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.

The Rip

Given the success of “Knives Out” and its subsequent sequels whose exclusive rights were scooped up by Netflix, Joe Carnahan’s “The Rip” feels like a smart Netflix hybrid, a mash-up of a crooked cop crime-thriller and an Agatha Christie drawing room mystery. It begins with Miami police Captain Jackie Velez (Lina Esco) being murdered by masked men, setting in motion a federal interrogation of Velez’s specialized Tactical Narcotics Team (TNT, as if subliminally communicating its desire to be a TNT Movie by Netflix) in an effort to determine who might be responsible. After all, rumors abound that certain cops are taking those eponymous Rips - seizures of drugs, guns, or money - for themselves, and the Feds wonder if a TNT somebody might be responsible. This introduces us to the whole crew, including Velez’s second-in-command, Lt. Dane Dumars (Matt Damon), and Sergeant J.D. Byrne (Ben Affleck) with whom she was in a relationship. After this inquisition, the TNT quintet pulls up camp chairs outside headquarters to vent, a nice touch, making them seem like heavily armed boys and girls in an Old Milwaukee commercial. This is when we also meet DEA Agent Matty Nix (Kyle Chandler), rolling around in an armored vehicle that you know is going to turn up again by movie’s end. Indeed, Dumars get a crime-stopper tip via his phone about a Rip and enlists his team to go investigate, setting the mystery in motion. 

At first, “The Rip” generates genuine dread and tension as the team arrives at the home at the end of a caul-de-sac and craftily talks its way inside, discovering an immaculately kept crawl space hiding significant contraband in the form of a lot of money. As a couple team members sledgehammer the wall to get at the barrels containing the cash, Dumars and Byrne interrogate the homeowner, Desi (Sasha Calle). It’s an electric scene in which the sound of the sledgehammer echoing throughout the wall underlines her increasing stress while the cross examination of Damon and Affleck’s characters puts their effortless chemistry on full display. And when the amount of the money is revealed, the tension escalates, especially when a couple cops from the district turn up outside, not-so-subtly implying that TNT is not wanted here. What ensues evokes both “Rio Bravo” and “Assault at Precinct 13” but with some nifty modern flourishes, like a streetlight blinking in morse code and ghost stories of entire blocks like this one bought up by Colombian cartels. 

Yet rather than yield an external threat, the menace comes from within, and from this point forward, “The Rip” becomes as talky as it does action-packed, cop against cop as TNT tries to ferret out where this money came from, who wants, and what they’ll do to get it. This, however, transforms “The Rip” into something more character driven and the characters never amount to much Velez’s death is supposed to hover over everything, but we never spend sufficient time with her for the character to be anything other than a device, while the electric presence of Teyana Taylor as Det. Numa Baptiste is figuratively sidelined for almost the entire movie. Carnahan falls back on Damon and Affleck’s shared history to fill in character where this none otherwise, but Dumars and Bryne’s feints toward the dark side of the force never feel believable. Indeed, Dumars has a tattoo on each knuckle, not unlike the priest played by Robert Mitchum in “The Night of Hunter” having love and hate tattooed on his knuckles. Those, however, were competing ideas, evoking an ambiguity that “The Rip” mostly forgoes in any real or interesting way. One of Dumars’s tattoos, in fact, is a question that the tattoo on the other knuckle answers, effectively solving “The Rip’s” riddle long before it’s solved. What, you thought Boston’s favorite sons were a couple Bad Apples (TM)?

