Dead Man’s Wire

“Dead Man’s Wire” does not tell the real-life story of Tony Kiritsis so much as the real-life act that made Tony Kiritsis famous, or infamous – that is, in February 1977, he took hostage the son of the mortgage broker he accused of ripping him off. Working from a screenplay by Austin Kolodny, director Gus Van Sant tells the this incident from beginning to end as Tony (Bill Skarsgård) shows up at the Meridian Mortgage building and promptly wires a shotgun to the back of the head of Richard Hall (Dacre Montgomery) before ferrying him to his booby-trapped apartment where he winds up in an intentional standoff with the police outside, demand both $5 million and an apology from Richard’s father, M.L. (Al Pacino), for having swindled him. He never gets that apology, not even when he takes a phone call with the elder Hall, a deliberately disinterested Pacino talking to him like he’s talking to an aggrieved customer on the customer service line, an effectively bleak reminder that the fine print trumps all ethics and morals.

That moment, though, also demonstrates the tendency of “Dead Man’s Wire” to work best in flourishes and isolated moments than overall. Tony virtually invites the spectacle that crops up around him, talking on the phone with a local radio dee jay, Fred Temple (Colman Domingo), throughout the standoff, while cub reporter Linda Page (Myha'la) follows him to his apartment complex and begins broadcasting much to the delight of her bloodthirsty producer back at the studio. These are interesting threads, but Van Sant never entirely pulls them, both these stories petering out. If Tony craves the spectacle more than he rejects it, Van Sant gets that across best in the sequence when he drives Richard home, scored to pop music of the era as myriad police cars crawl along behind, a precursor to the white bronco the L.A. freeway and a reminder that such sensationalism has always been in our American DNA.

Skarsgård is tremendous as Kiritsis, profane, polite, and self-pitying. What’s less clear, however, is what Van Sant wants us to make of this man, broadly speaking. Though chunks of “Dead Man’s Wire” are filtered through the prism of television news, sending the story to a wider audience, we never really see that wider audience and so, are never quite sure if he’s being made out as the American hero he claims to be or if that’s mere delusion. And though Skarsgård’s air hints at delusion, that is never clarified either, the conclusion in which the ensuing trial finds him not guilty by insanity still leaving it up in the air. By sticking just to the incident itself and never doing much to reveal who he Tony outside this context, “Dead Man’s Wire” comes to feel deliberately, diabolically evasive, not so much refusing to judge its character as leaving it open to interpretation so that every viewer can retrofit Kirtsis’s act for their own personal thesis.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Apollo 13 (1995)

Director Ron Howard and his producing partner Brian Grazer secured the production rights to Jim Lovell’s book about his 1970 Apollo 13 mission, “Lost Moon,” before it had even been published and you can understand their enthusiasm. Triumph can make for good drama, but the twisted truth is that failure frequently makes for even better drama. And the Apollo 13 mission, as a line in Howard’s 1995 movie says, was considered NASA’s most successful failure, one in which the third mission to the moon transformed into a mission to return to earth when an unexpected explosion aboard the service module disabled its electrical and life support systems. That explosion is what accounts for the famous real-life line, “Houston, we have a problem,” one spurring “Apollo 13” the movie’s best moment. Once Jim Lovell (Tom Hanks) advises mission control of a serious complication, chaos ensues as the three astronauts and the whole terrestrial NASA gang attempt to ascertain that complication. Eventually, Lovell notices oxygen is leaking aboard the spacecraft, engendering an eerie calm that Howard and his Oscar-nominated editors Mike Hill and Daniel P. Hanley create from almost nothing but faces, close-ups and medium shots as everyone registers the problem, giving way to controlled pandemonium as they then get to work solving it. It evokes the immense craft of “Apollo 13,” direction, editing, music, and writing harmonizing to maximize drama but also to effectively streamline a non-stop flow of information and terminology through whip-smart similes and clever dramatizations.

Given that Lovell and his two other crew members, Fred Haise (Bill Paxton) and Jack Swigert (Kevin Bacon), are forced to minimize power aboard their spacecraft and wait on instructions from mission control, it can sometimes feel as if “Apollo 13’s” heart is situated more on earth than it is up in space. Indeed, Howard proves much more adept at conveying straightforward problem-solving than the encroaching isolation in space. Hanks’s preternatural calm as Lovell is convincing, though not necessarily interesting, and Haise and Swigert remain underdeveloped, a brief moment of tension between the two feeling a paint by numbers for such an intense situation. The similar preternatural calm of Ed Harris as flight director Gene Kranzen hits harder as does the angst that Gary Sinise quietly carries in his performance as Ken Mattingly, the crew member forced by Lovell to bow out when he is exposed to measles (which he never contracts).

