Red Hook Summer

Though many references are made to the foul smells of the neighborhood that gives Spike Lee’s “Red Hook Summer” (2012) its title, from the odiferous cruise ship docked in the harbor to urine soaked elevators in tenement buildings lining the projects, and though the criminal element forever looms, Lee nevertheless allows a sunny disposition to creep in anyway, evoked in the way he often allows warm reds to saturate his visuals, mimicking the sun dappled trees we occasionally see that almost seem to be infusing the screen with oxygen right there before our very eyes. And Lee repeatedly outfits the soundtrack with wordless hymns, as if this meant to reassure the characters themselves that things are never so bleak as they seem. If the narrative can sometimes feel formless, as it often has in Lee’s later years, that still feels right, like a sermon delivered by a preacher without a text, just feeling his way along, maybe getting lost here and there but always finding his back, and always conveying passion, always seeking to make us think as much as he makes us feel.

“Red Hook Summer” is part summer vacation movie, part coming of age film, but with a Biblical bent. Its genesis is a 13 year old attached at the hip to his iPad, bearing the regal Spike Lee-ish surname of Flik (Jules Brown), up from Atlanta for, delivered by his mother to her father, Bishop Enoch, played superbly by Clarke Peters with equal tenderness and fire & brimstone. Flik also meets a neighborhood girl his age, Chazz (Toni Lysaith), a member of Bishop’s Enoch congregation, who tells off Flik as much as she makes eyes at him. Though the amateurism of the two first-time actors clearly shows, the energy of their respective performances is nonetheless palpable, and they make an endearingly rowdy duo. There is a scene when they go kayaking in New York Harbor, in the shadow of Lady Liberty, a splendid little bout of local flavor, and as they trade insults like they’ve had years of practice at it, you can feel the “You Gotta Be Kidding” frustration of the instructor in the background.

The real push and pull of this “Red Hook Summer”, however, belongs not to Flik and Chazz but to Flik and his grandfather. If Chazz, a believer, is content to let Flik figure out for himself whether he believes or not, Flik’s Grandfather is more forceful, withholding his grandson’s preferred vegan food and even screaming and shouting, waving around the Bible and hollering “It’s all in the good book!” And while Enoch is steadfast in this belief, “Red Hook Summer” is never simply assumes the Bible alone can move mountains. The movie is most alive when Enoch preaches, and when he preaches, he ties Scripture back to the social structure of the Red Hook neighborhood, and of the world itself. He wants his flock to be filled with the Holy Spirit, most assuredly, but he wants them to direct that fulfillment outwardly, to combat crime and gentrification. And even if his suspicions of technology can be misplaced, you have to admire the way he fights to get back his grandson’s precious iPad when it’s taken.

If Flik’s doubt is in God’s existence, the hoodlums, whose paths continually cross with Flik and Bishop Enoch, have doubts in the church itself, its function and intention. At first blush it seems this authenticity is on display in Deacon Zee, a broadly drawn character who might have faith but also has a drinking problem. In the end, Deacon Zee is just a red herring, and the spotlight gets shone down on Bishop Enoch instead, calling into question everything everyone thinks they know about him, and that includes us too. This is a movie, I imagine, that was and will forever be defined by the sudden turn it takes toward the end when Enoch, so consistently drawn as one thing, is suddenly revealed as something else. It is jarring. It is also alarming because it calls into question why Bishop Enoch’s daughter would allow her son to be in the presence of his grandfather for an entire summer based on this hidden truth. But that’s rooted more in traditional narrative concerns, and in his later years, Spike Lee has become less interested in traditional narrative concerns. If there’s a hole, there’s a hole, and who cares if you see it? Lee is more interested in how this sudden twist makes us feel.

This is a movie where God continually takes center stage, and as Bishop Enoch himself explains, “God loves all his people.” It’s a lovely sentiment, but Lee does not just want us to accept it at face value; he wants to challenge it; he wants that idea to be earned. He does not, by any means, let Bishop Enoch off the hook for his sins, but Lee also calls upon to offer empathy, and to remind us that offering empathy is not always supposed to be easy. So go ahead and watch “Red Hook Summer” and see if you can.

O.J.: Made in America

Director Ezra Edelman takes the wide view with his documentary “O.J.: Made in America”, as its five comprehensive parts go to show. Edelman is not merely interested in the notorious trial in which his titular subject, football star and media personality O.J. Simpson, was acquitted of the murders of his wife, Nicole Brown, and Ron Goldman, but interested in O.J.’s entire persona, and how his trial related to America, and how it still resonates today. Thus, Edelman begins with O.J.’s successful football run at the University of Southern California and then tracks him all the way to that cut-rate crime in Las Vegas populated by a band of wannabe Elmore Leonard characters that landed Simpson in a Nevada penitentiary. And while the middle parts do focus heavily on the crime and the ensuing court case, Edelman is not re-trying it. He operates from the assumption that more or less everyone watching assumes O.J. did it. Instead Edelman re-examines the trial’s larger context, and how Simpson, who in mantaining an elusiveness so as to foster some affable All-American brand (“I’m not black, I’m O.J.”), indvertently set himself up as the perfect vessel for a fierce morality play on race in modern America.

In allowing cameras into his courtroom to capture the so-called Trial of the Century, hapless Judge Lance Ito unwittingly authorized production on America’s first reality show, a terrifying thing to re-consider given how justice for two murdered people was on the line. And you are momentarily worried as “O.J.: Made in America” progresses that it too is forgetting about Ron Goldman. But that’s by design. He was, after all, tragically so, collateral damage in the absurd media spectacle, and Edelman wants that thought to linger, before he addresses Goldman, and in particular Goldman’s long-suffering family in depth. They get their moment, as they should, and among the most resonant details here is Ron Goldman’s father somberly remarking that his son’s dreams never went away. If in some ways O.J. was the American Dream gone wrong, it is important to never forget that Goldman was unfairly prevented from the opportunity of even trying to see his American Dream through in the first place.

The documentary does not, however, become as much of a referendum on domestic violence in America. It certainly does not shy away from the fact that O.J. physically abused his wife, and hearing Simpson, whose voice had been so indoctrinated into pop culture as good-natured, on 911 tapes shouting in the background gives you a window into the world she endured. What precisely led him to repeatedly injure Nicole is only tangentially raised, and O.J.’s friends, or his former friends, seem unable or unwilling to shed any light. Indeed, it’s truly jaw-dropping how many times O.J.’s confidantes admit blindness to Simpson’s worst attributes, and cop to their desire to repeatedly forgive and forget even as red flags were continually raised.

One of the jurors interviewed openly states that Nicole was at fault for not leaving O.J. earlier, unveiled victim blaming, before later conceding that she, and others on the jury, saw their letting O.J. off less as commentary on the poor argument rendered by the prosecution and more as payback for Rodney King and other injustices perpetrated on the black community in Los Angeles by the city’s police department. And throughout the documentary, Edelman expertly interweaves the LAPD’s story, what it did right, what it did wrong, interviewing a myriad of past members, including Mark Fuhrman, who is interviewed in depth, the infamous detective who found the bloody glove that perhaps would have done O.J. in if Fuhrman had not perjured himself on the witness stand and been unveiled as a racist. If in many ways Rodney King became the emblem of the abuse so many blacks suffered at the hands of the LAPD then Mark Fuhrman became the emblem of what many perceived, rightly or wrongly, as the LAPD’s rotted racist core, and Edelman captures how in many ways the trial of O.J. Simpson was turned around to become a trial against the LAPD with Mark Fuhrman as its star witness.

Fuhrman, in fact, is crucial to the film’s most polarizing moment, a recounting of the L.A. Riots and how members of the Black Community, engulfed with rage, vandalized and set fires within their own neighborhoods. Remembering this, Mark Furhman shakes his head, explaining that he cannot fathom how doing that one’s own community proves anything. The film then cuts directly to a black activist who explains that African-American citizens knew vandalism and arson was the only way their community would ever get attention. And in those two statements emerges the continual disconnect between whites and blacks in America, the inability, or unwillingness, to see the other side.

