“The Anderson Tapes” is a weird ass movie. Sorry to be profane, and I intend it partly as a compliment, but weird ass is simply the best way to summarize Sidney Lumet’s 1971 adaptation of a 1970 Lawrence Sanders novel that often feels like it’s two movies in one. In one movie you have safe-cracking savant John “Duke” Anderson (Sean Connery) released from prison after a decade and rather than even trying to go straight, or even trying to act like he’s going to go straight, just goes straight to see girlfriend Ingrid (Dyan Cannon) who is being kept, in a manner of speaking, by some wealthy so and so in a luxurious apartment that Anderson immediately declares his intention to rob. No one in Anderson’s crew emerges into a character of any real substance (although young Christopher Walken’s unconventionality is already fully electric), and neither does Ingrid, for that matter, though that’s at least in part by design, with Connery deliberately funneling a deep cynicism, it not outright nihilism, through his charming exterior. “It’s dog-eat-dog,” he declares in making a pitch to an aspirant member of his crew, not realizing he’s the one on the menu as this heist film gradually becomes a comedy caper, a deadpan comedy caper, that is, as the burglary becomes a slow-moving disaster.
Though the first movie is a little abstract in how it evokes the sensation of the heist being told to us after the fact through a series of police interviews, a half-hearted device that makes a true impact, the second movie is much more abstract by essentially being a non-narrative one. When Anderson departs prison, he flips off the security camera, thinking he’s finally free from always being watched, though life on the outside features no less surveillance even if, like so many schmucks, he remains blissfully unaware. Every member of his crew, and Ingrid too, are being surveilled by different factions for various reasons, suggested in eerie squeaks and squiggles on the soundtrack and evoked in myriad shots through windows and from behind walls. Its effectiveness is limited, though, not so much in how it never converges with the main plot in the way we might be conditioned to expect but in how Lumet never quite makes clear if this surveillance state is meant to underline the futility of the heist – of anything – in the first place or if the unexpected undoing of Anderson and his crew is meant to mock it. What’s more, the concluding joke almost seems to require what would have been knowledge in 1971 of the Nixon White House tapes, only installed in the Oval Office a few months before “The Anderson Tapes” was released, which makes me wonder if the seeming contemporary critical apathy was in part related to never being able to know when the future is sending smoke signals.
Virtually since the beginning, the length of award show speeches has been seen as a quote-unquote problem. When Adrien Brody intoned for five minutes and thirty-six seconds at this year’s Oscars upon winning Best Actor, he broke the five minute and thirty second record that had stood for 82 years, set by Greer Garson for winning Best Actress at the 15th Academy Awards. Garson prompted the ceremony to enlist a 45-second rule for all speeches going forward, one lightly enforced through the years with play-off music that recipients have mostly obeyed to varying degrees. Brody essentially shouted the playoff music down, as did Julia Roberts when she finally won in 2001. Brody’s speech was the “Speed 2” cruise ship plowing into the deck, if inadvertently revealing in its incredible false modesty, but Roberts’s was fabulous, living out loud a moment she knew she would never have again, and going to show how the quality of Oscar speeches always evens out.
Peruse The Hollywood Reporter’s list of the 10 longest Oscar speeches and they more than split the difference between good and bad. Halle Berry’s was as good as it gets; Garson’s is so much better than the legend suggests; Matthew McConaughey’s was taking a ride on a glorious rainbow. And unless the show has something go terribly wrong, like 2022, or 1989, those speeches tend to be what are remembered, and what the royal we want, whether we consciously realize it or not. At the 2008 Oscars when host Jon Stewart brought Marketa Irgolva back out in 2008 to finish her speech for Best Original Song after her mic got cut, he was crystallizing the purpose of these shows in the first place; it was about her commentary, not his.
