My Favorite College Football Games: Game 1

August 26, 1990: Colorado - 31 Tennessee - 31

If College football was always inherently an autumn game, once upon a time not kicking off until mid-September, bowl games were are an early sign of the sport’s creativity in finding ways to stretch that schedule, providing a gridiron respite in early winter. It was only a matter of time before college football prolongated its season going the other way, into the dog days of summer, beginning with the advent of the Kickoff Classic in 1983. In a sense, it was a preseason bowl game, born of a postseason contest – the Garden State Bowl – that decided its New Jersey locale, not conducive to winter, might work better in August, where it moved and took a new name. And just as one bowl game begat more bowl games, so did the Kickoff Classic begat more preseason classics as the Pigskin Classic – excuse me, the Disneyland Pigskin Classic – was born in 1990. And while I am against these college football season soft openings, preferring the resplendent suddenness of waking up one Saturday morning to find the sheen of thousands of helmets splayed on assorted channels across my television set with dozens and dozens of other precincts reporting non-stop, at least they remain true to the game’s event-oriented nature. And anyway, I wasn’t considering that when I settled in to watch the inaugural Disneyland Pigskin Classic on Sunday August 26th 1990.

That day just so happened to be the last day before the first day of my 7th grade year, and the last day before the first day of school was always – always – the worst, weirdest day of the year, an entire morning, afternoon and evening stricken by a sensation similar to a rollercoaster’s ascent, a pit in my stomach I could not expunge, every second feeling so precious yet so pointless. College football’s presence on that day, therefore, was at once life-saving and not right, summarized in the presentation. If the sport almost always looks best played either in the long shadows of a late afternoon or low grey skies of an early afternoon in autumn, this was one was played in the vivid sunshine of a California summer day, the brightness making the venue of Anaheim Stadium, a multi-use, cookie-cutter behemoth that housed baseball’s then-California Angels, meaning half the field contained the dirt of a baseball diamond, look as weird as I felt.

And the game, between the highly touted, top-ten ranked Colorado Buffaloes and Tennessee Volunteers was weirder still. If there is a legitimate critique that the nominally non-professional version of the sport is less compelling because the skill level is lower and the sport’s size means the best players are less evenly distributed, that is why I have always preferred it, the frequently tattered rhythms of over-excited collegians lending itself to great theatre. And so even if the first half of the inaugural Pigskin Classic was an absolute mess, a bumpy mix of turnovers and terrible plays, the teams’ accompanying high rankings, the idea that even though it was the first game of the season they needed to win or else, added palpable urgency. And the 4th quarter was magnificent anyway, overflowing with madness, a missed field goal, a muffed kickoff return, an interception in the end zone, Colorado scoring on a punt return for touchdown and, best of all, quarterback Darian Hagan’s madcap option pitch, the kind that causes misbegotten control freak coaches an aneurysm, making a 78 yard touchdown for running back Mike Pritchard out of nothing, and Tennessee not once but twice coming back from two touchdown deficits to eventually deadlock the game at 31-31 with mere minutes remaining.

That Tennessee’s star tailback Chuck Webb inadvertently ran out the clock while trying to muscle his way into field goal position was the perfect abnormal ending, as if the universe was nudging me in the ribs and reminding that no matter how entertaining the game had been, everything remained futile, for them and for me. School still started tomorrow at 8 am sharp.

An Ode to My First Earworm

Earlier this summer, after the latest bout of god-awfulness under the reign of Mad King Big Brain I, which might have been two weeks ago or two months ago so unrelenting is the god-awfulness that it begins to blur, I downloaded the new Carsie Blanton album. That’s because I’d heard the title track, “Buck Up”, and dug it. As much as I like that song, though, the cut that really wound up flooring me was another one – “That Boy.” And if Carsie was quoted saying the album coming out of “a tornado of grief and desire”, this song feels like throwing one’s self to the mercy of that tornado, pining over some dude, one who totally smoked in the boy’s room, not because he isn’t trouble but because he is trouble and she wants to make some with him. Indeed, she sings “I wanna make one last mistake.” And oooooh, the way she says it, really annunciating the hell out of mistake, really hitting the second syllable so as to raise the “ake” to tantalizing heights. And what gets me even more than the annunciation is the funky groove, the rhythm section swinging in such a way to evoke how Carsie’s just gonna go right ahead and take the plunge, thank you very much. I’ve been strolling down the street this summer with that groove not so much in the back of my mind as leading the way.