In standing back and casting such a wide net, Edelman’s film is able to see these two sides to the same story, and intrinsically asks us to do the same. When Judge Ito invited those cameras into the courtroom, he was operating under the influence that he could give a national tutorial on the process of the law. Instead he gave us front row seats to a national conversation on America’s original, enduring sin. If Simpson became an unwitting vessel for us to have that conversation in 1995, here he is again, in this incendiary summer of 2016, forcing the same questions upon us. The onus is on us to answer them honestly this time and do something about it; it always is.

Monday Morning Timeout

It's been a long week here at Cinema Romantico, what with the Crushing Post-Olympics Letdown™ transitioning directly into a why-won't-this-dissipate illness transitioning directly into a dishwasher malfunction which was like the callback to a joke earlier in the set that wasn't actually told, and all of that intertwined with the hideous late days of August which are, bar none, and even without Crushing Post-Olympics Letdown™ and a why-won't-this-dissipate illness, this blog's least favorite few days of every single year. And that long week, as you may or may not have noticed, contributed directly to our sparse content last week for which we roundly apologize. That we were able to serve an Old Fashioned was simply because we keep an Old Fashioned readymade under the bar for emergency situations. Now we have to make another emergency Old Fashioned which simply adds something else to our prolonged to-do list. So please, bear with us, give us another day, let us get our wits about us, and ingest our bloodstreams with a few more cups of coffee, and we will meet the high standard that you don't expect and that doesn't exist anyway beginning Tuesday, bright and early, and continuing on into the fall. (Fall? Are you out there? Oh sweet smells of autumn, just tease me, please, and tell me you're close.)

Friday's Old Fashioned: Torrid Zone (1940)

It’s not critical tradition (law) to begin a review by digressing on the movie’s poster but hey, we here at Cinema Romantico serve our Old Fashioned any way we damn please. And this poster amuses and confounds me because to look at it would leave you with an entirely wrongheaded impression of what this 1940 William Keighley movie might be. There’s James Cagney, strumming a guitar, eyes closed, like he’s Captain Corelli and that’s his mandolin, and Ann Sheridan on his shoulder, looking like the rosy-cheeked girl next door, cuddling up to her beau, just hoping he’ll take her down to the soda fountain for a chocolate malt. And the grinning Pat O’Brien? Well, maybe he’s the soda fountain proprietor who just can’t get over how happy he is to see these two young kids in love, or the dad of the girl next door just overwhelmed with good tidings for these two lovebirds. But then you’d watch the movie and realize that O’Brien never smiles, Ann Sheridan ain’t so sweet and Jim Cagney never, not once, picks up a guitar. Marketing, man, that crap will mess with your mind.

The odd misdirection of this advertisement, however, is apropos of the film itself, one that seems dead set on making O’Brien the star before he suddenly hands the starring role to Cagney, while Sheridan, riffing on Jean Harlow in “Red Dust”, operates always between the two. O’Brien is Steve Case, a humorless fruit company magnate who oversees a banana plantation down Central America way. His foreman is Nick Butler (Cagney), who decides to quit for a straitlaced job in Chicago, only to be lured back by a big bonus for a few weeks work to deal with a persnickety revolutionary, Rosario (George Tobias), who has just escaped execution. Nick agrees, but takes Sheridan’s Lee Donnelly along with him, who Steve has just ordered to leave the Torrid Zone and never come back if for no other reason than a mischievous twinkle in her eye which lets you know that she is always in the mood to some start shit. Eventually, after getting cheated by Lee at cards, Nick tries to send her away too, though she still refuses to budge, lurking around the edges, and calling him out on his dalliance with a married woman.

This is, of course, literally a banana republic, with Steve’s company in charge, displacing locals from their native land, a cause that is taken up by Rosario, who is less a hardened revolutionary than a romantic, the kind dreamed up on the Hollywood backlot rather than culled from the annals of actual history. Still, even if “Torrid Zone” might not be that sympathetic to Rosario’s actual cause, it remains sympathetic to him, thankfully refusing to turn him into a cartoon villain. There is an early scene, in fact, when Lee and Rosario are locked up behind bars in the same place and become fast friends. There is a reason for this friendship and it is their mutual interest in mixing things up.

That is the foremost motivation in “Torrid Zone” – causing trouble. This Torrid Zone is filled with troublemakers. Everyone wants trouble; everyone seeks trouble; everyone finds trouble. This is why Steve Case has to be moved out of the picture midway through, until he re-surfaces at the end to get his, because he is the one character here truly intent on preventing trouble in order to maintain his operation. Oh, Nick might act like he wants to keep things on the straight and narrow, but we know that’s a lie as well as Lee does. That’s why she keeps poking and prodding him, and that’s why we know he will never take that job in Chicago, which he doesn’t. He belongs in the Torrid Zone. They all do.

Freedom's Fury

"Water polo," says American swimmer Mark Spitz, narrator of the 2006 documentary "Freedom's Fury", "is a punishing sport, combining violence and finesse, endurance and strategy." It is also, he goes on to note, a sport where so much takes place just out of sight, below the water's surface, where players kick, claw, scratch, and do God knows what else, all to get the upper hand. Those dueling notions, what is so obvious at first and what is not, are also at the heart of the Olympics, where sport takes center stage even as politics forever lurk just out of sight, and sometimes eclipse the original athletic-based intent. Never was that more apparent than in the game that director Colin Keith Gray's film chronicles - the semi-final water polo match between Hungary and the Soviet Union at the 1956 Summer Games in Melbourne.

"Freedom's Fury" may start in the pool but it quickly moves on land, summarizing with reams of archival footage how during WWII the Nazi forces were driven out of Hungary by the Soviet Union, who subsequently, as one of the doc's myriad talking heads puts it, "forgot to leave." Instead the Soviets implemented their own government, politically and culturally repressing the Hungarians in the process. Athletics, as is explained, became one of the very few outlets Hungarians had, and there was no sport at which Hungary excelled more than water polo. How, exactly, a landlocked country like Hungary came to be a world power in a pool-set sport is only vaguely explained, disappointingly limited to the broadest of analysis and purple commentary like "It was in our blood." Still, it makes clear that Hungary achieved great success at the game because of forward-thinking training regimens and in-game strategy.

They were so good, in fact, that the Soviet Union, a place that, as David Maraniss noted in his book "Rome 1960", used "sports as propaganda to prove the superiority of the socialist system," sent its water polo team to Hungary to learn from the best and therefore exploit the best's  which made the 1956 match something of a mentor vs. protégé affair, which all alone would have upped the dramatic stakes, except that abundant extra and real world drama too hold when, in the months just ahead of the Melbourne Olympics, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 erupted.

The entire documentary is building toward the clash in the pool, of course, a clash that Hungary won 4-0. The focus, however, is not so much on the specifics of how the game was won but the one image that made the game famous – that is, Hungary’s Ervin Zador, after being sucker punched by an opposing player, opening a gash in his eye that bled profusely and into the pool. This indelible black & white photo provided the game an eternal moniker – The Blood In The Water Match. It’s funny, though, because the Hungary players interviewed actually somewhat dismiss the violence of the moment, labeling it as the sort of thing the sport, in any circumstance, fuels, and that the media took the breathtaking photo and ran with what they perceived it symbolized. It’s an interesting moment, a documentary purporting to be about this event, essentially muting the meaning of the event.

Indeed, despite ostensibly being the doc’s crux, the match doesn’t feel as important as how the movie concludes, when we see the two teams re-united many years later, in the aftermath of the Iron Curtain coming down and Hungary gaining independence. This heartfelt meeting, however, also betrays the lack of a true Russian voice throughout the film. The closest we get is Sergei Khrushchev, son of former Soviet premiere Nikita, whose smile as he speaks seems to betray almost a kind of embarrassment That the documentary is slanted toward Hungary is no surprise and not wrong, but the conciliatory conclusion would have been enhanced from honest voices on the other side, about what they felt back then and how they feel now. Their meeting does not seem to suggest that what’s past is past, but that there is still something valuable in discussing that past, looking it in the eye, and then moving forward. Seeing this conclusion taken in conjunction with all that came before reminded me of how the invaluable Louisa Thomas closed her piece in The New Yorker about the recent Wimbledon finale between American Serena Williams and German Angelique Kerber: "We sometimes project our problems onto sports. But sports can also be, in some small but real ways, where we start to work them out."