Alas, as ratings for the Oscars have dwindled with lengthy run times frequently cited as a culprit, the producers have homed in on the awards and winners themselves as the culprits, as if determining the problem with steak frites is the steak and the fries, shunting certain categories off-air and taking ever more dubious and/or drastic measures to shorten speeches. Jimmy Kimmel gave away a jet ski to the person who gave the shortest speech in 2018 while in 2013 the “Jaws” Theme by John Williams was employed as the play-off music. That last one no doubt looked good on paper but came off in poor taste in real life when the dun dun soundtracked someone giving heartfelt thanks. This is not exclusive to the Academy Awards, however. At the most recent Tony Awards, Cynthia Erivo sang off winners instead of playing them off, which just made something awkward to begin with even more so, while at the 2024 Emmy Awards, host Anthony Anderson enlisted his mother to intercede on overlong acceptance speeches. The latter was truly cruel and unusual punishment, a nominally cute bit that turned absolutely everyone into losers.
Impossibly, the 2025 Emmy Awards on Sunday night saw the Anderson bit, raised it, and made it worse. Host Nate Bargatze pledged $100,000 to the Boys & Girls Club of America with the key caveat that every winner had only 45 seconds to speak, and for every second a winner went over their allotted time, $1,000 would be removed from the donation while for every second a winner went under, $1,000 would be added. This was all “helpfully” tracked by a graphic that popped up on screen alongside the talking victor. There was conjecture that CBS intended this to limit political commentary, but in winning Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series for “Hacks,” Hannah Einbinder still got her two cents in, proving it was doable, and anyway, while I certainly don’t doubt CBS’s fecklessness, as demonstrated, speech-shortening has been a recurring problem long before American democracy was going down the toilet in full view much to the chagrin of so many shut up and act ostriches.
The charity device wasn’t mere cringe, it was godawful. You could sense the producers sensing it because when Cristin Milioti made the whole night with her jubilant 90-second speech upon winning for Best Actress in a Limited Series for “The Penguin,” the money graphic did not appear to visually step on her joy. The gimmick caused so many winners to rush, speedreading as if making it under 45 second was the whole point, the Emmy Awards recalibrated as a goddam game show. It was enough to want to tell the hung-out-to-dry Bargatze to fuck off, as John Oliver did in accepting the award for Outstanding Variety Series, and which made me wonder, was this the post-modern point, to incite a reaction? If so, Oliver’s comment was bleeped, defeating that possible point too.
Though Bargatze’s bit was generally decried across the Internet, Slate chimed in with its contractually obligated counter take, tying it back to the “near-Sisyphean task to make awards shows interesting these days.” And that itself is an interesting word – interesting. That’s the word Emmys producer Dionne Harmon used about the woebegone Anderson’s play-off mama bit in 2024: “an interesting twist.” But since when are award shows are supposed to be interesting? They are supposed to be celebratory and stately but not necessarily in and of themselves interesting; the art and the artists they’re celebrating are what is supposed to be of interest. Somewhere along the way, though, award shows began, to paraphrase The New Yorker’s perturbable Richard Brody, apologizing for what they fundamentally are in the first place.
If the award show format itself is the problem for modern award show producers then maybe move the Oscars and Emmys and Tony’s to streaming where those of us persisting award show enthusiasts can enjoy them for what they are without so many attempts to contrive phony interest, or maybe just surrender, do away with the format altogether, and announce the winners in individual Tik-Tok bits. But if award shows are to remain on primetime TV, then can we please all agree to continue the 45 second speech with inferred wiggle room and do away with undermining so many moments in the sun with lame gags trying to speed them up? I’d like to think we could return to that happy medium of old, though just like the three-person NBA announcing booth, I fear award show producers have convinced themselves they can still reinvent the wheel.