This, of course, is called an earworm and an earworm is one of this miserable world’s most joyful blessings. “That’s it!” I think, sometimes literally sitting up on the train when I hear the invitation to my newest earworm, the musical part of my brain scanning and then finding the right melodic frequency. Last year, when I belatedly, blessedly discovered Hop Along, Frances Quinlan turning the denouement of  “Well-dressed” into Earthrise through nothing more than a series of scratchy, revelatory do dodos echoed in my head for months. In the mid-aughts I’d walk around with the synth line winding its way through Low Skies’ sad-eyed shuffle “Palmyra” reverberating in my mind at all times. At the turn of the century I had endless sonic daydreams in my various barren cubicles about each individual part in Emmylou Harris’s “The Maker” – her vocal, Buddy Miller’s guitar, Brady Blade’s drums, and especially Daryl Johnson’s bass – until I could get back to my car, cue up the “Spyboy” album and listen once more to all the parts bloom in unison. I only survived high school because of whatever Tribe Called Quest song or Public Enemy Bomb Squad beat I was earworming any given week. Lady Gaga’s “Paparazzi”, meanwhile, the mother of all my earworms, I can still, sometimes, on a still winter’s night, hear murmuring just above my pulse.

With a lifetime full of earworms, it might seem difficult to pinpoint the first. Debbie Gibson? Samantha Fox? “Nightmare on My Street”? Nah. I know my first earworm through and through, and I thought of it again reading Melena Ryzik’s wonderful deep dive into How ‘Sesame Street’ Started A Musical Revolution for The New York Times. She went over the notable “Sesame Street” songwriter names, like Joe Raposo and Christopher Cerf, sure, and she was focusing primarily on collaborations with famous songwriters and performers, certainly, but one name unmentioned was Cheryl Hardwick. And Cheryl Hardwick wrote my favorite “Sesame Street” jam, a kind of post-punk celebration, with that piano shading from disco to new wave, of the cooperative spirit that thirty-six freaking years later I can still just conjure up for no real reason other than some part of it remains stuck in my brain.


In those ancient days with fewer school obligations I would typically watch “Sesame Street” when it aired in the morning. That same episode would always air again later in the afternoon. And when I heard “Street Garden Cooperation” in the morning, I remember – distinctly remember – singing “Co-operation / makes it happen! Co-operation / working together!” all morning and early afternoon, waiting, desperately waiting, for that rerun just so I could hear the song again.

Muppet Wiki tells us this song aired in 1983 and so the timeline matches up and it’s entirely possible that I heard this song on its very first run. That means before I even got my first cassette, before I saw I saw my first video, before I surfed the local radio stations, I experienced my first earworm. And that might be the first thing anyone should know about me.

Perspective

Like most (all?) Quentin Tarantino films, “Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood” sparked impassioned opinions both for and against, especially amongst the critical and/or cinephile community. I liked the movie, and I’ve enjoyed articles by others who did, which has helped further crystallize my thoughts, though I’ve also enjoyed reading dissenting opinions, which have also helped me crystallize my thoughts too, whether about the things I still very much like or the parts that left me feeling a little uneasy despite enjoying the whole, like that Bruce Lee cameo. It’s complicated, in other words, necessitating a discussion, which is good. But it’s not good in the world of Twitter where ‘Twitter is not place for discussion but let me have this discussion anyway’ has become the new ‘No word is overused like [insert word here] but let me use [insert same word here] anyway’. Those discussions lose any hope for nuance and respectful rhetoric right quick, devolving into assertions, preening quote tweets and smirking subtweets. And if none of that makes any sense, well, it’s because Twitter is so insulated, an economy, to paraphrase the sportswriter Ray Ratto, based solely on bitching at each other, an echo chamber addling all brains that make tragic contact with it, just like Mad King Big Brain I, for whom Twitter exists simply to stoke all his preexisting aggravations and confirm all prior biases. During the height of “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood” social media outrage I would surf through Film Twitter for a few minutes at a time and feel like I couldn’t breathe.

At some point during The Great Tarantino Twitter Terror, My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife and I had the Chicago White Sox game on in the background. It was the 8th inning and the Sox were leading the Miami Marlins 9-1. The game was essentially over and had been for a long time, it was late July and it was late at night, and the minds of play-by-play man Jason Benetti and color man Steve Stone were wandering. As they returned from commercial break, prerecorded footage showed Sox minor leaguer Tate Blackman of the Winston-Salem Dash being asked to name his favorite movie. He answered: “The Sandlot.”

“What was your favorite movie growing up?” Stone then asked Benetti. “’The Land Before Time,’” Benetti replies, going all the way back to 1988 when the first Tarantino joint was but a gleam in the eye. “And later on,” Benetti continued, “‘Best in Show.’” Stone agreed about “Best in Show”, saying “That was a wonderful movie. You can go back and watch it tonight and it’s still equally as funny as when you saw it for the first time.” I was hoping Benetti would then add a Busy Bee reference but, hey, you can’t get everything.