T-Rex: Her Fight For Gold

T-Rex of the title of Zackary Canepari and Drea Cooper’s documentary is the pugilistic nickname for Flint, Michigan’s Claressa Shields, who at the London Olympics, at the mere age of 17, became the first American woman to win Gold in women’s boxing, which made its debut at those same games. It might seem like a spoiler to reveal in the opening paragraph that she wins Gold since, hey, isn’t that what this documentary is all about? “Her Fight For Gold”? But it’s not really a spoiler, not even if you somehow avoided all sports press clippings in that last 4 years. And it’s not that the movie establishes straight up front that she wins, because it doesn’t. But the doc does place the match directly in the middle, building toward it and then pivoting off of it, because “T-Rex” seeks not simply to capture a Gold Medal winning moment. It seeks to capture how the lives of these athletes that consume us for a fortnight go on before the Games and go on after the Games. Claressa is 19. She’s a young woman. She’s Gold Medalist but damn she’s got a lot of life left.

It would have been so easy for this documentary to devolve into a feature length NBC Olympics puff piece. I don’t disagree with those pieces, but I disagree with their presentation, the way in which they transform every single athlete’s life and subsequent event into a fairytale. Claressa Shields winning Gold was not a fairytale. She was a skilled boxer, the best in the world, and she proved it. And though she had to overcome obstacles in life to get there, “T-Rex” never sentimentalizes this journey, balancing out lyrical shots of falling snow and shadow boxing with frames of the harsher side of life. At one point, they Canepari and Cooper fill the frame with the Flint, Michigan water tower and just let it sit there for a few seconds, letting it sink in that we know what’s coming even if they don’t, as if there is always something else to contend with where Claressa comes from.

Her parents are divorced, and while we don’t spend much time with them, we spend enough to get the gist, like a wrenching scene when Claressa’s sister stands on the sidewalk outside their house and winds up in an ominous verbal altercation with her mother’s current boyfriend. It’s short-lived, but it feels ominous. You know this is the norm. Claressa, meanwhile, winds up living with her coach, Jason Crutchfield, a former boxer. He had to retire and take a regular job, and he admits on camera to every coach’s yearning to tutor a champion, yet he never ever comes across as someone molding his charge in his image. He comes across as matter-of-fact in coaching as he does in parenting, equally making demands that Claressa might not like, but that he genuinely feels are best for her. This includes a boyfriend, who doubles as her sparring partner, who Jason doesn’t want her to see because he feels it affects the push & pull of his gym. That this never quite gets resolved feels true to the spirit of the film, where a life’s journey winds and weaves, and nothing is ever quite settled in stone.

When Claressa becomes an Olympian, she is forced to leave Jason behind, figuratively, because the coaches are obligated to be official appointees by Team USA. Still, he’s there, in the stands, and afterwards, giving her, the movie makes it seem, as many pointers, if not more, and if not more wise, than those of her “official” coaches. Not that Claressa or “T-Rex” mine too much drama out of this. The drama is in the ring, where the soundtrack, restrained but sharp, helps to wring real theater even when you know the result, allowing you disappear into the fight, as if it’s happening in real time. The climactic match, however, they handle a little differently, content in the advanced knowledge of her victory, rendering it as coronation rather than will she or won’t she? And when she does, it is the very genuine joy practically emanating from her visage, and the way she ecstatically bounces on the podium, that gets to you. Oh dear me, it’s hard not to believe in the Olympic Movement in those moments.

What follows afterwards isn’t a fall so much as the way in which the cloud of normalcy just sort of re-settles over Claressa. There is an indelible shot of her sitting on the couch, the Gold Medal in her lap, which evokes the sensation of “Well, what do I do with this thing now?” She yearns for endorsements, but they are not forthcoming. In one scene she and Jason meet with members of USA Boxing and they tell her to stop telling the press she wants to beat people up. She agrees, but reluctantly, and the look on her face, her eyes tilted toward the floor, isn’t a pout but a kind of WTF? Even so, important milestones beckon, like prom and graduation. And in these moments a paradox emerges.

In the hard won if healthy state of mind she displays, it is hard not to feel that true fame and fortune not finding her has allowed for that attitude. At the same time, when you see her continuing struggles, when you see her taking her mom to pay a bill at a collection agency, you cannot help but want fame and fortune for her more than anything.

The Care Bears on Fire

There was a moment during the United States Women’s Volleyball Team’s tense semi-final match with Serbia when coach Karch Kiraly, a legend of indoor and outdoor volleyball, called timeout. His team gathered around him. For a moment, the NBC announcers went silent and we heard Kiraly unfiltered. He told his team they were a family. He explained that this familial structure they had built was specifically for moments like this, to combat adversity. They need only rely on one another to do what they needed to do. If another coach in another sport at another time had spoken those words, I might have dismissed it as hooey. But by Thursday, after watching every single one of their games in Rio, I’d seen enough of this team to know it was true.

The Olympics are that much more fun when you have a team. You pick a team, whatever the sport, whatever the country, and you temporarily transfer all the emotionalism reserved for your official team and make this Olympic team your team for a fortnight instead. Sometimes you choose your team in advance, like I did with the U.S. Men’s Water Polo squadron of 2012. Sometimes you choose your team on a whim, like I did with the Swiss Women’s Curling Team in 2014. This year I picked my team ahead of time. This year I picked the United States Women’s Volleyball Team. And though they were referred to, by custom, as Team USA, I naturally decided that was too staid and unbecoming of a team so spectacularly righteous, and thus re-imagined their moniker as The Care Bears on Fire.

The Americans might not have seemed at first glance to possess as much volley balling verve as, say, the flair-full Brazilians, especially given how much Kiraly and the NBC announcers, Paul Sunderland and Kevin Barnett, referred to the American “system”. Somehow the term “system” just makes them feel more American, like Nick Saban and his monstrously unexciting sounding “process”, even if so many other volleyball teams have their own systems. But there is some truth to the tactical sameness of their “system.” They forbade, as Sunderland and Barnett repeatedly pointed out, any kind of riotous jump serving because it wasn’t as efficient. And while other teams could occasionally become dependent upon individual brilliance, setting a great player and simply letting her go get it, the United States stuck to the belief that systemic adherence would yield rich dividends.

Not that the Americans were rigid automatons. Look, I’m a Sports Emotionalist, first and foremost, and if The Care Bears on Fire just played white collar volleyball I would have bailed match one for Puerto Rico and its resplendent ABA-ish uniforms. In fact, Barnett explained that in the Olympic run-up he spoke with the mighty Foluke Akinradewo who said she loved this team because it let her act like “a big ol’ weirdo.” “What’s a big ol’ weirdo look like?” Barnett said he asked. “A lot of dancing,” she replied, “off rhythm.” She may as well have been speaking for the whole team; The Care Bears on Fire loved to dance.

While the six players competed on the court, the reserves, always at standing and at the ready if called upon, had choreographed dances for each individual player that were busted out in the wake of any point or great play. We didn’t see enough dancing, frankly. I wanted an iso-cam on the dancers. Kelsey Robinson became my favorite player not simply because she’s an ex-Cornhusker, and not simply because she was The Microwave, by which I mean she channeled Vinnie Johnson in instantly effecting results off the bench, and not simply because once when she made some dig that defied the eye the camera caught her mouthing “wow” to herself as if she didn’t even believe it, but because the dance in her honor was my favorite. It was sort of this little shoop shoop ba-doop, once to the right, once to the left. When Kelsey subbed in against China last Sunday, my favorite match The Care Bears played, and never came back out because she took over, it’s possible I tried out the shoop shoop ba-doop a couple times in my living room, though I’d never admit it.

