe to natto (i.e. fermented soybeans). You might deem it the Pacific Rim version of an unlimited steakhouse salad bar and, hey, I’m never one to shy away from the green marshmallow fruit salad, so why I wouldn’t try natto? (The natto was the one item that didn’t work for me. They can’t all be winners, can they?)

As I quickly learned, however, the real secret to Japanese breakfast was studying other Japanese people in the dining room and copying their moves. One morning, I noticed the Japanese man at the table next to ours finishing his breakfast with what appeared to be pudding in a jar. I went and got one for myself. This, it turned out, was Purin, a kind of Japanese flan, crème caramel or vanilla, take your pick, and for the rest of our trip, I finished every one of my breakfasts with Purin. I mean, c’mon, seriously, breakfast dessert: that’s advanced. Another morning, I saw a Japanese man at a table near ours stirring a raw egg into rice. This was Tamago kake gohan, which Zauner referenced in that CNN interview, though as a lover of porridge, I thought of it as egg porridge, sort of state-of-the-art oatmeal, often adding a little scallion and seaweed. Once I figured it out, I ate it every morning. It’s not hyperbole to say it changed my life.

Tamago Kake Gohan (e.g. egg porridge)

The sheer abundance of quality food in Japan is hard to imagine until you experience it. Restaurants stacked on top of restaurants stacked on top of restaurants. Noodles that were impossibly toothsome; broth so flavorful and rich I did as the Japanese did and brought the bowl right up to my mouth and slurped up every last drop; egg salad sandwiches from 7-Elevens that have no right to be that good; I had the best sushi experience of my life in Kyoto; I had grape soft serve twice! And yet, five months out, what I think about most, and what I miss the worst, is that egg porridge chased with Purin. All of which is to say, once you’ve had Japanese breakfast, believe me, you will never need to ask Japanese Breakfast why they are called that ever again.

The Sad Ballad of Kris Bryant

In Garrison Keillor’s 2001 novel “Love Me,” a best-selling author takes a job at The New Yorker only to be undermined with a severe case of writer’s block. The magazine, he learns, is a safe haven for the blocked, “a whole stable of writers who drew nice salaries to sit in their office and brood.” That stable includes J.D. Salinger, briefly featured in the book giving the narrator a white silk prayer scarf, claiming it helped. “Helped him do what?” the narrator wonders. In real life, Salinger’s writer’s block was proven to be something of a myth, but it makes for a potent image, nonetheless, someone as skilled as Salinger being waylaid by a psychological inability to do the thing he does so well. In a New Yorker piece, of all places, Steve Martin once noted that “writer’s block is a fancy term made up by whiners so they can have an excuse to drink alcohol.” Maybe. But Martin is first and foremost a comedian, and maybe he was just deflecting.

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There’s a way in which the Kris Bryant story has a happy ending. He was the National League Rookie of the Year in 2015, and he was the National League MVP in 2016, the same year he helped end the most infamous sports curse of all time with the Chicago Cubs, initiating the very out that ended it, in fact, with a big smile on his face. “Most of us thought that would become his staple season,” Joe Posnanski would write of Bryant while looking in the rearview mirror in 2019, “the kind of thing he would do every year for the next decade on his way to the Hall of Fame. And sure enough, in 2017 he had more or less the same season.” “The charmed baseball life of Kris Bryant,” Tom Verducci wrote in 2017, “seems an invention of nostalgia, ripped from the Chip Hilton novels of Clair Bee in the 1950s and ’60s.” Bryant had the story, and the ring, and the trophy, and a slew of statistics I could not hope to explain to back up his preeminent standing in the sport, but mostly, to me, he had that swing. I’m not against the advanced stats revolution in baseball, I’m just personally more compelled by aesthetic. 