Then, apparently consulting Twitter on his laptop since it’s 2019, Benetti cited a few responses from fans watching along in real time, movies like “Home Alone” and “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?”, respectively the 1990 box office champ and 1988 box office runner-up. Stone, though, bless his heart goes even more old school, praising “Gone with the Wind” as a personal favorite, which, for once, came without the danger of Cultural Cancellation. Then Stone says “I can remember a movie and no one will have seen it. It’s called ‘Giant.’” Sure enough, Benetti wonders “What is that?” “All I remember,” says Stone, “is there was so much land around”, which was the exact movie review I needed to hear that night, no analysis, just a gobsmacked observation you might have in the lobby after the show – like, “What about all that land, huh?” Benetti, trying to pinpoint “Giant”, then says “Not ‘My Giant’, with Gheorghe Muresan and Billy Crystal?” No,” says Stone, before adding, wonderfully, “that was a good one though.”

Several Oscar seasons ago, a few days before the Academy Awards, at a neighborhood burger joint, I overheard the people at a table over conversing about the Best Picture nominees. And their discussion, never minding the precise details, made me remember how closed off Film Twitter really is. And that’s what Benetti and Stone reminded me too. And I thought of that conversation in “The Untouchables” where Kevin Costner’s Eliot Ness is made to observe that even amidst so much trauma some part of the world still cares what color the kitchen is. You come up from the demoralizing rabbit hole of Film Twitter where any one mind has more breadth of insight into the oeuvre of Quentin Tarantino then absolutely everyone else ever and remember that some part of the world still cares about “My Giant.”

Not-Forgotten Great Moments in Movie History

Forty-eight hours ago, or four months ago, who’s to say anymore, the second trailer for “Star Wars Episode IX – The Rise of Skywalker” dropped to much fanfare. “This is your fight,” we hear Luke Skywalker advising Rey, the Taylor Swift of the Western Reaches. And that may be true, but this is also a nostalgia trip in the guise of a summation of the series and so half the trailer is just a cavalcade of green lights at the end of the pier in the form of images of past “Star Wars.” I got so exhausted I almost laid down for a nap in the middle of it. But I stayed awake, and so I saw the end where Rey, the Taylor Swift of the Western Reaches, is sporting a red lightsaber. That’s red, and that’s a potential problem, see, because red connotes Evil in the “Star Wars” universe and, wait! Is Rey the Katy Perry of the Western Reaches now?! Maybe, who knows, but Reddit’s got some theories which is all you need to know about how “Star Wars”, my beloved “Star Wars”, long ago jumped the shark. I wish a Knight of the Old Republic was an Internet ombudsman.

Anyway. This new lightsaber drop got me to thinking about my favorite use of a lightsaber in the whole “Star Wars” saga – Real Edition and Ersatz Editions I & II. Spoiler Alert: it doesn’t involve Luke or Darth! It doesn’t even involve Obi-Wan, though I’ve always dug his pulling the lightsaber at Mos Eisley like it’s the Jets and the Sharks under the highway. No, my favorite use of a lightsaber involves Han Solo and it happens on Hoth.

You know what I’m talking about. Luke has escaped the Wampa and passed out in the snow and Han goes looking for him by Tauntaun and finds him but then his Tauntaun dies and so Han has to erect the emergency shelter. But he can’t just leave Luke lying out there in the snow; he’ll freeze to death! So he scoops up Luke’s lightsaber, gets the thing turned on, a moment which Ford brilliantly accentuates with a kind of “uh”, as one might in a moment of unsure DIY plumbing, transforming “an elegant weapon for a more civilized age” into nothing more than a shiny tool for ripping up Tauntaun guts, which, frankly, is the kind of unprepossessing vérité nodding at nothing more than primal necessity that could really benefit the summation of Ersatz Edition II.

Sword of Trust

As Lynn Shelton’s “Sword of Trust” opens, Birmingham pawn shop owner Mel (Marc Maron) is haggling with a customer who wants to offload a guitar and pair of cowboy boots. Finally, they strike a deal, a couple hundred bucks, though after Mel forks over the cash, the customer wonders if he’s being swindled. Mel says nah, though soon after, once the customer leaves, we see Mel in those very cowboy boots, suggesting dubious ethics. It puts Mel’s words under the microscope, emblemizing “Sword of Trust” itself, which questions the legitimacy of words throughout, an idea fused with the current conspiracy theory fad, brought home in the film’s driving plot point, a Civil War sword – Union side – that a couple, Cynthia (Jillian Bell) and Mary (Michaela Watkins), bring to the pawn shop to gauge its worth, explaining that based upon a semi-coherent letter left by Cynthia’s grandfather, this weapon doubles as proof the South won.