The Care Bears on Fire were founts of this sort of joy. Any time a player substituted in or out there was an exchange of high fives between the whole team. Before every point was played there was a round of low fives, a constant “let’s get ’em.” And at the end of each point, there was either a celebration, often rendered in striking slow motion, giving full weight to the gigantic emotions splayed across the players’ faces, if they won. And if they lost, there was a huddle, typically packed with just as many smiles as a point won, and even occasional laughs that seemed to imply something along the lines of a jocular “can you believe I just f***ed that up?!”. This was particularly crucial. There was an incredible capacity for well-adjusted, even fun-loving, resolve. A point lost was gone, though not necessarily forgotten because it might have suggested a space for strategic correction, and now it was time to play the next point. In America, where so many of our sports are ensconced with unmerciful whining about everything that has already happened, this “the next point is a new point mentality” was a breath of fresh air.

That mentality had benefited them throughout the tournament, through which they had traversed with a perfect record of 6-0, and it seemed extra critical in the hella dramatic fifth set in the semi-final against Serbia, which we return to now, after The Care Bears on Fire had gone up by one set, only to lose Akinradewo to injury and struggle, going down 2 sets to 1, only to rally to even it at 2 sets all, and then take the lead in the fifth set, three precious points away from the Gold Medal match, when Serbia made a run and Kiraly called timeout and told them they were family.

In the Sports Movie, that’s enough. The Care Bears on Fire would go out and win. Instead, they kinda cracked up. They lost. And they took it hard. They shed some tears. And I liked that they shed tears because it simply reinforced the realness of the emotion that was so prominently on display throughout Rio. Forty eight hours later they played the Netherlands for Bronze and won. I was not surprised. After all, that was why they built their familial structure, to combat this kind of adversity. Next point, new point. Now, let’s dance.

Faster Higher Stronger

At the end of the Men’s Decathlon, the mettle-testing two-day event spanning ten different events of track and field, American world recorder and defending Olympic champion Ashton Eaton entered the final challenge, the 1,500 meters, with France’s Kévin Mayer unexpectedly snapping at his heels. To win Gold, Mayer had to outrun Eaton by seven seconds in their four laps of the track. As the race commenced, Eaton did as expected, locking into place directly behind Mayer so that if the Frenchman made a push to try and garner seven seconds distance, Eaton could respond. Mayer, however, did not have the legs to go for broke, and so Eaton would have done fine to remain just off his competitor’s shoulder, stay within seven seconds, pragmatically get the job done. But then, with roughly 300 meters left, and no need whatsoever to push it, Eaton pushed it anyway, going up a gear, passing Mayer, surging forward, around the final turn and down the stretch. Eaton did not win the race itself, but he finished ahead of Mayer, which seemed to be his intent. Afterwards, in the obligatory out-of-breath post-race interview, when asked where he found the strength, or some such, to keep going, he name-checked his competitors and his wife and the whole United States (really!), and maybe he meant that, but to me he looked less driven by Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, etc., than by an intrinsic embodiment of Citius Altius Fortius.

Citius Altius Fortius was the jejune sounding ideal proposed by Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympics, as the sporting celebration’s motto, the one that dictates Faster Higher Stronger. Not, as Donald Sutherland so memorably explained in “Without Limits”, being “faster, higher and stronger than who you're competing against... Just faster...higher...stronger.” That idea can be hard sometimes to wrap our heads around in a shouty society where everyone wants to pit someone against someone else, and where you are either a winner or a loser. In that moment, however, Eaton lived it.

Last Friday, Almaz Ayana of Ethiopia shattered the 10,000 meter world record that had stood since 1993. But what I found just as compelling was the plight of American Molly Huddle. I had high hopes she could land on the podium; a lot of people had high hopes she could land on the podium; she had high hopes she could land on the podium. But in the race’s early stages, the pace was positively furious. The giant pack of runners got strung out quick, and Huddle clung to the back of the lead pack, intent on not letting them go. Problem was, as NBC’s Tim Hutchings pointed out, Huddle was at a pace well past that of her personal best. To keep going with them was folly; to fall back was to bid the podium goodbye. A minute or two passed and the inevitable slowly played out. She fell back, and as she did, the cameras lost sight of her, partially because there were so many entrants in the field, and people were getting lapped, and there were runners everywhere, and the camera was most intoxicated by Ayana who was refusing to let up in running away from everyone. Even so, in the end, despite earning no medal, Molly Huddle broke the American record in the event by a fairly shocking ten seconds.

Her post-race comment wrecked my heart: “I just couldn’t hang with the top three. I just…” And then she paused, trying to concoct a delicate way to phrase it, but there is no delicacy for such a harsh truth. She said: “They’re better runners.” Maybe they are, but no American had ever been better than her and, as such, she had never been better than herself. She went faster, and sometimes being faster is as good as being fastest.

Usain Bolt wanted to go faster in his 200 meter final. It is and has always been his best event, the one where his majesty, his length and physical imposition, is on starkest display. He ripped up the turn like he always does, poetry in furious motion, but the last 100 felt oddly less dominant than usual, even if he finished, as he generally does, leagues ahead of everyone else. The guy whose transcendence partially stems from never appearing to try looked like he was really trying. He actually grimaced, he pushed all the way to the finish line, and he even leaned. Afterwards, he expressed happiness for the win, of course, but he also admitted disappointment at his stellar yet pedestrian (for him) 19.78. “I wanted to go faster,” he confessed.

“My body wouldn’t respond to me,” he continued, “so I guess it’s just age and all around taking a toll.” It was weird. I had to come to grips with it. Maybe I expected too much of him; maybe he expected too much of himself; maybe it was just the natural course of things and Usain Bolt - yes, even him - is getting the athletic version of old. Still, in dismissing what he had accomplished, in expressing disbelief at his body’s refusal to follow him where he wanted it to go, he summed up a strange, beautiful truth. His opponent was never the other runners because he was too advanced for them, and his opponent was never the clock because he always seemed capable of defying time when he ignored showboating. No, Usain Bolt’s primary competition was his idea of his own ability and his body’s capacity to assert that idea.

Usain Bolt was always running against himself.

Giants on the Earth

I cribbed this post’s title from Kenny Moore’s 1987 Sports Illustrated article recounting the astonishing moment at the 1968 Mexico City Summer Olympics when Bob Beamon obliterated the long jump record and Lee Evans broke the 400 meter world record by becoming the first man to go below 44 seconds, clocking a gritty 43.86. These two gargantuan feats of strength happened literally minutes apart, as if they were cosmically underwritten, and Moore’s scene-setting line still gives me chills: “Now we are moved to reflect upon what natural wonders these men were and how things came together for them in Mexico City on Oct. 18, 1968, at 3:46 in the afternoon....” Both those records eventually fell, as all records must, yet I never stopped thinking about them, wishing I could have been there to witness their rendering, wondering what it felt like for those who did.

Although Day 3 of track & field competition at the Rio Olympics last Sunday night was headlined by the men’s 100 meter dash, the men’s 400 meter final was scheduled immediately before it. On paper, the latter race appeared epic, stacked with 2008 Gold Medalist Lashawn Merritt, 2012 Gold Medalist Kirani James and 2015 World Champion Wayde Van Niekerk. Still, those who claimed afterwards they sensed a potential world record strike me as dubious. After all, once Evans delivered his 43.86 in 1968, only two men would hold the record again. Butch Reynolds passed Evans twenty years later and the immortal Michael Johnson passed Reynolds eleven years that, blazing a 43.18 at the turn of the century, a time so entrenched that I took it for granted even as I assumed its permanence.

Because of a semi-rough semi-final, Van Niekerk had been cast into dreaded lane 8, which, because of staggered lanes, put him in front of everyone else, meaning he would be running blind, unable to see his competitors and modulate this performance accordingly. That seemed a difficult impediment to overcome, not just for setting a world record but for winning at all. Then again, Evans operated out of Lane 6 in 1968, unable to track his primary competitor, fellow American Larry James, in Lane 2. Evans went on instinct. And I can’t help but wonder if not knowing where Merritt and James were actually gave Van Niekerk an unwitting edge. Because when he turned for home, he kept pushing in a way I’ve never seen at that distance, as if he assumed Merritt and James were right there with him, even though they weren’t. Normally the last 100 meters of a 400 are an exercise in agony as sprinters struggle rather than sprint and fight to hold their form to the finish. Even if Van Niekerk was in agony, he never struggled. He kept sprinting. I could not believe, and still kind of can’t, what I was seeing.