Richard Osman’s 2020 novel “The Thursday Murder Club” succeeded by impeccably blending playful murder mystery with thoughtful matters of life and death given the eponymous quartet of London pensioners solving cold cases in the jigsaw room of their posh retirement home Coopers Chase. The cinematic version, alas, directed by Chris Columbus is neither playful nor thoughtful; it’s flat; it has, unfortunately, Netflix written all over it. Katy Brand and Suzanne Heathcote’s adapted screenplay turns the quartet, each one a fully formed individual in the novel, into what is essentially the four-person rock and roll band from “Almost Famous,” Stillwater, with two members brought way up in the mix (Helen Mirren’s Elizabeth and Pierce Brosnan’s Ron) and the other two (Ben Kingsley’s Ibrahim and Celia Imrie’s Joyce) just along for the ride. And that might be fine. Adaptations must make choices, after all, about what goes and what stays and what changes. But then, why make Joyce’s introduction to the group the narrative starting point if you’re going to reduce her to mere cake-baking comic relief? Is there a three-and-a-half-hour cut? (I don’t want to see it.)
This odd sidelining of Joyce and Ibrahim also underlines “The Thursday Murder Club’s” most significant problem: the titular group never feels like one. Columbus evokes no real chumminess between them, never makes it seem as if they are gleefully in on something together, and never invites us, the audience, through those figurative clubhouse doors either. And though the emergent mystery ties back to saving Coopers Chase from dastardly intentions to destroy it, the retirement home never comes alive either, rendered not so much as a lively community but just a series of well-lit rooms. Just as the whole movie feels like an outline waiting for the real one, so does Coopers Chase feel like contrived images from a senior living brochure. And though there is a rather substantial change the film makes to the book’s conclusion, one that has apparently thrown many of the novel’s fans into a tizzy, I hardly felt worked up given how little any of this is made to count in the first place.
I had not seen the seminal dad movie “The Hunt for Red October” since I saw it with my dad on home video in the early 90s, and I had forgotten just how much the recent “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning” cribbed from it. In John McTiernan’s cinematic adaptation of Tom Clancy’s best-selling book, CIA analyst Jack Ryan (Alec Baldwin) suspects that when Soviet submarine commander Ramius (Sean Connery) goes rogue with a nigh undetectable new class of underwater warship, he is not seeking to transform the Cold War into a hot one but to defect. Granted three days by the National Security Advisor (Richard Jordan) to prove his theory, Ryan seeks out the Red October in the North Atlantic to confirm its true intent by way of an American submarine by way of an American aircraft carrier just as in the eighth M:I movie, IMF agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) seeks a sunken Soviet submarine in the Bering Sea by way of an American submarine by way of an American aircraft carrier. Ethan Hunt, however, skews closer to a superhero, and if subsequent Jack Ryans could skew that way too, I had also forgotten the jocularity of Baldwin’s pace-setting performance, truly playing an ordinary analyst rather than a savior-like agent. And given that Ryan wants to bring home a teddy bear to his daughter as much as he wants to prevent WWIII, no wonder desk bound dads everywhere loved this movie so much.
Clancy’s novel was published in 1984 when the Cold War was still in effect, but by the time the movie was released in March of 1990, the Soviet Union was dissolving. In that way, Ramius defecting, with he and Ryan cast as allies, feels like a premonition more than a hopeful wish, underlining what was playing out in real time. Then again, rewatching this conclusion now, with the pathetic American President kowtowing to a Russian one hellbent on resurrecting a USSR-like empire, if not occasionally outright copying his playbook, colors it in a whole new light. (It’s quite a quirk of history that the Political Commissar aboard the Red October that Ramius is forced to kill to keep his plans quiet is named…Putin.) “The Hunt for Red October” might lay America’s semi-self-inflated role as global peacekeeper on thick, in a way that no doubt would make some cringe, but at a moment when it can feel as if The Great Experiment might be failing, Ryan telling Ramius “welcome to the new world” hit me hard, man.
That “The Hunt for Red October” lacked real world Cold War overtones upon its release only emphasizes John McTiernan’s supreme command of craft. The screenplay might be laden with exposition, but McTiernan’s frequently moving camera still seems to be telling the story itself by nudging us toward characters who are about to matter and leading us toward details and events about to matter. What the underwater effects lack, meanwhile, is more than made up for in how the action sequences are composed by McTiernan and editors Dennis Virkler and John Write to illustrate how these vessels are merely extensions of the men running them. That’s the true subject of “The Hunt for Red October,” not geopolitics, not even underwater warships; dudes.