Shelton is a veteran of Mumblecore, that unfortunately-monikered, oft-revelatory, usually improvisational indie genre that gave rise to Greta Gerwig, amongst others, and of which Richard Brody once wrote how its directors “don’t impose performances on actors but develop them from the actors themselves.” That sentiment is implicit in Maron, his character’s ability to read people in several seconds flat not inconspicuously born of Maron as a real-life podcast interviewer extraordinaire. In a scene where Cynthia and Mary debate their potential as mothers, Mel astutely breaks down each of their personalities, and when a pair of cliched rednecks show up at this shop looking for a sword, speaking in code by asking if he’s from – ahem – “the east coast”, Maron holds off on the punchline until the last moment, which not only makes it funnier but suggests how he had them sized up from the get-go.

That sequence, though, also goes to show just how frequently “Sword of Trust” diffuses its otherwise inherent tension, where even the punctuating moment of a gun being drawn comes with a punchline. Guns, in fact, are sprinkled throughout, playing off the sword as more modern artillery, though whether this is supposed to poke fun at America’s gun obsession or act as a comical acceptance of this fact is never quite clear. “Sword of Trust”, though, is much clearer in its viewpoint of conspiracy theories and their peddlers – dim, very dim.

Look no further than Mel’s assistant, Nathaniel (Jon Bass), introduced watching a Lone Man Telling Truth Internet video, Bass’s nigh-omnipresent slack-jawed expression comically connoting his character’s dimness. As Mel haggles with Cynthia and Mary, in fact, Shelton keeps Nathaniel out of the shot, until the first mention of a conspiracy theory at which point, as if hearing a dog whistle, he casually slips into the shot, his interest now piqued. And while trying to peddle the sword to a gaggle of conspiracy minded southerners, Shelton splits the quartet off into groups so that as Mel and Mary are inside trying to feign The South Shall Rise belief, outside Nathaniel pitches Cynthia on the earth being flat (“You ever drive out near Kansas City?”), essentially equating one as with the other.

What’s more, by framing the entire conspiracy around a nonsensical letter, in which Cynthia’s grandfather continually mistakes Phil Sheridan for William Sherman, and vice-versa, and the details of the battle in question make little sense, Mary and Cynthia and Mel, one by one and in different situations, try and render this yarn believable, comically evincing the idea of a conspiracy theorist’s babble, changing the story as is necessary to make the pieces fit, which is essentially what’s happening with Nathaniel as he tries to sell his flat earther burble. In this light, if the payoff to the sale of the sword feels perfunctory, that’s also the point, a whole belief system going up in a puff of smoke.

No, the movie’s unexpected truth emerges on the road to sell the sword, the quartet piling into the back of a truck and winding up in a variation of the Stuck In A Elevator scene, as the characters confess their respective truths, most notably Mel. If he probes Mary and Cynthia like a therapist, the questions are gradually turned around on him, as he talks about an ex-girlfriend, who we are introduced to in an earlier scene in his pawn shop, and what she means, the simple cuts between the earnest smile of Cynthia and the despite himself admissions of Mel laying bare honesty’s detox. The truth, you realize, isn’t out there; it’s [points at chest] in here.

Blinded by the Light

Finding your voice as a teenager is both the most essential quest and the hardest thing to do. Even if you have some sense of self it can be drowned out by the surrounding cacophony of parents, peer pressure, the problems of the outside world, etc. Music, then, so accessible provides a stand in for your voice when you’re struggling to find it. That struggle defines the protagonist of Gurinder Chadha’s “Blinded by the Light”, Javed (Viveik Kalra), a Pakistani teenager in 1987 living in the London suburb of Luton where he is frequently reminded in explicit terms that he is not wanted. As the movie opens, he rides his bike while images of the Thatcher years appear all around him through split screen effects, suggesting the music piping through his omnipresent earphones as a coping mechanism. The song, though, “It’s a Sin” by The Pet Shop Boys, suggests, sadly, how he sees himself, or how he’s told to feel about himself, and foreshadows his journey to discovering the ultimate Springsteen truth: “it ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.”

Javed’s Road to Damascus doubles as the high school hallway where his emergent best friend Roops (Aaron Phagura) gives him the word of Bruce Springsteen by way of a couple cassette tapes. When Javed finally cues them up one dark and stormy the night, the spiritual kinship is instantaneous as Bruce’s desperate, searching “Dancing in the Dark” lyrics fill not only the speakers but the screen, giving brilliant rise to the idea that these words are what Javed wants to say and can’t. And if the accompanying hurricane might be overwrought, it not only mirrors the overwrought tempest brewing not just inside Javed but every teenager but the lyrics for the scene’s other song, “The Promised Land”: “Blow away the dreams that break your heart.”

Before long Javed has filled his bedroom wall with Bruce posters and bought a jean jacket and cut his sleeves to look just like his idol circa the “Born in the U.S.A.” Tour. Kalra, though, is not content with letting the clothes do all the work. If early on he is tightly coiled and hunched over, clutching his trapper keeper, as the music takes hold he seems to grow into his body and walk not with a swagger but a looseness leading directly into a relationship with a political activist schoolmate, Eliza (Nell Williams), and confrontations with a practical father, Malik (Kulvinder Ghir), who wants his son to focus on economics, not English, to blend in and not stand out, culled from Sarfraz Manzoor’s book on which the movie is based (and who co-wrote the screenplay with Chadha and Paul Mayeda Berges) but also rhyming with the real Springsteen’s infamous father/son relationship.