There was a moment when I tried to balance where Van Niekerk was in relation to the finish line with the time on the clock. It looked like he was going to finish below 43 seconds. But that couldn’t be possible, I thought. I must not be seeing where the finish line really is, I decided. But I was seeing it, and then he was across it, and the time that flashed, 43.03, felt to track fans what it must feel like for an astronomer to see some grand celestial object pop up where it is not supposed to be. I was not alive when Roger Bannister broke the 4 minute mile, obviously, and Van Niekerk coming within a whisper of sub-43 is my closest equivalent. I screamed so loud my girlfriend came out of the other room because she thought I’d been watching Usain Bolt, who she wanted to watch with me, and she’d missed it. Bolt surpassing Michael Johnson’s 200 meter record in 2008 was transcendent, but when Bolt toed the line I was in the mindset that he could do it. I didn’t even consider Van Niekerk breaking the record when he set sail, let alone go that low. I thought he was going up in a standard 747 and the next thing I knew he’d landed on the moon.

Usain Bolt had already taken his trips to the moon, back in 2008 and 2009, when he broke world records in spectacular fashion, and then broke the ones he’d set. Now he was pitched to go past the bounds of the known track universe, to become the first person to win three Gold Medals to in the 100 meter dash, to go back-to-back-to-back, a triad of heavyweight titles, like Muhammad Ali’s, The Greatest, the closest pure athletic comparison I can think of for Bolt, who was on the precipice of being The Greatest too. And that’s where he was last Sunday night, on the precipice, as he kneeled in the blocks and took that trademark last look down the track, and that unmistakable heavenly hush came over the Olympic Stadium crowd, my heart was beating to burst, and I both wanted the race to begin more than anything and to stay in that few seconds, so alive and unknown, forever.

At the gun, Bolt started slow. He always starts slow, given his unlikely-for-a-sprinter 6’5 frame, but he looked even a tad heavier than usual, and he was several runners behind his chief nemesis, Justin Gatlin. Bolt doesn’t win races in the beginning, of course, he wins them in the end, eventually bringing the full power of his powerful frame to bear. Even so, in the flash of that slow start I saw a whole race unfold in my mind where he failed to uncoil and unleash, and so my body was flooded with a hot flash of panic so immense I frankly might have collapsed if he had not so quickly done what he always does – that is, meet everyone else in the race on their terms up to 60 meters and then……dictate his terms and leave the mere mortals in the dust. Back-to-back-to-back. He went where no runner had gone before, which was where I was so desperately wanted him to go, and I was so overcome with joy that he had, well, I don’t mind saying it since you probably could’ve guessed it – I wept. I don’t wish to declare Usain Bolt as “The Greatest Athlete of All Time” because that’s arbitrary, subject to everyone’s own criteria, but he is the greatest athlete I have ever seen, and I will leave it there.

I’d imagined Bolt winning that race at least since the World Championships a year ago, maybe even back to the Worlds in 2013, maybe even all the way back to the London Olympics, maybe further still, when he ran that 9.92 in a semi-final in Beijing without even really running at all. But I never imagined it in conjunction with Van Niekerk’s 400. And because everything has to be delineated in the year 2016, some were quick to declare Van Nierk’s achievement as more impressive than Bolt’s, which is just boring and reductive. All I know is that when I think of Bolt going back-to-back-to-back, I’ll think of Van Niekerk going 43.03. And when I think of Van Niekerk going 43.03, I’ll think of Bolt going back-to-back-to-back. I will think of an Olympic night unlike any I can recall. And their respective records will one day fall, because that is the way the world turns, but even when they do, the night will live on, forever and ever, and I will hold onto it for at least that long, that mystical night when two giants walked on the earth.

Shout-Out to the Extra: Without Limits Version

When The Beatles invaded, so to speak, America in 1964, it marked, as Greil Marcus put it, a “pop explosion”, and that pop explosion covered all manner of cultural ground. But when The Beatles invaded, so to speak, America in 1964, it also unleashed, as seen above, all manner of screaming girls, which was but one marker of that pop explosion engineered by the boys from Liverpool. Cultural forces like The Beatles can yield thoughtful, in-depth essays like those by Marcus and they can yield screaming girls who have never seen anyone so beautiful, never heard anything so remarkable, never wanted so desperately to be so close to someone. To see them is to have to scream.

I mention this because in the midst of his famed 5,000 meter race at 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, late American middle distance runner Steve Prefontaine was termed by British commentator David Coleman “an athletic Beatle.” And this is not inaccurate. By that time, particularly in his native Oregon, where so many sported shirts with his name, where so many chanted the famed abbrevation of his full surname in the midst of his races, not only wanting to will him to victory but to let him know that they saw him and loved him, he had become the closest thing America probably still has ever seen to a rock star on the track.

In Robert Towne's Prefontaine biopic “Without Limits”, superior to the documentary-ish “Pre”, he has minimal time to establish this transition from mere Person Who Runs to Rock Star. He does this via a lone race at Hayward Field where Pre defies Coach’s orders and takes the race from the front by running away from everyone else. His shattering victory and the cocky ebullience he exudes connects with the crowd, and the crowd goes crazy, as if momentarily Hayward Field becomes JFK Airport in 1964.

To signal this, Towne cuts from a confrontation between Pre and Coach where Coach tells runner to take his victory lap. Pre goes to do just that. And as he does, Towne cuts to a shot of the first row of the stadium, but he leaves, initially, all the faces blurred out save for one, as if the screaming horde, which is always comprised of individuals, has been reduced to just a single individual and what Pre means to her and her alone.

And this, I suppose, is fandom, which while so often being a communal experience, is also intensely personal. We may outwardly express our fandom in a manner identical to all those around us by screaming even as we inwardly know from what particular place that scream first begins to gather steam. Pre had so many fans, but in this shot he just has one, and she momentarily represents all of us 

A Proposal for Old Billy Dee to be Young Lando

Remember In Living Color, the Fox sketch show that had a brief if fiery run in the early nineties? I think my favorite sketch of theirs was I Love Laquita, a spoof, as the title implies, of I Love Lucy, re-imagining Lucille Ball’s famed comic interferer as a black woman, played with great comic force by Kim Wayans, and featuring Jim Carrey, whom the show was famous for breaking, as her Ricky-ish spouse. There was one I Love Laquita, however, that was best.

As it opens, we hear a radio news bulletin, one that Laquita inevitably misses, warning of a Billy Dee Williams impostor on the loose, robbing people all over town, and not to let him into your home. Sure enough, the Billy Dee Williams impostor, played by Keenan Ivory Wayans, arrives a moment later and Laquita, gone gaga, lets him right into her apartment. Before long, it turns out that Ricky has convinced the real Billy Dee Williams to come over for Laquita's birthday, meaning hijinks ensue. In the end, the impostor is found out because he cannot compete with the real Billy Dee’s famously record levels of debonair.

I mention this all because The Wrap reported last week that the forthcoming Han Solo spinoff is eyeing a young Lando Calrissian. All sorts of names have been dropped by all sorts of movie pseudo-news outlets, lists of ten and fifteen and twenty potential Lando Calrissians. And many of the young men mentioned are fine actors, absolutely. It’s simply that asking someone else to assume Lando’s cape is asking the impossible. If the I Love Laquita sketch proved anything it was that no man could dream of successfully impersonating Billy Dee Williams. That’s like a splotch of pasta sauce on your white chambray shirt passing itself off as Jupiter’s Great Red Spot. Ha! The suaveness of Billy Dee Williams is not second to none; it’s first to no one else; it’s operating on a level of high wave frequency we ordinary humans can’t glean.

In the wake of the Han Solo spinoff, I suggested casting six different actors to embody the full essence of Solo, since simply relying one one actor to manage such a difficult job was certain folly. In the case of Lando, however, six actors could not approximate his essence. Twelve actors could not approximate his essence. A hundred actors could not approximate his essence. No, only one will do, and that one is the one who played him, which is why the only way to cast Young Lando is to cast Old Billy Dee Williams.