There might not be enough machine gun fire, broken limbs, or dudes thrown through windows to qualify as a Movie for Guys Who Like Movies, but still; McTiernan, his producers, and casting director Amanda Mackey assembled a magnificent stable of dudes. There is Baldwin, of course, at his youngest and frothiest, and there is also Sam Neill as Ramius’s right-hand man exuding the right-hand man loyalty that sends the hearts of assistant coach-loving dudes everywhere aflutter. Courtney B. Vance is a sonar operator, meaning he spends most of the movie just listening to sonar, and yet in his unique casual cool reminded me that, between this and “Cookie’s Fortune,” he should have been a full-fledged movie star. Scott Glenn as the American sub commander is magnetic in how he quietly holds each pressure-packed moment in his utterly impassive face before calmly making a split-second decision. (Fred Dalton Thompson is definitely a dude as commander of the USS Enterprise, but the truth is, in a similar role in “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning,” Hannah Waddingham out-dudes him.) And though what Connery says (in his native brogue, proving once again that movie accents don’t have to matter) as Ramius often carries great weight, what’s more impressive is how the actor carries a lifetime of experience in his air. The script is coy with Ramius’s politics, perhaps not to offend any delicate American sensibilities, and that feels like a checkmark, but Connery makes up for it by maintaining a genuinely moving dignity of purpose.
Friend of the Blog Jaime recently forwarded me a Los Angeles Review of Books piece from March by Clayton Purdom dissecting the oeuvre of Michael Mann, the greatest living American filmmaker, and the work-obsessed men who dominate it. Mann Men, Purdom deems them, tracing them and their professional dedication from James Cann’s titular “Thief” (1981) all the way up to Adam Driver’s eponymous Enzo “Ferrari” (2023). I especially appreciated the latter. Maybe because “Ferrari” was a movie of an all but extinct breed, one in which Mann specializes, the big budget Hollywood art film, it seemed to get lost in the year-end shuffle with so many other releases but was deserving of the rigorous analysis Purdom provides. Indeed, the whole piece is exhilarating, and electrically written, and exhaustive. And yet, in devoting over 4,000 words to Mann’s oeuvre, it never once mentions not just my personal favorite Mann movie but my favorite movie period, “Last of the Mohicans” (1992).
Purdom might reference “Collateral” (2004) as a popcorn movie, but “Last of the Mohicans” is by far Mann’s poppiest movie. It is vintage Hollywood, as Charles Taylor put in his definitive take on the film for Salon, reduced to the most primal of emotions which is, perhaps, why it doesn’t lend itself as readily to academic-styled analysis. Based as it is on James Fenimore Cooper’s novel, in a colonial America where indolence, to paraphrase the memoirs of Margaret Moncrieffe Coghlan, was totally discouraged, Mann’s film adaptation, based in part on the 1936 film adaptation, is in its way about industrious men in pre-industrial America. The two Mohican Indians, Chingachgook (Russell Means) and Uncas (Eric Schweig), and their adopted son Hawkeye (Daniel Day-Lewis), are hunters and trappers and you’re telling me that ain’t work? Living in 1757 by trapping is harder than cracking safes and winning the Mille Miglia put together.
“Last of the Mohicans” begins, in fact, with the three men hunting an elk. In Native American culture, the killing of an animal is something sacred, which we see in how the three men honor and give thanks to the vanquished beast, and which we see even more in how Mann evokes the hunt itself, venerating these men and their work with a sweeping visual and musical grandeur. Mann conveys their cooperative effort with nary a word, merely the instinctual understanding of a hundred similar hunts, foreshadowing so many ensuing workmanlike scenes, like when they track a Huron war party and rescue a British regiment, chasing off the enemy with a practiced, reverential ease. When Hawkeye dispatches one Huron warrior in hatchet-to-hatchet combat, you sense the choreography of the movie giving way to the choreography of the character, like our hero knows the moves of his opponent in advance. In these moments Day-Lewis exudes Jada Pinkett Smith’s line from “Collateral” that Purdum quotes: “Take pride in being good at what you do?” Indeed, the famed commitment DDL brings to all his roles effortlessly blends with the commitment Hawkeye brings to what he does and the climactic moment when Hawkeye shoots two muskets at once feels less like an exclamation than a variation of Purdum’s cited Mann Men creed: act like you’ve simultaneously shot two muskets before.
