Pressure

There is a double meaning to the title of the new war movie “Pressure,” one glimpsed in the opening image of the clouds, referring not only to the inherent mental strain of the 1944 D-Day invasion but how that invasion was predicated on nothing less than an accurate weather report. That’s quite a task for director Anthony Maras and his co-screenwriter David Haig (who wrote the book on which it is based) to manage – rendering not only a movie with a foregone conclusion but a foregone conclusion hinging on feuding weathermen thrilling. They succeed by crafting an old-fashioned feeling kind of drama from performances and writing, making the meteorological details both palatable and dramatic, boiling everything down to Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower’s (Brendan Fraser) one key question: Do we go? And yet, as old-fashioned as “Pressure” feels, it also comes across modern in a funny kind of way by suggesting a wartime “Moneyball,” of all things, advancing the argument that when it comes to active combat, the data overrides wishful thinking.

“Pressure” is seen through the eyes of RAF Group Captain James Stagg (Andrew Scott), leaving his pregnant wife Liz (Tamsin Topolski) at home, one of the many little details that gets neatly folded into the overarching drama, summoned by Eisenhower (Brendan Fraser) to provide an accurate forecast ahead of the proposed June 5th date for D-Day. After all, they can only launch with good weather. Stagg, though, clashes immediately with Eisenhower’s American meteorologist, Colonel Irving P. Krick, played by Chris Messina with great relish, making for an obvious if no less enjoyable antagonist, often evincing the air of a haughty student in a debate competition. Krick will be proven wrong, of course, and part of the fun is in seeing the antisocial, pragmatic Stagg figure out how to access his inner emotionalist to reach a roomful of uniformed men who fancy themselves pragmatists, too, without quite realizing just how much they are guided by feelings.

As Eisenhower, Fraser embodies both the Supreme Commander’s tact and temper and, even more than that, the figurative weight of the world on his shoulders, conveying in equal measure how the crucial decision gradually becomes inevitable while still feeling impossible. Kerry Condon, meanwhile, in playing the part of Eisenhower’s private secretary, First Lieutenant Kay Summersby, continues to prove she is one of our most exciting current actors by beathing life into what could have been a stock character, a cool, patient turn evoking the old phrase it takes an army. When Kay remarks “Men are too fond of that word” after Eisenhower says Stagg is known as a genius, Condon’s line reading brings the house down.

For as much as Maras prefers to emphasize plot and performance, however, he does make room for one true filmmaking flourish. It occurs on that fateful Sunday, June 4th, right after Eisenhower is convinced to postpone the invasion. The day begins in the bright sunshine with all the major characters attending Sunday mass, save for Stagg, pointedly outside the church when the wind picks up, the clouds roll in, and the rain pours. If the cinematography and soundtrack lay it on a little thick, I still liked it, the forceful way in which Maras mocks not only the notion of praying for good weather but that all the military might in the world doesn’t get first say over the weather gods. It’s so satisfying that yet one more brief recreation of D-Day in its aftermath cannot help but pale in comparison, drawing an otherwise solid movie to a somewhat anti-climactic conclusion, though, by that time, I was already satisfied.

Choose Your Agamemnon

Brad Pitt’s gloomy, self-serious performance as Achilles, waiting around for two-and-a-half hours to die, embodied Wolfgang Petersen’s foundering Iliad-adaptation “Troy” (2004), unless you want to argue it was Diane Krueger as Helen of Troy seemingly with no guidance about what she was supposed to be doing other than standing around and watching other people die. Then there was Brian Cox as Agamemnon. The character is cautioned at one point that he cannot have the whole world, which he takes as nothing less than a personal challenge, and which is also how Cox plays the part, as if he were biting into the whole planet earth like it was an apple. Cox, bless his heart, is willing to crash and burn by going over the top for the sake of our entertainment amid the otherwise somber goings-on. Indeed, while “Troy” mostly evaporated from my mind the minute it ended, Cox stayed, though I confess, I can’t calculate exactly how much of that was Cox himself and how much of that was Friend of the Blog Rory saying for months afterward in his finest Scottish brogue (Cox kept his accent), “Then every son of Troy shall die!” Even so, I would never would have expected that while watching Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey, every time Agamemnon was mentioned, and even when Agamemnon was literally on the screen in front of me, albeit obscured by his Darth Vader-ish helmet (“Star Wars” is “The Wizard of Oz” and “The Wizard of Oz” is The Odyssey), I kept picturing Brian Cox. If he could sometimes feel out of place in “Troy,” he really would feel out of place in “The Odyssey,” but I couldn’t help it, no matter what, Cox’s sneer just kept involuntarily flashing in my mind. And that, I suppose, is the test.