This paternal Pakistani standoff calls to mind Ken Loach’s “A Fond Kiss.” Loach, however, is more Kitchen Sink and Chadha, famous for “Bend It Like Beckham”, prefers a Bruce Goes Bollywood approach. And while that doesn’t mean “Blinded by the Light” fails to educe real emotion, as Ghir invests certain moment with an impressive wounded dignity, there is nevertheless a two dimensionality to these issues, just as there is with Javed’s writerly pursuits and even the single scene with Eliza’s parents meant to provide her character depth. No, “Blinded by the Light” is best leaning into its knowing reality of heightened teenage fandom, like a scene where Javed watches Springsteen’s famous performance of “The River” at the No Nukes Festival, a so-painful-it’s-true evocation of how youthful obsession is at once self-conscious performance art and wholly earnest.

Springsteen songs, of course, are everywhere, and only fizzle when Chadha tries using them to paper over what the moment itself can’t produce, like the “Jungleland” needle drop. A “Thunderoad” sing-along, on the other hand, animates the fantasy of your favorite lyrics sweeping you along on a romantic quest you’re too timid to face on your own while the film’s high point finds Javed, Roops and Eliza running through the streets and across the fields of Luten, like The Beatles in “A Hard Day’s Night”, though running not from fans but where they’re from and who they are, living out the lyrics of “Born to Run” as they lose themselves in the joy of singing along to them too.

Granted, “Blinded by the Light” indulges a cult of personality, but it is simultaneously hip to this fact, evinced through Eliza, both enamored with Javed’s obsession even as she finds it ridiculous, deftly communicated by Williams in several loving you’re-an-idiot looks; she understands this as a teenage boy phase as rite of passion. And if he gets stuck in the phase, the movie makes the downturn, niftily crystallized in an older, more aching acoustic version of “The Promised Land”, brief. Javed spends most of “Blinded by the Light” communicating in Bruce’s words, but gradually begins substituting more of his own, brought home in his climactic speech to an auditorium of peers, slyly nodding at so many searching Springsteen monologues from the stage; in this moment, Javed finds his voice.

My Favorite College Football Games, a retrospective

Hi, friends, loyal frustrated followers, and random, confused people! As you know or as the name implies, this is a movie blog, first and foremost, always has been, always will be. Still, we have, as loyal frustrated followers know, allowed space for digressions during the Summer and Winter Olympics because your humble, moronic correspondent is an Olympics Devotee, through and through, even while acknowledging the Games’ myriad grave sins. But if the Olympics are my predominant jam, my preferred year-round sport is college football. And as last college football season concluded, I found myself suffering something of an existential crisis in relation to it, not so much from the dubious motivations of the NCAA nor the vicious, injury-prone nature of football itself, though those have tormented me for some time, but from college football’s shifting structure. Even if the game has become as imaginative and free-wheeling as ever, conference realignment and the emergent playoff have transformed the sport into something more homogenized and national, more NFL-y, betraying the anarchic, regional roots that made me fall in love with it. But I don’t want to get into that here. And I don’t want to stop loving college football. I want to remember why I love college football in the first place. So. This fall, only on Saturday, starting next Saturday and continuing each Saturday hence for the duration of the 2019 college football regular season, I will be blogging about my favorite college football games.

1.) These will, understand, please, not in any way, shape or form, not in any capacity whatsoever, be the “best” college football games. God, no. There are hundreds of lists purporting to decree the “best” college football games. Go read those. No, these are merely my favorites, for various reasons, all of which I will outline in the posts.

2.) These games are not and will not be ranked. That’s nonsense. I love them all equally. They will be posted in something approximating spiritual order.

3.) These posts will not be of interminable length, I promise, pinkie swear. These posts will be 500-600 words long, and nothing at all like blow-by-blow recaps, generally forgoing stats and such, just brief reminiscences about why these games mean so much to me.

4.) These posts, to assuage the fears of those who know me best, will not include any games involving my beloved Nebraska Cornhuskers. This is not about them. I know why I still love them. This is about remembering why I still love college football.