And I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: wait, Billy Dee Williams is 79 years old, how can he play the young Lando Calrissian? Oh for pete’s sake, people, it’s called time travel. Remember the J.J. Abrams “Star Trek” reboot when the young James T. Kirk improbably has an encounter with the old Spock played, of course, by Leonard Nimoy because of time travel, or something like it? Do that. I really don’t care how. I don’t care if it’s rife with plot holes and the most absurd twist in movie history and sends “Star Wars” fans into hissy fits. None of that matters. All I know is, there is no other alternative.

Billy Dee Williams is not Lando Calrissian; Lando Calrissian is Billy Dee Williams, and anyone else trying to take the part would merely be an impostor.

The Second Mother (2015)

It is a testament to the delicacy of Anna Muylaert’s “The Second Mother” that when Bárbara (Karine Teles) tells her household’s longtime live-in maid, Val (Regina Casé), that she is “part of the family”, the statement is simultaneously truthful and condescending. Val is part of the family, and not just because she so often hovers in the orbit of Bárbara, and her husband Carlos (Lourenço Mutarelli) and son Fabhino (Michel Joelsas), fixing dinner and cleaning up, but because her relationship with the teenage Fabhino appears, frankly, more intimate than does Bárbara's. Of course, there are always lines that Val cannot cross, like that doorway between the kitchen and the dining room, or the backyard pool that is a shimmering testament to the elite, mystical boundaries representing the divide between economic classes. Someone will have to break those invisible lines, of course, and the culprit turns out to be Jéssica (Camila Márdila), Val’s daughter.

If Val is, as the title implies, like a second mother to Fabhino, she’s like no mother at all to her own daughter, who has been living in India with her father and shows up in Sao Paulo, intent on enrolling in the city’s most exclusive university to become an architect. With no home to call her own, Jéssica first moves into her mother’s small room before the family immediately takes to her allows her to not only stay in the guest bedroom instead, but to sit at the table designated for guests and even eat hallowed ice cream. She is the obligatory narrative bomb that goes off, exposing rifts in the entire household operation, intrinsically bringing the silently suffering union of Bárbara and Carlos to something like a noiseless head. Indeed, the relationship that briefly emerges between Jéssica and Carlos suggests something much more melodramatic, and much darker. But Muylaert ties off the angle quickly.

Instead, “The Second Mother” maintains a wistful tone without ever becoming saccharine, revealing itself as being as much a story of a daughter’s love for her mother as a mother’s love for her daughter. Jéssica can’t figure out why her mother subjugates herself to this way of life and her mother can’t figure out why her daughter won’t. In so many ways, Jéssica is already more assured in who she is, even as she’s still trying to figure herself out, than her mother. And that is because Val has just sort of unconsciously assimilated with the family, and Casé's wonderful performance quietly conveys how easily she accepts her place, not out of resignation but routine; this is the way it is because this is the way it has always been. If anything, she goes about her mundane daily tasks with something much closer to joy than agony. It is why she feels such pain when, in an early scene, Barbara dismisses her gift of a coffee set.

And Val never really reaches a point where she has to change because of some dust-up with Bárbara and Carlos. Even if the living situation becomes rocky with Jéssica’s arrival, the narrative never takes the ultimate decision away from Val. No, Val, with a crucial assist from her daughter, figures things out for herself, even if the end leaves you with the knowledge that she has not figured it all out. When Val finally sets foot in the pool, which she continually claims she will never do, it’s a moment where, perhaps conditioned from hundreds of other films, I kept waiting for the other shoe to fall. It never did. I was glad it did not. She earned the respite.

Elite Squad (2007)

“Elite Squad”, a stylistic descent into the drug wars of late 90’s Rio de Janeiro, is narrated by Roberto Nascimento (Wagner Moura), a captain in BOPE (Batalhão de Operações Policiais Especiais), a military unit of Rio’s state police. These voiceovers are omnipresent, beginning to end, and make absolutely clear the film’s point-of-view. While there is the concept of an Unreliable Narrator, in which the credibility of the person speaking is compromised, coloring the film in his or her own un-trustworthy light, Captain Nascimento comes across as an extremely Reliable Narrator. I believed everything he told me; it’s just that everything he told me left me wondering if he was the hero he thinks is.

His voiceover is entirely free of doubt. As he takes us through the dizzying inner-workings of the Brazilian police force and those they typically keep in line by letting them do whatever they want so long as the cops on the beat get paid, Nascimento sounds like a guy writing a tell-all book after the fact. He is not seeking truth because he already knows the truth. He knows all the cops in Rio are corrupt; he knows the drug dealers rule the favelas; he knows the rich Rio kids who smoke dope are no better than the drug dealers they buy it from; he knows that BOPE, and BOPE alone, is the city’s savior, That makes him sound like a one dimensional character, and, rest assured, he is, even when the film segues to his personal life where a baby, as it must be, is on the way, prompting to Nascimento to ponder, as he has to, retirement.

This is stock, no more, no less, existing as motivation but betraying the emptiness underneath all the movie’s gloss, and its unchallenging nature in a seemingly limitless situation that would seem to have all sorts of angles. And it’s all conveyed, of course, in Shaky Cam Cinema, as are the action sequences, naturally, and everything in-between. These jittery frames are not intended to emblemize anything, they just are, an empty stylistic device that (probably) inadvertently hones in on the ethics of all the people involved.

All of Nascimento’s problems in the home are merely a narrative ruse for him to train a couple replacements, newbies coming into BOPE with, well, if not an innocence, necessarily, an inquisitive attitude, a chance for “Elite Squad” to pose some questions and seek some answers. Neto (Caio Junqueira), however, is pretty much a nonentity. André (André Ramiro), on the other hand, bears promise, particularly because a character who seems more willing to step back and consider, evinced by the way in which he moonlights as a law student. This puts him in a class with those rich kids, including Maria (Fernanda Machado) who works at an NGO helping kids a nearby favela. He doesn’t tell her he’s a cop, because he can’t, because to do so would put her in a jeopardy .

This leads to classroom scenes where André’s fellow students lash out against the police and he shouts back at them. What’s interesting is these scenes are not discussions; there is not back and forth; there is no examining each side of the issue; it is mark your line in the sand and don’t come across, or else. And that, frankly, is “Elite Squad” in its entirety,

And by staking its claim with Nascimento – that voiceover – it essentially falls on the side of BOPE, whether it intends to or not, brought home in the training sequence that kicks off the third act which could have been cribbed from a hundred other boot camp movies, and that concludes with its members literally invading the favela, as if it’s war, which it is. And it becomes that Machivellian idea of how war cannot be avoided, only postponed to the advantage of others, and so the Tropa de Elite may as well just get on with what will come anyway.

First Week of the Olympics (as Seen Through the Prism of NBC)

I watched the USA Women’s Gymnastics Team, six million cubic feet of raw acrobat power, win the hallowed Team Event final on tape delay via NBC. But the American women were so unruffled and dominant that I imagine watching it live still would have approximated tape delay, like it was so obvious they could not be beaten that competition would have felt like coronation. The team seemed to know it was foregone too. After all, immediately upon winning, the five members locked arms in a semi-circle around an NBC camera, gazed into America’s collective soul and altogether declared, twice, “We are the Final Five.” Four years ago, in London, the media dubbed the Gold Medal winning women’s gymnastics team as the Fierce Five, and they came sixteen years after the the press branded the USA’s first team to win the event as The Magnificent Seven. The five young women of right now, however, were not about to let someone else control their brand, and so they pre-planned their own moniker. Stick the landings, sure, but get your marketing ducks in order first. It’s a brave new world.

Their brand merged famously with NBC’s famous brand – that is, All-Americans Who Win. Kerri Walsh Jennings and her new beach volley balling bestie April Ross went 3 for 3. Katie Ledecky stomped all comers. Lilly King briefly re-ignited the Cold War. Michael Phelps kicked ass and created memes. Even on those rarest of occasions when NBC allowed a foreign competitor into their broadcast, like Australia’s 100 meter freestyle sensation Cate Campbell, for whom a puff piece was authored, an American, Simone Manuel, transcendently becoming the first black female to win swimming Gold, grabbed hold of the narrative anyway. Her winning moment, however, felt less packaged because it was less expected, an inadvertent reminder of grand the Olympics can be when the narrative imposes itself rather than the telecast dictating it. Had NBC shown Manuel on tape delay she would have got her own puff piece right before the race, not so subtly giving the result anyway. But NBC was as thrown for a loop as anyone, like they were a night earlier when a Kazakhstan swimmer, Dmitry Balandin, won his country’s first gold in swimming by improbably surging in from winners-never-come-from-all-the-way-over-there lane 8. “Where did this guy come from?!” NBC color commentator Rowdy Gaines hollered in one of those stock lines that suggested the possibility he did not necessarily do all his homework.