Kate Winslet is my Ophelia (duh), Angelina Jolie is my Cleopatra (even though she never made that movie), Anne Hathway is now my Penelope, and Brian Cox, it turns out, is my Agamemnon. We don’t choose these things; they choose us.

Songs of the Potential Siren(s)

On Monday, I lamented that in his version of Homer’s Odyssey, Christopher Nolan saw fit to figuratively put wax in the audience’s ears by not letting us hear the song of the sirens. Maybe that was a wise creative decision, sometimes what you don’t hear is more powerful than what you do, and I’m willing to be swayed, though I mostly meant it as an emblem of the director’s overall lack of imagination. But it also invites the question, who would I cast to sing the song of the sirens? True, that’s a little too close to Diane Sawyer once upon a time in an interview criticizing the erstwhile Dixie Chicks for criticizing President George W. Bush’s foreign policy without formulating a foreign policy, as ordinary citizens so often do, of their own. Reviewers need not be in the business of rewriting the movie they are reviewing. That’s not how it works. Still, the question was tantalizing, so much so that I worked through it, even if I am mostly considering a siren in the singular form rather than the plural. Hey, that’s the beauty of using your own imagination. 

My first thought was, Emmylou Harris. The ethereal nature of her voice fits the bill and even more, it would sound so eerily enticing drifting over water crashing against rocks, a lulling in spite of yourself. But then I remembered that The Coen Brothers had the same thought when they enlisted the singing voices of Harris, Alison Krauss, and Gillian Welch to be their sirens in their own version of Homer’s Odyssey, “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” Geniuses and idiots think alike, I guess?

If we had access to a time machine, the haunted nature of, say, Billie Holiday would no doubt work since that voice knows more than all our 8 billion people put together, or even Edith Piaf. What was that moment with the phonograph ahead of “Saving Private Ryan’s” big final act if not a sort of song of the siren?

En Vogue could recalibrate the song of the sirens as one so smooth you suddenly just find yourself in the water without knowing you had jumped in.

Zola Jesus (i.e. Nika Roza Danilova) feels less like a siren, more like a witch, which I mean as a compliment, not unlike the ultra-iconic Stevie Nicks, though that goes without saying.

I was going to say Natalie Merchant, and I suppose I still am, yet, as soon as I thought it, I thought, hers is the voice of a mermaid, not a siren. 

The soprano of Swedish chanteuse Lykke Li is in the key of the siren, yet, paradoxically, her voice is so sad it would just make you fall down and cry rather than swim over to your doom.

I have a strong desire to cast Neneh Cherry in the role, not so much because her Swedish-West African heritage would tick off the right people but because her beguiling spoken-word style would break the song of the siren mold.

Hope Sandoval’s voice would lead you into temptation and inevitable doom, there is no doubt about it, and if you don’t think so, buddy, I triple dog dare you to eschew wax in your ears without tying yourself to the mast. Could Sandoval’s voice, though, infuse you with the knowledge of the whole world as do the sirens? Could anyone’s voice? Is it such a tall task that it’s insurmountable? Was Nolan right, after all, to leave it alone?

He wasn’t. Reader, have you heard the mighty alto of Neko Case, and have you heard it intertwined with her longtime harmony vocal compatriot Kelly Hogan? They will lead you into temptation while simultaneously impressing upon you the beauty and horror of the whole world, reconstituting the biggest branch on the tree of knowledge into a shiv so delicately you won’t even realize that it has already impaled you.

The Odyssey

“A time of apparent magic” explains the title card that opens Christopher Nolan’s two-hour-and-fifty-three-minute version of Homer’s Odyssey. You can practically hear the scoff just off camera. For all that’s been made about Nolan’s commitment to putting us there, the Bronze Age, that is, from practical effects, to lighting, to a score utilizing era-appropriate instruments, “The Odyssey” proves more modern, and not just because everybody is speaking in contemporary American accents. Nolan’s version of Odysseus (Matt Damon) is one conspicuously in the throes of PTSD brought on by a Trojan War unpacked as a traumatic event while the gods are minimized, underscored in a crack of thunder that may or may not represent Zeus, like a special effect in a middle school play, which I might take to be Nolan’s tongue in his cheek if I thought he ever laughed. Humorless, revisionist, just as every translation of Homer’s Odyssey adopts its own point of view, so does every adaptation, like this one, in which the fabled ancient Greek epic poem is transformed into, uh, well, what else: a Christopher Nolan movie.