If this exercise interests you, by all means, stick with us this fall through Saturday, please and thank you. If this does not interest you, ye gods, do I get it, no hard feelings, none at all, and feel free to remain on our traditional Monday-Friday schedule, ignoring Saturday. But just understand how much I want to do this, how much I need to do this, how excited I am to do this, and how I cannot wait to do this. Onward.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Heavy Metal Parking Lot (1986)

As “Heavy Metal Parking Lot” opens, its co-directors and producers, John Heyn and Jon Krulik, film from inside their car as they are ushered into the parking lot of the late Capital Centre in Landover, Maryland for a Judas Priest concert on May 31, 1986. “Where do we park?” they ask. “Where do you park?” asks the parking lot attendant, who sounds a lot less put out than most of the parking lot attendants that I’ve encountered. “Anywhere you want,” he says, almost mystically beckoning them forward, or perhaps just under the influence despite being on the job. Into the lot they go. And as I watched this legendary 17 minute cult doc for the first time, I kept thinking of the myriad recent Woodstock ’99 retrospectives, each one lamenting the false utopia of its ex-Air Force base site. “It was not a beautiful or pastoral place,” Rolling Stone’s Rob Sheffield told The Ringer. “It was a parking lot.” Man, why hoof it all the way to upstate New York when you got a good hunk of cement right there in the ’burbs?

There’s that scene in Cameron Crowe’s “Almost Famous” where William Miller is dropped off at the Stillwater show by his very concerned mother as we see various longhairs, drunk or stoned or both, all of whom she judges. There is no passing judgement in “Heavy Metal Parking Lot”, but neither, really, is there celebrating or even analyzing. This is total immersion, the barrier between worlds sort of ineffably fading once Heyn and Krulik enter the lot, where underage drinking and drugs – the latter happening just up the road from “Just Say No” ground zero – are discussed openly, gleefully. And the directors toss out some off camera questions, they mostly let the people speak for themselves, so much so that at certain points the subjects just commandeer the microphone and spout off to their heart’s content, like the kid in the Zebra-striped jumpsuit expounding on Madonna being a “dick” and how he doesn’t really give “a shit about that kind of punk fuck.”

This is as close as “Heavy Metal Parking Lot” gets to dissecting metal music itself, aside from random shouts of “Priest!” The absurd questions of subliminal messaging would dog Judas Priest are never delved into here, the absurdity of this zebra-striped jumpsuit kid seeming to underline the absurdity of such accusations in the first place. Not that Heyn and Krulik are making fun. If the apparently legendary Zebraman is crude and cocky, he’s also an astute encapsulation, in its way, of what it’s like to be a teenager when you’ve latched onto a thing and made it your Thing, meaning that not only does nothing else matter but everything else sucks. This is your culture, these are your people, and if you don’t get it, you’re a dick. And that’s why “Heavy Metal Parking Lot” belongs not to the band but its fans, a lot of whom got a rap for being Satanists, or something like it, though this felt less like a Satanic ritual than carving out a charmless chunk of concrete as a rowdy Eden.

Pitching the New John Grisham Movie

In declaring the Summer Movie Season’s WINNERS and LOSERS early in July, I declared John Grisham Movies a LOSER, writing “Remember how the 90s were awash in John Grisham cinematic adaptations that were not good, per se, but still entertaining because each one had, like, a dozen really good actors collecting paychecks by chewing up scenery? We can keep the MCU, fine, but bring my JGU back.” My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife can attest to my yearning for JGU movies; I am always whining out loud about how actors no longer have JGU trash to romp through. Well, loyal frustrated followers, too bad for you because it seems I’m not alone. Because Joe Reid wrote a piece for Vulture lamenting the death of the legal thriller, tying it to the 25th anniversary (that no one is celebrating) of the cinematic adaptation of Grisham’s “The Client”, and noting that even as Netflix is reinvesting in the romantic comedy to try and push back against the MCU, no one is doing likewise for the legal thriller, citing Amy Adams as someone who might make a good fit in helping resurrect that genre. That’s why Cinema Romantico is here! To scan John Grisham’s books, see one called “Gray Mountain” about a Big City Lawyer coming to a Small Town and taking on Big Coal and promptly imagine a poster with Amy Adams in a Kamala Harris-ish pantsuit standing sternly with her arms crossed next to the image of, well, a gray mountain. And the poster will be adorned with the blurb I pulled from Kirkus Reviews: “There’s a new sheriff in town, and she’s come to bring down Big Coal.” {The whole world explodes.}

“Expect the expected,” writes Publishers Weekly of “Gray Mountain”, “in this tepid legal thriller from bestseller Grisham.” That’s what I’m talking about!!! “A third-year associate in the commercial real estate division of a massive New York firm, Samantha (Kofer) expected her 100-hour work weeks -- most often spent poring over contracts a foot thick -- to add up to a partnership someday,” writes Dennis Moore in his 2014 “Gray Mountain” review for USA Today. As such, we will introduce Samantha in an over-the-credits prologue working deep into the night by the light of her green lamp in an empty, spacious office looking out over Central Park with a pile of foot-thick folders like the ones on T*ump’s desk.