Much was made of “Apollo 13’s” technical accuracy and it is on full display, often infusing the finished product with the feel of a docudrama, albeit a stirring one. But that emphasis on precise detail over complicated emotion is also what hinders it. Apart from Lovell’s wife and family watching from back home in Houston, “Apollo 13’s” one other subplot involves America’s waning interest in moon landings, evoked in a live broadcast from the spacecraft before things go wrong that the networks drop in the middle to show something else. No one tells the astronauts, which may or may not have been true, but either way, goes to show how the movie itself never wrestles with this flagging interest in any real way. Howard clearly wants to reignite our nation’s passion for space beyond a mere space race, but by never much broadening his viewpoint beyond the mission itself, “Apollo 13” never suggests why America might have become apathetic in the first place, as if afraid of introducing pesky politics. And if the argument is that the thrill of going to space is the end unto itself, Howard’s style is not the kind to illustrate the wonder of spaceflight, more suited to the drama of returning home.

keira knightley contemplates the hideous lonely emptiness of existence

 

Some Drivel On...the first 30 Minutes of Apollo 11

Culled from previously unreleased 70mm footage documenting the preparation, launch, flight, and surrounding hoopla of the July 1969 Apollo 11 lunar mission, Todd Douglas Miller’s 2019 direct cinema documentary begins with up-close images of the mammoth 6-million pound Crawler-Transport hauling the Saturn V rocket to the launchpad off the coast of Florida, this fragmented presentation making it feel even larger than already it is, before cutting away to a wide shot of the whole vehicle and its significant cargo. It is an effective demonstration of scale and a tactic that Miller repeats throughout this half-hour pre-launch sequence to show both the technical and cultural magnitude of the mission. We see Mission Control from high above and then we see it up close, the camera pulling backwards past row after row after row of NASA technicians, underlining the countless people it takes to achieve such a mighty task, and we see helicopter shots of the people that have gathered at then-Cape Kennedy watching the Saturn V lifting off before Miller lingers on close-ups of three faces: white, black, and brown. More than the real-life Walter Cronkite commentary deployed to add contextual gravity, these shots do it for us. A close-up of the massive orange flames as the Saturn V initiates launch and the accompanying roar and rumble of the camera inspire primal awe at what it takes to leave this planet behind as do ensuing images of the rocket surging through the Earth’s atmosphere. 

There is an underlying feeling in the lead-up to this event of something akin to a rock concert, and though the score by Matt Morton deliberately utilizing only musical instruments available in 1969 helps to evoke prog rock of the era, hurtling us into the future right along with it. No image, though, in this opening half-hour is any more moving or revealing than the one of the camera looking up at the Saturn V getting smaller and smaller in the sky, virtually lost against the blue backdrop. This image takes my breath away. It is real, this image, but resembles a painting, that one orange-ish splotch amid a canvas of blue and white, blurring this awesome man-made accomplishment with the natural world until they are almost indistinguishable. In doing so, Miller is not diminishing Apollo 11 but illustrating how such feats of human ingenuity can ironically provide immense perspective on our infinitesimal place in the world, this image rendered as a lyrical variation of the 1990 photo of The Pale Blue Dot. 

It is an image I have been returning to in my mind as Artemis II makes it way to the moon, scheduled to fly by the damn thing today. I am sympathetic to the argument that federal funds might be better used elsewhere; hell, part of me agrees with it. But part of me also thinks there is something not just beautiful but utterly useful in being reminded that despite all our imaginative, practical might, we remain cosmically insignificant. I am not sure there has ever been a moment during my lifetime when we have needed that reminder more. 

In Memoriam: Suki Lahav

Bruce Springsteen and Suki Lahav, 1974.

Bruce Springsteen’s back-to-back 1974 and 1975 masterpieces of New Jersey/New York life, “The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle” and “Born to Run,” were records of romantically heightened youth. They captured their creator in a musical theatre mode, pulling as much from West Side Story as Elvis, a mode he would move on from, and a mode defined by a markedly different version of The E Street Band. When he plays songs of this period in concert now, I am always happy to hear them, but I confess, deep down, there is also always a little twinge of disappointment because they are not quite the same. They can’t be. The person he was, the way he felt, how the group sounded, that time has passed. Those records were defined as much by David Sancious’s piano cum Roy Bittan’s piano as Bruce Springsteen’s guitar; they were also defined by Suki Lahav’s violin. Her instrument appears only once on an official Springsteen recording, though that one time is significant, the opening to “Jungleland” that draws back the curtain on something mythic. To get the full effect of Lahav’s violin in the band, you have to listen to the live recordings of the era, like the one from Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania’s Main Point in early 1975, recorded for posterity by Philadelphia’s WMMR, which was the first Springsteen bootleg I ever owned and crucial in my education of his canon, going to show that he was so much more than the Reagan-era image that still, to a large degree, defines him. At that Main Point show, Lahav is his only accompaniment on an otherwise solo piano version of “Incident on 57th Street” and she is the most key contributor on a cover of Bob Dylan’s “I Want You” that, in my honest opinion, they do better than The Bard himself. That’s the song I listened to first when I read that Lahav had died on April 1st in her native Israel at the age of 74 from cancer.