Of course, the Mohicans also help rescue the Munro sisters, Cora (Madeleine Stowe) and Alice (Jodhi May), with whom Hawkeye and Uncas, respectively, will fall in love. They might have intended to trap during the fall and winter in Kentucky, but something happens, to quote Susan Sarandon in (forgive me) “Elizabethtown” that is not part of the plan. And maybe that’s why after all these years, “Last of the Mohicans” is still my number one Mann movie. It’s a significant irony, after all, that a guy hung up on what people do is my favorite filmmaker when few things matter less to me than what I or people at a dinner party do. (Tell me your favorite color, your favorite regional barbecue, your favorite Canadian province, anything else!) And so, rather than maintain discipline of a rigid professional code in the manner of most Mann men, Hawkeye eschews his work’s strictures to throw himself headfirst feet-first over the falls of passion. Sometimes, brother, those beaver pelts can wait.
If ever there were a middling thriller that deserved the meritorious distinction of More Than Middling, it is Nick Rowland’s “She Rides Shotgun,” taking the sensational and/or sentimental set-up of a pre-teen girl on the run with her dad from bad dudes and imbuing it with real warmth and weight. Based on a novel by Jordan Harper, who co-wrote the screenplay with Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski, it’s as if one evening he watched “Commando” (1985), itself a minor masterpiece of its own genre, in which a dad sets out to rescue a daughter taken hostage by warlords, and wondered, what if I tried to write this as a novel without winking? I haven’t read the book, but the movie succeeds, not simply through commitment but care, paying attention to its people, or at least, its two most important people. In fact, if “She Rides Shotgun” has a problem, it’s a nice problem in so much as its central relationship is so well drawn that everything else can’t help but pale in comparison.
“She Rides Shotgun” begins with 11-year-old Polly (Ana Sophia Heger) being picked up from school by her dad, Nate (Taron Egerton), her estranged dad, that is, which is not wholly communicated to us through dialogue but context clues like his jittery air and a car that has clearly been stolen. Indeed, in this introduction, the camera remains yoked to Polly’s point-of-view, foreshadowing how “She Rides Shotgun” prominently sticks to her perspective, refusing to make the audience omniscient for long stretches as we learn new information at the same time as her. When she phones Detective Park (Rob Yang) after seeing news on television about her disappearance, it’s striking how much we are in her same headspace, unsure if he really is someone she can trust. Nate, it turns out, has just been released from prison where he ran afoul of a white supremacist gang that now wants him and his family dead. And because the gang has its tenterhooks in the local police, Nate determines his only option is to pick up Polly and make a run for the border.
Rowland frequently deploys a handheld camera to evoke Polly’s POV, though the device never becomes overbearing in its destabilization, and still captures the feel of the massive and empty southwestern landscape which only makes this small girl feel that much smaller. Though it’s clear Polly has been forced to grow up in a hurry, more aware than oblivious adults might realize, she always feels true to her age as Rowland is careful to emphasize the last few embers of innocence still in the process of burning out. When Nate briefly seeks refuge with an old friend, the way the camera catches sight of Polly marveling over an illuminated fish tank before showing her perspective as she watches the adults talking effectively recounts these dueling ideas. Nate, meanwhile, is both a contrast to Polly and an echo of her, loving if emotionally immature but also her determined physical protector. And though the script embeds the idea of these actions as Nate’s shot at redemption, Egerton’s air makes it feel less obvious than that, like Nate is operating from nothing more than instinctual desperation.