“But the financial crash in 2008 sends her reeling to the Mountain Legal Aid Clinic in Brady, Va.,” Moore writes, “for a non-paying internship.” He continues: “Practicing law in Brady consists of helping women disentangle themselves from abusive marital relationships, protecting homeless families from predatory collection agencies and challenging Big Coal. Samantha is adamant about avoiding the latter. But the horrors wreaked by strip mining companies can't be avoided. And the handsome and fearless litigator who stands up to them, Donovan Gray, can't be resisted.” Timothy Olyphant will play Donovan Gray because this is the big screen, baby, and we need our central couple to smolder, see. To establish Samantha’s working life in Brady, meanwhile, the client she first helps will be played by Jennifer Beals.

The extremely helpful “Gray Mountain” Super Summary, meanwhile, explains that Mattie Wyatt runs the Legal Aide clinic where Samantha works, which is apparently housed in a converted hardware store (Production Design Oscar here we come!). Mattie will, of course, be played by Ashley Judd. This is non-negotiable. Annette, meanwhile, the junior lawyer at Mattie’s firm, and in whose garage Samantha apparently stays because of course she does, will be played by Blake Lively. (I don’t know if this book sets scenes in a small town diner where Samantha receives prescient advice from the owner who lost her husband to black lung, but if there isn’t, we’re adding one. And the owner will be played by Mary Steenburgen.)

This will naturally yield questions from concerned movie-goers like “Wait, a pro bono law firm in rural Virginia is run entirely by Amy Adams, Ashley Judd and Blake Lively? This is believable?” To which we say: Believable? BELIEVABLE??? This is middlebrow Hollywood trash, you imbeciles!

Big Coal will be played by Bruce McGill. Because he should be in everything.

The Aftermath

Set in post-WWII Hamburg, Germany, much of “The Aftermath”, based on a novel by Rhidian Brook, takes place inside a mansion requisitioned by the British, specifically for Colonel Lewis Morgan (Jason Clarke), overseeing efforts to rebuild the city and deal with insurgent attacks, and his wife Rachael (Keira Knightley) who has just arrived from London. If the ornate, pristine interior stands in stark contrast to so much rubble of bombed out buildings outside, it is no haven, marked by a discernible chill, evoked in Rachael’s arrival where, standing on the balcony, admiring the view, she asks to go back inside since it is freezing, as if taking the cold with her. Some of the best shots in the movie are when Knightley just stands rock still inside the mansion as its expansive surroundings seem to swallow her up. Initially Rachael sits on the furniture, Knightley doesn’t even quite sit all the way down, just sort of perching on the edge; this is not home.

It not being Rachael’s home is merely underlined how its previous owners – Stefan Lubert (Alexander Skarsgård) and his daughter Freda (Flora Thiemann) – are still living there, upstairs in a different annex. This is only because Lewis feels humanist rumblings after witnessing the brutal death of a German in the street, despite this German’s Third Reich sympathy, and extends an olive branch to Stefan. Complications ensue, though they never feel too complicated, if only because Skarsgård is so genteel in his anguish and Freda’s dalliance with a Werwolf is nothing more than mere red herring. No, the real complication is in the relationship between Rachael and Lewis, already strained by the death of their son during The Blitz. With the emergent knowledge that a discoloration on the wall was where a portrait of you-know-who once hung, evoking an apparition of a war that has only nominally concluded, Rachael struggles to believe that everything is now just automatically peachy keen even if Lewis says so, prompting a transonic “you’re shitting me” look at him from her at dinner.

It might seem odd, then, that Rachael and Stefan get it on. But the all-of-a-sudden presentation, where he just plants one on her out of the blue and then, a little later, she just fiercely and without warning kisses him right back, leading to an affair right under Lewis’s nose, does not come across in this context as dubious character motivation but something like physical necessity. She needs someone. He needs someone too, suggested in how his own wife perished during the war. And so when Lewis is called away on a duty for a few weeks, a “Bridges of Madison County” situation germinates, though here, as Stefan takes Rachael as something akin to a marital replacement and Rachael starts doting on his daughter as something akin to her own, it feels less romantic than distressing, coloring scenes like the Stefan and Rachael throwing snowballs at each other in the light of two people having gone round the bend.

Yet rather than follow these characters down the intriguing rabbit hole of role-playing, it opts for forced sentimentality, bringing Lewis back early from his military responsibilities, interrupting this faux family unit and instigating a love triangle. At this point, the tenor of Knightley and Skarsgård’s performances don’t change but the context does, which makes “The Aftermath” come to feel like one of those movies where a climactic twist winds up in a brief montage of revisiting early scenes to cast them in a whole new light, but which we do in our minds instead. And so the scene of Stefan and Rachael throwing snowballs at one another transmutes from a creepy variation on “Rebecca” into Hallmark Channel fluff, the twist, then, in this case being that the whole movie collapses right before your very eyes.