Lahav being in The E Street Band was some matter of fate. She was married to Louis Lahav, who was Springsteen’s recording engineer in the early years, and when Bruce was looking for a violinist to join the band, he enlisted her. When Jon Landau essentially assumed command of the Springsteen operation not long after, virtually sidelining his previous producer Mike Appel in the process, the Lahavs went their own way. “We were really Mike’s people,” she would tell The Jerusalem Post in 2007 with no detectable notes of bitterness. She and Lahav returned to Israel, divorced in 1977, and going by her Hebrew name of Tzruya, by all accounts, Lahav fashioned a long and successful career in the arts there. For the next 25 years, as Springsteen devoted himself to straight ahead rock and roll, he rarely utilized the violin, but turned toward a more rustic sound around the turn of the century and invited Soozie Tyrell into the fold where she has remained for two decades-plus. Suki Lahav, on the other hand was in The E Street Band from September 1974 to March 1975. In the immense text of Bruce Springsteen, she is barely a blip. But then, the period in which she featured prominently was the one where Springsteen was saying goodbye to his youth, immortalized on “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy),” on which Lahav sang backing vocals, and that’s the thing about youth, seven months can last forever. 

Friday's Old Fashioned: History of the World – Part 1 (1981)

Upon its release in the summer of 1981, Mel Brooks’s “History of the World – Part 1” received mixed, often harsh, reviews. “Rambling, undisciplined, sometimes embarrassing failure,” the esteemed Roger Eber wrote in a two-star review that reads like a one-star, lambasting it for being “unfunny (in its) bad taste.” Yet, what Ebert viewed as its worst quality, is what The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael saw as its best, commending his “audacity – his treating cruelty and pain as a crazy joke.” Having watched “History of the World – Part 1” again for the first time since the last time, whenever that was, rented on VHS, so a long time ago, I side with Kael, even if I acknowledge all the ways in which it comes up short. In fact, My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife and I rewatched this and then rewatched “The Producers” right after, and I was struck by something Kael also alludes to, how in both, Brooks is sort of a Broadway producer disguised as movie director: that is, he essentially stages scenes for the camera rather than staging scenes with the camera.

“History of the World – Part 1” is not so much a history of the world as random bits and bobs pulled from both the Bible and history texts (was the dinosaur eating the caveman a dig at creationism, I honestly have no idea), an overview of the Old Testament and then extended riffs on the Roman Empire, the Inquisition, and finally, the French Revolution. Indeed, if Ebert and Kael agree, it’s on the lack of narrative propulsion. “His ‘history’ framework doesn’t have an approach or point of view,” Ebert writes, while Kael deems the whole thing “a jamboree, a shambles.” And in Brooks’s first-person New York Times accounting of how he conceived of the movie, that’s exactly how it reads, as a jamboree, a shambles, everything just sort of randomly occurring to him in different places, a collage thrown together. It’s not just that “History of the World – Part 1” is uneven, that it hits and misses in its gags, but that it feels longer than its not-that-long hour-and-thirty-two minutes, owing to the kind of dead space that is unacceptable in a rapid-fire comedy. It can occasionally seem as if Brooks is trying to marshal all the elements of his massive sets as much as he is trying to land a joke.

In his New York Times piece, Brooks notes that his overriding theme was the meek will not inherit the earth, a good one, and though it often comes across like he’s just blindly finding his way into that theme as opposed to manifesting it with razor sharp precision, when he gets there, the jokes hit with guillotine-force. As Emperor Nero, Dom DeLuise is giving what I will cite as retroactively one of 1981’s best performances, a debauched infant that cuts to the heart of the matter in a way no staid sword and sandals epic ever could while Brooks’s “It’s good to the king” schtick crudely but effectively portrays the monarchy as “The Wolf of Wall Street.” Nothing is better, though, than Brooks transforming The Inquisition into a big Busby Berkeley-style musical number to comically, sharply evoke a truth that America has been in the process of living all 2026: state-sanctioned violence is just show business. 