For all its honesty, though, “She Rides Shotgun” still occasionally pulls a punch. A car chase with police in pursuit is punctuated by Polly’s almost ecstatic laugh, opening a can of worms that even this movie isn’t ready to explore, letting it lie there for a moment and then backing off. This sequence, though, scored to Denver Luna’s “Underworld,” demonstrates how Rowland gives the genre machinations some stylistic punch, furthered in John Carroll Lynch’s delicious villainous turn which feels as deliberately broad as Egerton and Polly’s feel purposely three-dimensional. And that’s what “She Rides Shotgun” can’t quite square. As the narrative begins crosscutting between Polly and Nate, Detective Park, and the gaggle of bad guys, it’s self-evident the latter two storylines don’t have the depth of the former, meaning that, oddly, the final product feels disproportionate despite being consistently good. Yet, even if these subplots pale to the main one, they enhance it, nevertheless, the world’s harshness juxtaposed against the straining hope of Polly. You see it best in the final scene, scored to synth-pop band CHVRCHES’ “Clearest Blue,” where the camera recounts Polly in close-up as she learns a new dance from some new friends, trying to shake it off, though Heger’s facial expressions suggest that shaking it off is not always so simple.
There is a phenomenon known to cinephiles as the film festival bubble in which a person attending a film festival, like, say, the Toronto International Film Festival, its 10-day run commencing today, becomes so ensconced in watching movies and thinking about movies that the outside world ceases to exist. I don’t attend film festivals anymore, preferring to watch less and let it digest more, but I do miss that bubble, surfacing afterwards, wondering (or not) what I missed. If, however, you dip into a film festival bubble of life these days in America where the number of atrocities occurring can feel limitless, and their scale can feel infinite, it can also feel as if you’re burying your head in the sand. But then, to not occasionally stop drinking from the unrelenting firehose is unhealthy. They’ve got us right where they want us, in other words, forcing us to try and strike a nearly impossible balance, one that Not-at-TIFF, our annual counter-programmed festival to Real TIFF, did its best to strike, sort of. After all, somewhere along the line, round about 2020, say, Not-at-TIFF’s mission statement merged Here are Some Cool Movies to Watch! with a Festivus-like Airing of Grievances.
11th Annual Not-at-TIFF Film Festival
Who’s Harry Crumb? Real TIFF 2025 opens with the Colin Hanks documentary “John Candy: I Like Me,” a tribute to the late Canadian hero, so Not-at-TIFF 2025 will open with a John Candy movie. The first 100 guests will receive free philodendrons, the legend Shawnee Smith will appear, as will Bonnie Tyler for a special post-screening performance.
Report to the Commissioner. 2025 marks the 50th anniversary of Real TIFF, and good for them, but rather than screen some old 1975 warhorse like “Dog Day Afternoon” to commemorate 50 years, let’s screen this down and dirty crime thriller. Because the way New York City looks in “Report to the Commissioner” is basically the way the President of the United States imagines every (blue) American city still looks today. Not that he would know, of course, because like Jack Donaghy refusing to leave his office after being mugged on The Tuxedo Begins episode of “30 Rock,” I imagine that His Imbecility hasn’t gone outside except to play golf since the Central Park Five.
King of Marvin Gardens. Speaking of the President, I just finished Mark Kriegel’s incisive book Baddest Man: The Making of Mike Tyson and was reminded of the outsized role His Imbecility played in the boxer’s ascension, including hosting the mammoth 1988 Michael Spinks fight at the Atlantic City Convention Hall which was attached to T*ump Plaza Hotel and Casino. In fact, Kriegel wrote, T*ump built a walkway between the two so that “high rollers” would not have to see the riff raff and “dilapidated boardwalk” of Atlantic City like the one presented in Bob Rafelson’s 1972 New Hollywood classic “King of Marvin Gardens.” I was reminded of the Tyson/Spinks showdown during the recent P*tin/T*ump summit in Alaska. After all, His Imbecility essentially turned this meeting with an alleged war criminal into a sporting event, including a flyover and a slogan, Pursuing Peace a la Tyson v Spinks being billed as Once and For All. And so, it was only appropriate that just as Tyson KO’d Spinks in 91 seconds, the Russian President essentially laid the American political tomato can out flat in what was tantamount to a minute and a half.