“A top athlete’s beauty is next to impossible to describe directly. Or to evoke.” That’s David Foster Wallace in his immortal Roger Federer as Religious Experience essay from two decades ago and he’s right, of course. The beauty in Federer’s backhand slice, or in the way Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone runs are at once self-evident and beyond words. So, how can one hope to describe Kris Bryant’s swing? In his profile, Verducci wrote: “Bryant wants his levers to fire sequentially in perfect timing: front hip, hands, back hip and, lastly, bat head, finished off with tremendous extension through the ball with his long arms.” That, however, is a bit too technical for our taste. Verducci gets closer, or as close as anyone can, a few sentences earlier: “(Bryant’s) is the Swiss timepiece of swings: a carefully timed chronograph of angles, gears and levers.” It suggests not only how all the elements of Bryant’s swing in congress were so visually pleasing, but in an unintentional way, equated him with Federer, as if his swing were a Rolex the Swiss tennis star hawks, classic, stylish, built to last. On the other hand, as Gary Shteyngart noted in his 2017 New Yorker piece about being a watch geek, there is something unexpected melancholy about a time-keeping device permanently affixed to your wrist, keeping track of the unrelenting passage of hours, minutes, seconds, of “our own demise.” Indeed, there is a reason I keep mentioning Bryant’s swing in the past tense. 

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When Kris Bryant was traded in 2021 to the San Francisco Giants, it felt cruel, to the city of Chicago and to him. He lingered in the Wrigley Field dugout in what turned out to be his last game as a Cub, taking one last look, a romanticism that appealed to me almost as much as the swing, a player treating a business like a game. There was an ad for Midwest Express Clinic featuring Bryant at the Chicago Brown Line L stop that stayed up for almost a year after his departure, and though it was probably just CTA laziness, I liked imagining it as them thumbing their nose at the Ricketts Family. 

In truth, Bryant was already in competitive decline, going on the injured list in 2018 for the first time, recovering, playing well, if never at the level of his previous standards. People who track stats could see Bryant was now swinging under a red sky at morning, and when he signed to the Rockies in 2022 on a massive seven-year contract, it all fell apart, an ironic twist given that when he entered the league from the University of San Diego in 2013, he thought the Rockies would draft him, not the Cubs. In the Mile High City, the injuries have piled up, arthritis and bone spurs and a bad back. He hasn’t hit. His batting average last season was .218, the year before .233, which is, like, Al Newman level. The team hasn’t won, and if once Bryant would have been viewed as their deliverer, now he’s just viewed as a financial drain, a $182 million emblem of all that has gone wrong. Local sportswriter Sean Keeler compared him to a car that might as well be sold for parts, perhaps just a glib line in a glib column, or maybe more revealing, suggesting athletes as subhuman, more like a product. No wonder Bryant has received death threats. 

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Bryant’s story is not necessarily new. Famously, Chuck Knoblauch of the Yankees was afflicted with the yips, unable to throw from second base to first, causing his career to fizzle out. Chris Davis of the Baltimore Orioles mirrored Bryant in the twenty-tens, signing a big contract after considerable success and then going in the hitting tank. “I have no clue what I’m doing at the plate,” he told Stephanie Apstein in 2018 in a line that might as well have described my brief but abominable Little League career. My favorite baseball player Jerome Walton endured a career that was essentially one long, slow fade after a sensational Rookie of the Year season in 1989. But something about Bryant feels different, more sorrowful, and I think it’s the swing. 

In Johnny Tillotson’s 1960 song “Poetry in Motion,” the one that may very well have given birth to the phrase itself, he’s singing about the girl he loves, how she’s poetry in motion, how he loves her every movement, how there is nothing about her that he would change. But once a baseball batter struggles at the plate, it’s natural for him to tweak his swing, and that’s what Bryant did, fundamentally altering his so that what was once poetry in motion became something more like hapless hacking. It was on full, gruesome display in his first at-bat of the 2025 season, gone swinging on three pitches. It was J.D. Salinger who famously wrote that “Certain things…should stay the way they are. You ought to be able to stick them in one of those big glass cases and just leave them alone.” Baseball puts a great many things in big glass cases, if only we could have put Kris Bryant’s swing in one. 

Postscript: Since this post was published, the Colorado Rockies announced they were placing Kris Bryant on the 10-day injured list with lumbar degenerative disc disease. Sigh. Things cannot only get better. 

In Memoriam: Val Kilmer

In an industry that has always sought to capitalize on trends, copy formulas, and roll stars off an assembly line, Val Kilmer was an original. He appeared in some of the most seminal Movies for Guys Who Like Movies of all time while also appearing on posters tacked to the inside of lockers of so many teenage girls of the 80s and 90s, not merely a heartthrob but a sensitive heartthrob. He had the look of a movie star, but the soul of an eccentric. He also had an immense gift for total immersion in his roles, one that too often left Hollywood more mystified than mindful of how to harness his prodigious talent and yielded a peculiar career. In the twenty-tens, he was ravaged by throat cancer, permanently altering his voice, but recovered, only to die last week at 65 from pneumonia. What rattled around in my head upon reading the news wasn’t any line of Kilmer’s, though I have written extensively on those in the past, but the Crystal Gayle song famously recorded by Johnny Cash, “We Must Believe in Magic.” “Mad is the crew bound for Alpha Centauri / Dreamers and poets and clowns.” Val Kilmer was on his own mission, one often inscrutable to the rest of us.