Odysseus, King of Ithaca, has been away for 20 years, 10 spent fighting and winning the Trojan War, 10 wandering in his struggle to return home. This has left his kingdom in peril with suitors occupying his home, seeking to marry his wife, Penelope (Anne Hathaway), while his son Telemachus (Tom Holland) looks on, wanting to help, but not sure how. Honoring both Homer and his own nonlinear propensities, Nolan has chosen to use the chunk of time Odysseus spends on an island with Calypso (Charlize Theron) as his unconvincing framework. It’s not so much that in his version Nolan plays coy with why Odysseus is trapped there, and as if afraid to render his protagonist contemptible for stepping out on his wife eschews Calypso repeatedly taking him to bed, as it is an overriding air so morose as to beggar belief when she remarks on their having such a good time together. No, these scenes are just a flagrant vehicle for him to process his trauma, never dramatic in and of themselves, and with a staid air that weighs the whole enterprise down.

The Odyssey emerged from songs and spoken tales that preceded it and has in effect been influencing stories of all varieties in the centuries since, and so anyone that it takes it on is naturally going to see it in their own way. Still, there are times when it feels less like Nolan is interpreting The Odyssey so much as he is repurposing it for parts to construct a sort of spiritual summation of his whole oeuvre. You see it straight away in one of the movie’s first shots of the trojan horse half-buried in the sand, evoking the concluding image of “Planet of the Apes” and immediately impressing upon you the sense of destruction rather than victory, foreshadowing the war between the Greeks and Troy as nothing less than an ancient world atom bomb a la “Oppenheimer.” In wandering those 10 years afterwards, Odysseus has lived long enough to become a villain, cough, cough, at least in his own mind, not so much the complicated man of Emily Wilson’s famous 2017 translation, never mind the wily trickster of the original epic, as a one-note brooding stoic. If The Odyssey is in so many ways about homecomings, this might be where Nolan’s own identity, or at least, his predilections, most tellingly merge with Homer’s ultimate intent: of course, his King of Ithaca would become Batman.

Robert Pattinson, at least, is not brooding as Antinous, the foremost suitor of Penelope (along with Corey Hawkins as Polybus), giving some real president of Alpha Beta fraternity energy. In a weird way, Pattinson might be having too much fun, in so much as his malevolent sniveling invites a bloodlust in the denouement that inadvertently runs counter to the lessons that we are supposed to have learned along the way. Antinous meets his match, however, not in Telemachus, whose arc can feel perfunctory with all that’s going on, but Penelope. Along with Samantha Morton giving life to Circe’s righteous anger, Hathaway’s performance is “The Odyssey’s” best, both honoring Nolan’s modern vision while still effusing grand melodramatic flourish. And though Nolan generally prefers medium shots to close-ups that would befit these larger-than-life characters, in a reverse shot over Holland’s shoulder, Hathway suddenly lunges forward in the frame, fashioning a close-up all on her own. 

She fares better than Zendaya, anyway, who is ostensibly playing Athena, though like Theron, seems to intentionally downplay, thinking the performance will be made in the camera, only to be stranded in diminishing, dull frames unworthy of a Greek goddess. (She has resembled a Greek goddess on the red carpet for the movie’s promotion more than in the movie itself.) Then again, Nolan sees Athena less in terms of mythology than psychology, turning her into nothing less than an Imaginary Friend, providing a form of recurring consultation for Odysseus so that when she ultimately disappears, we know he is now emotionally and mentally healed, the hoariest trope in the screenwriting manual. It is emblematic of how Nolan sees the gods in more abstract terms, evoked in Odysseus’s struggle to believe in them at all, which on some level makes it both his most audacious and most cautious revision in so much as it feels like he is taking this 3,000-year-old story of polytheism and revising it for vacation Bible school.