Reality. I would think Sydney Sweeney was a S1M0NE invented purely to feed the discourse if I had not already seen her immense talent on display elsewhere, like this exhilarating 2023 take on the Reality Winner story that was one of the best movies of 2023 and deserves to be seen far and wide. Sweeney spends most of the movie in cut-off jeans rather than regular jeans, so I hope that’s good enough for the pundits and thinkers.
Brain Donors. And because I’m doing it again, by which I mean making Not-at-TIFF too big a downer, here’s a palate cleanser. As “The Naked Gun” reboot has shown, audiences are starving for otherwise extinct 80s, 90s-style rapid fire comedies, and so here’s a deep cut, a 1992 Zucker Brothers-produced Marx Brothers homage with John Turturro riffing on Groucho. Rotten Tomatoes is a little suspicious of it, but I remember watching this on HBO at my best friend’s house and laughing my keister off.
Strange Brew. John Candy is not in this 1983 Canadian American cult classic, but Rick Moranis is, and when My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife and I were in Portland, Maine last month we encountered a mailbox with a Rick Moranis sticker plastered to it (see above). And I liked thinking of a whole host of Maine mailboxes with these same stickers. Be the change you want to see in the world, and this person wanted to manifest Rick Moranis back into the movies. And hey, it worked!
Nowhere to Hide. While I was not a fan of “Weapons,” I was a fan of “Weapons” providing a prominent role for Amy Madigan. More of that, Hollywood, please. It got me perusing Madigan’s filmography and in doing so, I discovered this action-thriller in which Madigan plays an ex-marine fending off evil military industrialists and Michael Ironside plays her survivalist brother and why was this not the biggest movie of 1987?
On the 8th day we rest, of course, and just watch some YouTube videos, like this one, which really brings back memories. This was the first George Strait song I ever knew because they played this commercial about a thousand times during college football games that year. And this occurs to me because the King of Country is receiving a Kennedy Center Honor, and why wouldn’t he be, described in that sharp-witted syntax of the Kennedy Center’s cockamamie chairman as “believed to be by millions of people to be just as good as you can get.” And though in this track Strait tells us that “you’ve got to have an ace in the hole, a secret that nobody knows,” the irony is that everybody knows Strait’s secret is remaining politically neutral. Mensch Mel Brooks nobly declined a Kennedy Center Honor that would have been presented by Dubya because he opposed the War on Terror, and though Strait could take the same tack and tell our burgeoning authoritarian to take a hike, as only an artist who would agree to be sponsored by Anheuser-Busch would know, you don’t get rich by sticking your neck out.
Small Town Santa. I’m sorry, but upon forcibly reviewing the Not-at-TIFF schedule, the T*ump administration’s special envoys to Hollywood demanded to include one movie and this title, starring America’s favorite I*E agent, is what they gave me. After all, The War on Christmas continues apace. (Don’t hold it against the blog. You don’t have to attend, that’s fine, because no matter what, we are required to report that all seats for this screening were filled.)
Gypsy 83. I have been dealing with living in America in 2025 by listening intensively to music of my old favorites. Bruce Springsteen, yes, but also my #1 favorite childless cat dog lady, Stevie Nicks, her solo stuff as well as her work in Fleetwood Mac but especially her contributions to “Tusk.” (This was only enhanced by reading, and loving, Andrew Porter’s SoCo-set new novel The Imagined Life in which Nicks’s music is essentially a supporting character.) And so, I felt so much shame and embarrassment that I only learned this year about the existence of this 2001 movie in which two Midwestern goths road trip to New York for an event called Night of a Thousand Stevies. Did I greenlight this in a dream?
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