Missy Franklin came in last in a semi-final race from lane 8 a few days earlier. You might remember Missy Franklin from the London Olympics of four years ago, beaming that photogenic smile, winning medals up the wazoo, starring in the USA Swimming Team’s “Call Me Maybe” singalong. She was as prevalent as Michael Phelps. But prevalence is dictated by placement on the podium. And last place in a semi-final means no podium. Missy didn’t even get the traditional Absurdly Pointless Interview With Michele Tafoya While Trying To Catch Your Breath, as sure a sign as any that the value of her brand had plummeted in the Peacock’s eyes. No, her struggles were mentioned in passing, never really analyzed, and then forgotten, a cruel, unintentional yet no less true underscoring of America unceasingly demanding What Have You Done For Me Lately?

As easy at is to criticize NBC’s coverage, however, it’s simultaneously necessary to laud it. Well, maybe not the coverage itself, which essentially negated any commentary on the non-Olympic plight of Rio, went heavy on commercials and was Phelps-obsessed to the point that I have no idea how they will cope without him in Tokyo 2020 (show shots of him watching coverage on his sectional probably), but the amount of coverage, spread across NBC’s sister networks and the Internet. Twenty years ago finding an Olympic Water Polo match required paying obscene amounts for the infamous Triplecast; in 2016, on a Monday night, in America, I could easily watch a water polo clash between Croatia and Montenegro, which rivetingly concluded when the former’s Luka Bukić simultaneously reeled in a perfect entry pass and furiously released it toward the opposing goal where it landed with eight seconds left, nabbing them victory. (Parenthetical Tangent: Croatia’s national water polo team is called The Barracudas. America’s national water polo team is called the USA Men’s Senior National Water Polo Team. Do better with these things, America.)

On Wednesday, I stumbled upon a badminton match just seconds before China and the United States engineered a 46 shot rally. As the announcers explained, the Chinese were more or less toying with the hapless if valiant Americans, and so this was not traditional drama, yet it was mesmerizing nonetheless, an extraordinary display of shuttlecock exactitude and a reminder that these fringe-ish sports that often prompt people to say things like “That’s in the Olympics?!” belong just as much as anything else. The brand new Rugbys Seven, which like Match Sprint Cycling in '12 or Curling in '02, became my unexpected jam, belongs too. America’s men’s Rugby team, a genuinely motley crew, thrown together to take a shot against the world’s best and coming up well short, flew under the radar. Still, there was something noble in their attempt, and more than so many well-oiled, well-funded American squads, their ragtag origins and fiery desire in the face of long odds invoked our underdog beginnings.

America prefers underdogs that become winners, especially when they vanquish all-of-a-sudden mortal enemies as U.S. swimmer Maya DiRado did by beating Hungary's Iron Lady, Katinka Hosszú, who so emphatically dominated her first three races that the only explanation in the States was doping. She had to be doping. Otherwise, how could she beat Americans? Maybe she is doping, maybe she isn’t, I honestly have no idea and neither do you. And I did not, to be completely clear, leap to my feet when DiRado out touched Hosszú by a mere fingertip at the wall to win the 200 meter backstroke because she proved some patriotic point. No, I leapt up because the Iron Lady seemed unbeatable and DiRado conjured up a version of that magic first brewed at Olympia so long ago to beat her anyway.

As good as the race was, however, the medal ceremony was best. Oh, dear reader, have I seen some medal ceremonies in my time, but I can honestly say that DiRado’s might be my favorite. She smiled; she crossed her heart; she sang along; and then, she laughed. Michael Phelps laughed in a medal ceremony last week too, though that, as we learned, was because of some friends horsing around in the stands. Maya DiRado’s laugh was different. It was as if she was flooded with so much unexpected joy that she could not quite fathom what she was feeling and involuntarily cracked up. I will never forget it. Her laughter made me cry.

Just as good was afterwards, when she posed with silver medalist Hosszú and the bronze medalist, Hilary Caldwell. After the obligatory smattering of photos with their Olympic loot, a smiling Hosszú said something to to the also smiling DiRado and DiRado laughed again. That laugh was not a crackup; that was a laugh of “Hey, you said something funny and I am responding to it!” They looked like new friends, not antagonists. There was a lesson in it I think. 

Friday's Old Fashioned: Rio 40 Graus (1955)

“Rio 40 Graus” opens with an aerial shot of Rio de Janeiro, pushing past the Corcovado and toward its favelas, the slums inhabited by its (much) less prosperous citizens, and director Nelson Pereira dos Santos’s film closes with a shot inside the favelas, in the midst of a samba, before the camera rises up and out of the slums, to take in the whole of glittering Rio itself. These bookend shots remind us that despite the efforts by so many to keep the favelas out of view, or, at least, keep the favelas out of view in their own minds, they remain right there, on the edge perhaps, but part of the same city nonetheless. Inhabitants of the favela live in Rio just like the affluent who chill on Copacabana, just like the local politicians who scheme and cajole, directly in plain view of the good ol’ Statue of Christ. That’s not to suggest that “Rio 40 Graus” is enraged with its titular city. There is anger, yes, and it percolates and it occasionally bubbles over, but there is love too, a love for Rio, and for Brazil, and its culture. So much, in fact, that it wants to use this cinematic platform as a means to argue how that culture belongs to all.

The film opens inside the favela where five young boys, all peanut sellers, depart their homes, wading into Rio, peddling their products. Each boy is plagued by his own problems, whether it’s a once-great trombonist for a father who has devolved into destitution and alcoholism or a gravely ill mother. These bits of characters are not, mind you, introduced to engender dramatic payoffs, but to set mood. “Rio 40 Graus” is very much of the neo-realist movement, a quasi-documentary, though one often overlaid with music, typically more uplifting or sweet than ominous. Life may be hard, but the spirit of the people here remains intact. That smells suspiciously of sentimentality, sure, but Santos never panders, never comes close, instead allowing his film to intrinsically argue that life itself automatically allows for such duality.

As they journey into Rio, the youngest boy, in a splendidly jarring moment that seems to transition like a magic trick, winds up in the green of the forest, with animals all around, as if he has been teleported to the Amazon. It is the city zoo he has wound up in, but Santos doesn’t clue us into that right away, preferring instead to revel in the boy’s eyes, alive with wonder, as he drinks in the sights and sounds all around him. Alas, his palpable joy is stripped in an instant when a security guard boots the boy before immediately ushering other kids, kids very much not of the favela, right on in, the class divide rendered starkly, painfully. And that’s how “Rio 40 Graus” will go, following these boys from place to place, even as it occasionally takes time for vignettes, or even side stories, like the melodrama of a pregnant young woman and the father-to-be wrestling with whether or not to get married. Even if these scenes are shot in the same plainspoken style, their mood is more befitting of a soap opera, as is the subplot of a local politician’s daughter being fixed up with a sinewy deputy minister at the famed Statue of Christ. There, in a laugh out loud moment, the deputy conspicuously checks out the young lady’s backside, indifferent to his towering Redeemer.