The presentation of Athena, however, ties back to the presentation of Calypso, both of which relate to “The Odyssey’s” biggest problem, Nolan’s filmmaking style, or a lack of one, more accurately, meaning that no matter how spectacular the scenery and sets, there is a pervasive stodginess. He filmed on 70mm IMAX cameras, the first feature film ever to do so, and yet, it feels like a crutch for his own lack of visual imagination. He essentially transcribes what is on the page to screen rather than bringing it to life, like Penelope’s burial shroud, or Odysseus’s faithful dog Argis, but two plot points that Nolan injects with no real feeling. Would it have been impossible to render the song of the sirens as bewitching as the poem says? Perhaps, but isn’t that why you go into filmmaking, to envision and make perceptible that which seems impossible on the page? Isn’t that the dream of filming The Odyssey, not just to rework the text for our own times but to animate one of our world’s foundational stories? You’d think, but in the end, Nolan’s Odyssey lives its title card a little too much: a movie of apparent magic.

Project Greenlight

There are two Onion articles that are never far from my mind. One I referenced just this week: Harsh Light Of Morning Falls On One-Night Stand’s DVD Collection. That one was from 2003, the other was originally published in 2007 and also involves movies: All You Had To Say Was ‘Owen Wilson Befriends A Dolphin’ And I Was Sold. That one was written from the perspective of a fictional Hollywood producer, Howie Sandberg, receiving a pitch and being utterly satisfied with nothing more than half a sentence.

Listen—stop talking. I don’t need to hear the rest. The first half of the sentence was genius! “Owen Wilson befriends a dolphin and…” And? What “and”? No “and” necessary! Are you kidding me? I’m sold. Sold!

As it happened, that article also came back to me this week not so much when I read about Anna Kendrick’s new streaming series for MGM+, “Embassy,” but when I saw the accompanying photo announcing the streaming series. It was a photo of Anna Kendrick and her co-star Sam Heughan in an air duct. And I immediately thought, I don’t need to know the rest. That photo is genius! Anna Kendrick in an air duct and... And? What “and”? No “and” necessary! Are you kidding me? I’m sold. Sold!

Well, on second thought, maybe one “and.” Anna Kendrick in an air duct and it’s a movie, not a streaming series, a hundred minutes, tops.

In Memoriam: Glen Hansard

John Carney’s 2007 little musical indie that could “Once” opens with an unbroken shot of a nameless street busker (see bottom of the post) played by Irish singer-songwriter Glen Hansard standing on the street at night strumming guitar and singing. Utilizing a handheld camera, Carney starts the scene in long shot, conveying how the street is deserted and that Hansard’s character is not so much busking in this moment as singing just for himself. In the song, one that is both Hansard’s composition and his character’s composition within the movie, evoking its blurred lines, “Say It to Me Now,” he at first seems to plead with an unnamed lover to tell him what she needs to tell him, if there is, in fact, something to tell. As the song moves to its conclusion, however, the subject whom he is addressing seems to shift, from an unnamed lover to the Lord Almighty, pleading with Him that if he has something to say to our unnamed busker, to say it now. He is no longer performing, even, he is shouting into the void, even as Carney gradually moves his camera into close-up, intimacy, intensity, and emptiness in equal measure. Then, Carney takes a couple steps back with the camera to reveal that the nameless busker has acquired one listener, a nameless girl played by real-life Czechian singer-songwriter Markéta Irglová. His moment effectively becomes her moment too, the camera letting her into it just as he will let her into his life as they go on to make literal music together, filling up that aching void we have just felt. I remember seeing this sequence for the first time almost 20 years ago at the Landmark Century in the mall that time forgot like it was yesterday, how music and just a few shifts of the camera could say everything.

“Once” was a runaway success, first at Sundance and then out in the world, commercially and critically and Hansard and Irglová proceeded to win the Oscar for Best Original Song for “Falling Slowly.” That there was a mite of controversy as to whether having been composed a couple years earlier it had technically been written for the movie, as Academy criteria dictates, only underlined how dumb the rules of that category are in the first place and how even the sullen sticklers of such dumb rules were swept away by the movie’s ineffable spirit. Though Hansard had cultivated a successful career in the music industry up to that point as frontman of the Irish rock band The Frames, the fame and success with “Once” was on a different level, and even given their 18-year age difference that we might say, charitably, was, ah, a bit discomforting, it was also maybe inevitable that Hansard and Irglová would wind up together, a relationship based on an intense experience, to quote Sandra Bullock in “Speed.” Of course, Bullock’s character said such relationships did not last, and neither did Hansard and Irglová’s, recorded for hard-to-watch posterity in the 2011 documentary “The Swell Season,” though even as they both went on to marry other people, and have kids, their musical partnership endured; they released an album together just last year. No one else knew what Hansard had been through except Irglová, and vice versa.