In Memoriam: James Tolkan

In early 2016, I had serendipitous back-to-back movie-viewing experiences. First, I watched the previous year’s “Bone Tomahawk,” S. Craig Zahler’s western-horror hybrid. Most people might remember it for so much gruesome violence, but I remember it most for a scene in which a gunslinger semi-squabbles with a saloon pianist over the price of playing a few songs. When you first see the pianist, slumped at his chosen instrument, head on the keys, you think for a moment that he might be dead until he pops to something like hungover half-life, epitomizing the film’s off kilter sense of humor by essentially living, so to speak, the old joke from “Ishtar: “Not dead, just resting.” The pianist was played by James Tolkan. The next movie I watched, a few days later, was 1973’s magnificent neo-noir “Friends of Eddie Coyle” in which Robert Mitchum plays a glorious sad sack career criminal informing to an ATF agent who finds himself in the crosshairs of The Man. Lo and behold, Tolkan turned up as the contact man for The Man, playing opposite the much taller Peter Boyle but lording over him in his air anyway. I could not remember the last time I had seen the then-84-year-old Tolkan in a new-to-me movie and yet, here he was in two of them, 42 years apart, both one-scene walk-offs in which he left an unmistakable footprint, and both evocative of a career as rich and varied as his life. (Contrary to the famous line about his character in “Back to the Future,” one wondering if he ever had hair, Tolkan did have hair in “Friends of Eddie Coyle” just as he had hair two years later as one Napoleon Bonaparte in Woody Allen’s “Love and Death.”)

Indeed, in reading Tolkan’s backstory upon learning of his death at the age of 94 on March 26th, as I did in this 2021 interview with the military news website We Are The Mighty, I could not believe just how much it felt like a novel. He was born in Michigan, but his family moved to Chicago where he quit school at 15 to work for the Chicago Northwestern Railroad (“which I hated,” he told We Are The Mighty) until his family relocated to Arizona where he re-enrolled in high school, graduated, and earned a football scholarship at Eastern Arizona College before joining the Navy where he made some waves as a boxer. Prior to shipping out, however, he was discharged on account of a heart condition and wound up in Iowa where he drove a cattle truck for a while, eventually attended the University of Iowa on the GI Bill and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in drama. He then literally took a Greyhound bus to New York, he would tell We Are The Mighty, with 75 bucks in his pocket to try and become an actor. He started on the stage, understudying Robert Duvall, appearing in several Broadway productions, including 1973’s “Full Circle” opposite Leonard Nimoy. In reviewing it for The New York Times, Clive Barnes would write: “James Tolkan had a marvelous scene as a recaptured prisoner, a Jewish ex‐professor from the concentration camps.” Tolkan starred in the first Broadway production of “Glengarry Glen Ross” in 1984, which I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t know, and when I read this, I thought to myself, I swear, “I bet he played Dave Moss,” and turns out, he did, because can’t you hear him saying, “We’re just talking”?

“Glengarry Glen Ross” was also his last play on Broadway perhaps because in the 80s, Tolkan’s movie career blossomed, the supreme force of his 5'6" presence accentuated on the big screen, and though he was always in support, never a lead, he frequently bettered what was already good and still left a mark in what wasn’t. I saw 1987’s “Masters of the Universe” for my 10th birthday party at the Valley 3 in West Des Moines, Iowa and the only memory I retain has nothing to do with He-Man or Skeletor but Tolkan on the other side of the galactic portal as Detective Lubic. (He also co-starred in 1986’s “Armed and Dangerous,” one of the John Candy comedies of the era that my mom, my sister, and I would rent over and over.) Tolkan probably had more screen time total in that critical and box office bomb than he did in the back-to-back box office champs of 1985 and 1986, but demonstrating his gift for conveying authority, he rendered himself a Hollywood immortal, nevertheless, on account of those two movies. In the former, “Back to the Future,” he was Principal Strickland, though Tolkan did not play him as an educational leader so much as a cruel and cocky antagonist to our hero, Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox), like an ex-drill sergeant-type coach who became a principal for lack of a better idea. Strickland unforgettably dresses Marty down in a monologue that Tolkan delivered with such committed fury he seemed to conjure the camera’s movement, drifting closer and closer to the two men as Tolkan leans in so close to Fox that their noses practically touch. 

The next year Tolkan appeared in “Top Gun” as commanding officer of the USS Enterprise. Though he was credited onscreen as “Stinger,” that name is never said aloud, because why would it need to be given how Tolkan breathes immense life into the character all on his own in dressing down Maverick and Goose (Tom Cruise and Anthony Edwards, respectively) the same way Strickland dresses down Marty McFly, coining an unlikely and profane synonym for worst case scenario along the way: “flying a cargo plane full of rubber dog shit outta Hong Kong.” The whole sequence, really, is nothing more than an exposition drop, explaining Maverick’s backstory and the origin and purpose of Naval Weapons Fighter School, but Tolkan does not merely sell it with maximum gusto, he transforms it into an unapologetically juicy slice of pure verbal entertainment. As much as any scene of aerial combat, Tolkan turns and burns. And at the end, when Stinger dismisses Maverick and Goose, then stops them, then wishes them luck, the way he watches them go, shoving a cigar in his mouth as he does, it’s eerie just how Tolkan effects the countenance of a school principal who know he’s gonna see those two crazy kids again after class real soon.