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Outfit (1973)

The 1973 crime-thriller “The Outfit” is based on a novel Richard Stark’s celebrated Parker series, yet in changing the character’s name to Earl Macklin, writer/director John Flynn is essentially remaking the role in the no fuss no muss air of his lead actor Robert Duvall. As the movie opens, Earl is released from prison to find his brother Eddie (Edward Ness) has been killed by a crime syndicate called The Outfit. Turns out, Earl and Eddie robbed a bank that was a front for The Outfit some years back and now that syndicates wants revenge. Rather than go on the run or wait around to get offed himself, Earl enlists his old cohort Cody (Joe Don Baker) to go on the offensive, working their way from Outfit goon to Outfit goon, and eventually all the way up to the man on top, Mailer, appropriately played by the dude of dudes, Robert Ryan, evincing the air of someone who has necessarily strained so much from his life as necessary protection that he has also strained out any sense of joy. He watches professional football games with the air of a man who has no interest in the game itself, just the money he wagered on it.

Like all the women in “The Outfit,” Mailer’s trophy wife Rita (Joanna Cassidy) is only half-acknowledged, but the script at least half-acknowledges that all the women in “The Outfit” are half-acknowledged. That includes Earl’s girlfriend Bett (Karen Black) whose presences mostly ensures that 70s audiences wouldn’t get the wrong idea since the real romance is between Earl and Cody. Indeed, Duvall and Black sculpt a genuine lived-in relationship as two guys getting too old for this kind of life but unable to part ways with it, nonetheless. That way of life involves some traditional action, a few shootouts and the like, but “The Outfit” surprises in just how much drama and tension it mines from moments in-between, like Earl and Cody having a stare down with two men from whom they hope to acquire a getaway car, a scene sculpted from nothing but pure attitude. Time and again Flynn’s script seems to set Earl up for an action hero wisecrack only for the character to decline, as if too serious for such childishness, echoed in Duvall’s turn. “The Outfit” never cuts loose until the last possible second, after Earl and Cody have completed their getaway, falling into a spate of laughter, as if the once the job has been completed, then, and only then, are dudes allowed to rock. 

Eephus

The Major League Baseball glossary explains the roots of the Eephus pitch are in Hebrew, the word eefes loosely translated to nothing, as described by a teammate (Maurice Van Robays) of the pitcher (Rip Sewell) who first regularly threw it: “Eephus ain’t nothing.” Carson Lund’s 2025 movie that takes the pitch’s name for its title is not nothing, either in a Seinfeldian sense or more broadly, but I have never seen a movie that so implicitly captures the deliberate, relaxed rhythms of a baseball game quite like this one. That is because unlike virtually all other baseball movies, which tend to climax a larger narrative through a game while sprinkling in snippets of other games via montage, “Eephus” just is a baseball game: one recounted from beginning to end. It’s as if Lund and is co-writers Michael Basta and Nate Fisher adapted Arnold Hano’s “A Day in the Bleachers” but instead of recounting Game 1 of the 1954 World Series between the New York Giants and Cleveland Indians are recounting a fictional 1990s New England rec league game between the Riverdogs and Adler’s Paint. 

There are a multitude of players, but “Eephus” proves less interested in developing their personal stories then in demonstrating how they all relate to one another in the context of the game. There are hits, and outs, and runs, but the camera is just as often pointed away from home plate, toward the fielders, and the base runners, eavesdropping on their between-pitch chatter and conversations in the dugout. The result of the game does not even seem to matter all that much, evoked in how one player arrives to the game late and another departs early, committed to a prior engagement. Even the umpire bails early, forcing a spectator to step in and call balls and strikes, albeit from the stands. This makeshift arbiter taken in tandem with a couple young people in the bleachers wondering what all the fuss is about and a vendor outside the stadium quietly suggest that the only thing holding the nature of any game together, really, is the collective importance we impress upon it. 

The field is scheduled to be torn down after this game, though it is not making away for something like a Kmart or a Walmart, however, but a school, shading this finality with melancholy rather than anti-capitalist fury. What, precisely, will become of these teams is never explicated, and all the men playing would rather not talk about it, and as the game stretches on, nine innings giving way to extras, day ceding to night, forcing the players to turn on their car lights and aim them at the field, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot fuses with Roger Angell’s The Summer Game and the latter’s observation that “baseball time is measured only in outs” takes on the absurdist quality of the former, making it truly feel as if “the end of this game may never come.”