Kilmer’s role as Iceman in the 80s pop culture classic “Top Gun” truly put him on the map even if as a graduate of Juilliard, he didn’t want the role. Harrison Ford didn’t want the role of Han Solo either, but Han Solo, despite Ford’s own trepidation, was a good part; Iceman was something else. It was small, only about ten minutes of screen time, and more than that, it was sorta weird. The character was a scold, a square even, lecturing Tom Cruise’s aptly named Maverick for unsafe flying practices. Yet, in the image Kilmer cut, and the air he evinced, he was somehow still cool, even weird in altogether different ways, so much pen-twirling and wristwatch-fiddling. You can take the boy out of Juilliard, but you can’t take Juilliard out of the boy. Despite all that air combat maneuvering, no one in “Top Gun” goes harder than Kilmer when he smacks his gum.

As good as he was in “Top Gun,” Kilmer was more at home in Oliver Stone’s “The Doors,” which is to say he could disappear himself completely into someone else, in this case by playing debaucherous semi-poet Jim Morrison. Stone said he should have won the Oscar, but he wasn’t even nominated (absurdly, he never was), probably because unlike most musician biopics, in which the transformation from actor to subject is on full display, Kilmer’s possession of the character was so complete you couldn’t really see the performance at all. In “Tombstone” you could see the performance, though it wasn’t Kilmer’s, it was the performative nature of the famed American gunfighter and gambler Doc Holliday (“Wyatt, I am rolling,” he says on a main street that may as well be a stage) that Kilmer is playing. He physically transformed by losing significant weight to evince Holliday’s tuberculosis, but he was doing so much more than that, juxtaposing the character’s slowly withering away with nothing less than a still zealous appetite for life. He was a tragic hoot.

If Kilmer could summon the countenance of Doc Holliday, however, he could not do the same for Batman, or Bruce Wayne, whichever, both, in Joel Schumacher’s first crack at the franchise in 1995. Kilmer essentially equated the role with the Batman suit itself, meaning there was no one’s skin for him to virtually crawl into. His other 1995 epic, however, Michael Mann’s second of three masterpieces in the 90s, “Heat,” was his sweet spot. He was on the poster with Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro, yes, but still free to give a character actor kind of performance, moody, soulful, and strange. It’s all there the first time we see him, his character buying explosives with a phony ID, mouth agape, edgy, and a little bit spacy, and just so innately electric.

It was also around this time, however, leading up to the infamous bomb “Island of Dr. Moreau,” that Kilmer’s reputation for being difficult truly took root. Was it fair? I can’t say for certain, of course, but it’s worth noting that in his 2020 memoir “I’m Your Huckleberry,” Kilmer does little to dispel this notion, mostly tapdancing around it. And though it squelched his run as a movie star, he did some of his most interesting work post-squelching, indies like “The Salton Sea,” and with prominent writer/directors like David Mamet in “Spartan” and Shane Black in “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.” In the latter, Kilmer gleefully played an inversion of a movie star role. That might have suggested a way forward, but instead a marked an end as he went to wander in the direct-to-DVD wilderness with occasional forays into the mainstream like the SNL movie “MacGruber,” or appearing in the latest Francis Ford Coppola self-financed joint.

That sounds like a sad career arc, but both his memoir and Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s essential NYT profile of him suggest just the opposite, that getting off the main path of stardom liberated him. Indeed, in “I’m Your Huckleberry” he writes of side trips being more revealing in his life’s journey than the main voyage. If the one-man Mark Twain show to which he dedicated himself for the better part of the twenty-tens might was a curiosity to the public, to him it brought genuine fulfillment. That’s what also made it ironic that his last film appearance was the 2022 sequel to “Top Gun,” the movie he never wanted to do in the first place, side trip and main voyage becoming one. In reprising the iconic part of Iceman, Kilmer’s real-life physical ailments were written into it, meaning that rather than disappear into the role, finally, after all those years, he put himself onscreen.