Prior to 2007, Hansard had only acted once, in 1991’s Irish rock band comedy-drama “The Commitments,” and even then, he “was basically just doing what I was told,” he would explain to the Montreal Gazette. Unwittingly, the singer/songwriter was describing what a lot of movie acting is, a performance shaped by the director and the camera as much as the performer. Yet, even if Carney did that to some degree in “Once,” he also honored his formal training-less leading man’s request to frequently keep the camera far away, even hidden, to encourage naturalism, demonstrating that there are many ways to string one’s guitar. Originally, County Cork native Cillian Murphy was going to play the role, getting cold feet and bowing out due in part to the octave-changing nature of the songs that he felt he could not handle. Those octave changes of Hansard’s, as the “Say It to Me Now” opening suggests, from tender to full-throated, melded with his performance, not hesitant in moments when he was not singing, but more reserved, even a bit sheepish, only to unleash behind the microphone. He might not have possessed the technique to evince a truly complicated individual, but in his way, did something more than that, manifesting the way in which recording artists tend to express themselves through their music and embodying an earnest belief in that music that, I suspect, only a non-actor could.

I thought of “Once” last year while watching the disappointing Bruce Springsteen movie “Deliver Me from Nowhere” about his recording the “Nebraska” album. Those sessions also famously included he and The E Street Band recording what would become the title track to “Born in the U.S.A.,” a performance so exhilarating that producer Jon Landau deemed it “the most exciting thing that ever happened in a recording studio.” You see the moment in “Deliver Me from Nowhere,” and it’s effective in a classic Hollywood sort of way, if not quite the most exciting thing that ever happened in a recording studio. In “Once,” on the other hand, when Hansard and Irglová’s characters scrounge up enough money to lay down a studio demo, Carney imbues a D.A. Pennebaker fly-on-the-wall feel, a la his documentary recounting the recording of the Original Cast album for the Broadway musical “Company.” That included an unforgettable sequence of Eileen Stritch doing take after take, deep into the night, trying to nail the solo for “Ladies Who Lunch,” going to show how what might sound spontaneous on record is often anything but. Sometimes it is, though, as it was with “Born in the U.S.A.” and as it is when Hansard and Irglová and their makeshift band lay down one take of “When Your Mind’s Made Up.” It’s thrilling, the way Carney frames and editor Paul Mullen cuts it, so that you implicitly feel how the electricity coursing between the nameless guy and girl and the electricity coursing through the performance itself is one and the same. (During the beach montage scene not long after, Carney, in fact, runs the song back again, as if this moment is so overwhelming we need to hear it a second time to process it.) It might not, itself, be the most exciting thing that ever happened in a recording studio, but it probably comes closer than anything we have to capturing what it must have been like for Jon Landau to hear Bruce throw down “Born in the U.S.A.” for the first time. 

Glen Hansard died on Wednesday July 29th in a single-vehicle motorcycle crash west of Dublin. He was 56.

Postscript (8/3/2026): The American singer songwriter Neko Case remembers a much different Glen Hansard. A reminder that people like you and me tend not to really know these people at all. You can read it at her Substack. Click here.

The Worst Movie I Have Ever Watched in a Theater

A couple weeks ago the staff at Defector was asked to name the worst movie they had ever watched in a theater and provide a brief explanation why. The post has since received over a thousand comments, as you might expect, and it naturally made me reflect on the question, though I wondered if it was a good idea to contribute with a post of my own. I wasn’t sure if I felt like going negative at a moment when everything already feels so negative in the first place. It sometimes feels easier to reflexively lambaste a movie you dislike than elucidate a movie you love. But the thing is, even seeing a bad movie in the movie theater can be illuminative. “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker” was dreadful and made worse from my perspective because it was the last movie I saw in a theater before the pandemic, but it also provided an essential moment of clarity: what “Star Wars” meant to me when I was a kid did not matter anymore, had stopped mattering to me a long, long time ago, and I could just put the whole thing up on a figurative shelf. When I saw “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” in the theater in the spring of 1990 at the age of 12, I had the profound realization that, hey, you know what, not all movies are good. 