This journey to the famed Statue keeping watch on Rio is indicative of the overall film, moving from famed locale to famed locale, Sugar Loaf Mountain to Copacabana and beyond. This is not, however, a mere travelogue. Each of these places represents an odd kind of democratic meeting ground, where the poor and the rich are allowed to intermingle, even if the rich laugh obliviously, or turn their nose up, at the poor, and the poor know they don’t really belong there anyway. Of all the locales, the famed Maracanã stadium becomes the most crucial, with a championship game between the home team and another team contested. If anything stands for everyone, it is Brazilian futbol, though even here, we quickly learn, the higher-ups will always hold more sway. The team’s beloved best player is sidelined by the whims of the owner who is determined to thrust a new, inexperienced if promising player into the spotlight. Eventually the owner is proved right in his seemingly idiotic decision, a darkly comic reminder that good fortune falls upward toward those in power, allowing them to consolidate it. That consolidation of power is also evinced in a local gangster who wants control of the peanut racket, leading him to try and chase down one of the favela youths infringing on his territory, which ends tragically, abruptly, so much so that you might not believe it just happened. But it did, and the world keeps turning, indifferent. Santos juxtaposes this moment with a big goal at the Maracanã, rendering the thunderous cheers spectacularly hollow.

Despite the melancholy of this moment, and of others, the film ends on a festive note, essentially transforming into a musical as it returns to the favela where the locals, gearing up for the Brazil Carnival, erupt into a samba. It is not a moment that forgets what came before, but that remembers despite the power and wealth tipping toward those outside favela, its dwellers, despite all their problems, retain the right to Brazil’s culture and traditions. A little earlier, the trombonist father explains to a favela visitor that “Everybody heard just my trombone when my band played.” It’s a great line, and he underscores it by ignoring the drink and momentarily unwielding a few notes on his chosen instrument. But it’s a line that also echoed in my head as the movie concluded, where as everyone sang and danced the samba, you could, for a few moments, only see Rio for the favela.

5 Olympics Movies That Need To Be Made

The modern Olympic games have been around since the turn of the 20th century, with the Summertime version debuting in 1896 while the Wintertime version, built on the back of the Nordic Games, eventually arrived in 1924. And yet, despite such expansive history, there are fewer films about these grandiloquent international sporting events than you might surmise. And even when one is made, the quality, more often than not, feels wanting. For every effective film, be it a documentary like “Tokyo Olympiad” or a dramatic recounting of an actual event like “Chariots of Fire”, there are a half-dozen abominations like “Goldengirl” or “Ice Castles”, either woebegone efforts to “say” something or pseudo-inspirational dreck. And that’s not to mention the constant desire to seize on the story of a single athlete, a played out narrative choice that too often provides nothing but paint-by-the-numbers biopics like this year’s “Race” and “Eddie the Eagle.” Oh, it’s a grand shame, because, after all, the Olympics are steeped in natural drama. We can do better, Hollywood; we should do better; let’s do better.

As you may know, which is likely causing you to shake your head while sighing because you see what’s coming, I am something of an Olympics junkie and amateur Olympics semi-historian. And so I feel lightly qualified to impart at least a few suggestions that absolutely no one will listen to.

5 Olympics Movies That Need To Be Made

Runner’s Friction

While this blog is a hearty and vocal proponent of “Cool Runnings” (1994), that spirited comedy was nothing if not uber-Disneyfied, and for “Runner’s Friction” we will turn to the dark side of the bobsled track. The top tier of the sport is high-tech and extremely secretive, where teams will go to extravagant lengths in an unrelenting sleigh war to uncover what mechanical secrets other teams might possess. This was never the case more than in the 80s when the villainous East Germans were the cream of the crop, locked in a fierce rivalry with the Swiss, and the two teams circled each other like lycra-clad intelligence operatives. “Runner’s Friction” would be a throwback, a John le Carre novel on and around the bobsled track, where “the glory of sport” is traded in for subterfuge, and victory only leads to accusation and innuendo.

Exorcism of the Yell

In esteemed Kenny Moore’s wonderful 1988 Sports Illustrated article about a few of the discus’s best he quotes American discus thrower Ben Plucknett as saying he sought a sport “without human judgment. Just the tape and me.” Just the tape and me. I love that sentiment because it suggests a sport that is at once clear cut and abstract. You have to throw the discus further than anyone else, yes, but you are not throwing it against them; when you step into the circle it is you and your throw and the tape measuring your throw. That, I know, does not lend itself to a clear-cut Robert McKee-ish narrative, one with a clear beginning, middle and end. It lends itself to something more esoteric, the tape measure stretching off toward the Olympic Stadium horizon. And that is why I see this as a Werner Herzog project. After all, the eccentric German once made a hallowed, poetic movie about a ski flyer, perhaps the pre-eminent short film, and I can only imagine how lyrically captivating Herzog might render a film about discus throwers competing more against the tape than each other, discus throwers who, in the terminology of Mac Wilkins, experience “an exorcism when (they) yell.” If Exorcism of the Yell is not a phrase Mr. Herzog was born to metaphysically parse in the attempt to seek out his beloved Ecstatic Truth, what is?

Olympic Village, a Richard Linklater Film

You can set your watch by the avalanche of articles that appear in concert with the Olympic games that breathlessly report the number of condoms – this year it’s a whopping 450,000! – in the massive village housing all the nations’ athletes during the event’s fortnight.  If that alone wasn’t enough to cause the more puritanical to quake, Sam Alipour’s article for ESPN during the London Olympics would have caused them to melt down, the article where Christine Brennan said: “You’re taking those athletes out of their natural habit, and you’re dropping them into the world's largest coed dorm.” Coed dorm?! It’s screaming for a movie! But we have to careful. One wrong step and you wind up with “National Lampoon’s Olympic Village” or “American Pie Presents: Olympic Village”. That is not what we want. Which is why the only hope is to hire Richard Linklater and have him work his “Everybody Wants Some!!”, “Dazed and Confused” raunchy ensemble magic for “Olympic Village.” We’ll make the US Men’s Olympic Canoeing Team the focal point and then follow them as they settle into the village, from which we never leave, not for the Opening Ceremonies, not even for the events, as they find themselves locked in epic air hockey battles with rival American kayakers, get into under-cover-of-darkness hijinks with Lithuanian basketball players, get a little global perspective from Malawian fencers, skinny dip with Aruban swimmers, and, oh yes, make eyes, in a very respectful yet no less amorous way, with female Swedish handball players.

Michelle Smith

I understand that above I called for no movies about individual athletes and here I am listing a movie about an individual athlete. But allow me to explain. We, as a planet, need to have an honest and comprehensive discussion about doping, and not just about the athletic and political benefits and consequences. No, we need to have a talk about whether we are really concerned about the notion of fair play, or if it is merely, to quote the esteemed Charles Pierce, “moralistic flotsam and authoritarian jetsam”? This crossed my mind just the other day during the current Olympics, not only in the wake of American journalists going immediately all in on declaring Hungary’s Katinka Hosszu as a doping Satan in a swimsuit, but in a downright surreal moment during the women’s cycling road race when Britain’s Lizzie Armitstead was drafting off an equipment van leading the NBC commentator to note “Technically, this is illegal” like she was just jaywalking. What, I wondered, considering those two moments together, is the dividing line for our outrage? So I suggest a full scope doping doc, centered on Smith, an Irish swimmer, who won three Gold Medals at the Atlanta Olympics as well as a Bronze. Though she was the Toast of the Irish, she instantly became a pariah in America, where we were convinced the precipitous increase in her times could only mean doping. Did it? Maybe, maybe not (she did not test positive in Atlanta, but was found guilty of tampering with a drug sample a couple years later), but that is not what I am interested in. No, what am I interested in is the broader discussion of doping, and in particular, whether the euphoria Smith afforded her country in so many victories superseded all the rest, and whether, in the end, deep down in those places we do not talk about on Twitter, that is what matters most.

Untitled Athens Movie

Of the five, this is the least fleshed out, more an idea that a skillful lyrical filmmaker would need to run with, but still. You’ve probably come across those eerie photos of abandoned Olympic venues in the aftermath of the 2004 Summer Games in Athens and Greece’s subsequent economic tailspin. And maybe you know that indie film in Greece has been thriving, particularly in the case of the so-called Greek Weird Wave. I don’t know that we’d want to go that weird but I’m thinking Greek Weird Wave mixed with what Bill & Turner Ross have been doing in America with their dreamy drama/documentary hybrids, particularly “Tchoupitoulas”, which is what I’m really picturing as the inspiration for this movie. People in one form or another encountering these abandoned venues and ineffably tying it back to the inevitable ruin hosting an Olympic Games brings.