I stayed ‘til the end of “The Rise of Skywalker,” and even more unbelievably I stayed ‘til the end of “Reindeer Games” (and saw it at all even though the person working the box office literally laughed when I said what show I wanted to see) in the winter of 2000, but I did not stay ‘til the end of “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End” in 2007. The first one, honestly, is overrated, inflated by the immense quality of Johnny Depp’s performance, the second one sagged, but the third was at once so gluttonous and so moribund that I simply reached a point where I literally thought to myself, “I cannot take another second of this,” stood up, and walked right out of the theater. It is the only movie I can recall paying for and leaving early. I did not walk out of “The Scorpion King” in 2002 but only because I was seeing it with my friend Nicolle and her family and because we were seeing it at the late, beloved second-run West Des Moines movie house Billy Joe’s Pitcher Show, meaning I could just order another cheap light beer to power through. 

See, I worked at a movie theater in the late 90s and worked for much of it as a projectionist and/or manager, meaning I was tasked with screening virtually every movie we got after hours to ensure the film reels had been properly put together. That meant seeing a lot of dreck and so, occasionally, if there was another manager willing to endure the whole thing, there were movies I walked out of, I just didn’t pay for them. That makes leaving early a little different, a little easier to give up, like I did on “The Postman,” or on “Varsity Blues.” Once, a fellow manager and I started “My Favorite Martian,” just the two of us, and found it so affectless that we fast-forwarded the reels on the projection platter to the end so we could just go home. 

My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife reports that she has never walked out of a movie, though she has seen some bad ones in the theater, nevertheless, so many bad ones that she could not narrow it down to single title when I put this question to her. “Legal Eagles,” “Harry and the Hendersons,” much to the chagrin of Jack Donaghy, “Light of Day,” which breaks her heart because she was a Michael J. Fox stan long before the term stan even entered the cultural lexicon, and “Gung Ho,” were all movies she provided as being among the worst of the worst she has seen in a theater. They were not, as she explained, schlock, a critical designation meaning they were not low budget cheesy fun but the tedious horse latitudes of Hollywood. Those four titles she supplied all sound like part of the bad DVD shelf from The Onion. 

“Pushing Tin” was on The Onion’s figurative bad DVD shelf and was also mentioned by someone in the Defector comments as the worst movie they had ever seen in a theater. And that’s what a lot of the movies I watched in the theater during those days were like – “Pushing Tin.” They were watched but not necessarily remembered; transitory in the bad way. And it does invite a question: is the worst movie watched in movie theater one that spurs nothing more than total lack of interest, or is it one that provokes intense dislike? My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife also mentioned “Under the Skin” as one of the worst movies she has seen in a movie theater, not because it washed over her unremembered because she was disgusted by it just as I was disgusted by “The Trip to Italy” as tantamount to a three-hour Widespread Panic concert with celebrity impressions in place of guitar noodling. She and I can agree to disagree on those movies (I loved “Under the Skin”; she loved “The Trip to Italy”), but I think we would both agree those movies are doing something, they are just doing something that each of us personally rejects. I mean, I have not yet mentioned “Armageddon”, which I generally cite as the worst movie I have ever seen, and I did see it in a movie theater. But even I will admit that Michael Bay is an auteur in his way, and even if his aesthetic made me want to gouge out my own eyeballs, he did not cause my eyelids to droop, and then to ultimately close.

In 2004, on the other hand, I fell asleep watching “Van Helsing” in a theater. Why did I see that movie? Probably because of Kate Beckinsale, if I’m being honest, or maybe because back then I saw almost everything on opening weekend and there was nothing else opening that week in central Iowa. And the thing is, that’s really all I remember of the experience: falling asleep. I could not recite a line, a scene, a moment, nothing; I do not remember a single thing that happened aside from suddenly waking up from a nap I did not realize I drifted into and thinking, “Hey, when did Frankenstein’s monster get here?” I might have walked out right then except I was mired in that post-afternoon nap state of grogginess, could not really bring myself to move, surrendered, fell back in my chair, and apropos of the worst movie I have ever watched in a theater, dozed off again.