All You Had To Say Was 'Keira Knightley Stares Forlornly Out a Window'

An old Onion piece  appropriately titled: “All You Had To Say Was ‘Owen Wilson Befriends A Dolphin And I Was Sold’” imagines a Hollywood pitch meeting from the perspective of an agent who cuts off the pitch less than a sentence in not because the pitch is so bad but because the pitch is so good. “Listen—stop talking,” implores this imaginary agent. “I don’t need to hear the rest. The first half of the sentence was genius! ‘Owen Wilson befriends a dolphin and…’ And? What ‘and’? No ‘and’ necessary! Are you kidding me? I’m sold. Sold!” The agent then proceeds to concoct the rest of the movie right then. “Now, all we need to do is figure out the movie. What? You have a whole concept worked out already? Beautiful—but completely unnecessary. I’ll come up with the rest of it, off the top of my head, right now, while I’m on the 405.” This inevitably leads to the movie’s poster: “I see Wilson, the dolphin, front seat of a convertible, wearing shades. Yes, both of them.”

This piece is legendary amongst my movie-loving friends. Why just a few weeks ago, on the news site Facebook, my friend Daryl, in response to my posted “Gloria Bell” review, wrote “What do you mean ‘Julianne Moore goes dancing to disco music and?’ Your pitch meeting was over right there!” And I thought of that piece again as I sunk into the sofa and cued up the latest Keira Knightley joint, “The Aftermath.” And though the review will come, and the review will be honest and unmerciful, before the review, we have to discuss the beginning independent of the rest because, well, let me explain.

“The Aftermath’s” opening shot is an old steam train rounding the bed on some snowy mountain. A snowy mountain is right in my wheelhouse.

But then – then! – the very next shot – the second shot in the whole movie! – is pushing in on one of the train car windows where we see who else but Keira herself forlornly staring out of it. 

It wasn’t supposed to be funny, I know, but context is everything, and I have never seen a movie opening so specifically crafted to my peculiar, obsessive tastes. I don’t think I’ve laughed that hard at a movie since Rose Byrne told the story about the Bulgarian clown in “Spy.”

And that’s when I realized I could never be a Hollywood producer. That’s my kryptonite. That’s how you get me to greenlight anything. “All You Had To Say Was ‘Keira Knightley Stares Forlornly Out A Window’ And I Was Sold.’ I don’t need to hear the rest. The first half of the sentence was genius! What ‘and’? No ‘and’ necessary! Are you kidding me? I’m sold. Sold!” I don’t need to know what she’s staring at. Don’t tell me. And don’t tell me where the train is going. Does it matter? Of course it doesn’t matter. Keira Knightley is staring forlornly out a window! I’m hooked! Teeth, line and sinker! Wherever she’s going, I’ll go too, straight into the heart of melancholia, baby!

Biopic Genres for 2020 Democratic Presidential Candidates

Recently, on Cinema Romantico’s favorite podcast, The Press Box, the invaluable Bryan Curtis recounted a tale I’d never heard, wherein former Senator John Glenn sought to reap the release of “The Right Stuff” ⁠— in which he was a character, played by Ed Harris ⁠— in 1983 as free publicity for his 1984 Democratic Presidential candidacy. Alas, “The Right Stuff” failed at the box office and the expected polling boost went bust. It was, as Curtis noted, the original Beto O’Rourke Vanity Pair profile. [Rim shot!] Then Curtis and co-host David Shoemaker speculated about which of this year’s Democratic Presidential candidates they would most like to see campaign through a biopic, though only briefly touching on a possible Bernie Sanders movie and then dropping the subject. And that, of course, is where we come in. What is Cinema Romantico here for if not this?

Biopic Genres for 2020 Democratic Presidential Candidates

Joe Biden = Middlebrow Drama 

Drown it in soft lighting, give it a stately, sweeping score, apply sheen with vigor and those gaffes start to sound like wise platitudes.

Elizabeth Warren = Drama Based on National Book Award Winner For Non-Fiction

Not as detailed as the book.

Bernie Sanders = Coen Brothers-ish Slapstick

Bryan Curtis suggested Sanders would need a director with a kind of plain-spoken, direct, one foot in front of the other aesthetic, which brings to mind Kelly Reichardt. But, nah. I see Joel & Ethan Coen calling up Larry David from the SNL ranks and then sort of filtering a leftist version of the belligerent Walter Sobchak of “The Big Lebowski” through a “Hail, Caesar!”-ish Washington.

Kamala Harris = 1990s Legal Thriller

Despite questionable motives and dubious tactics that closing argument scene really reeled me in and now I really think I want to vote for- gah! I did it again!

Pete Buttigieg = After School Special

Predictable does not necessarily mean noneducational.

Cory Booker = Inspirational Sports Movie

He was on the Stanford team that came from 17 points down to upset #1 Notre Dame in 1990, remember, which in this context will become a metaphor for his own Presidential comeback. “No one believed in us!”

Beto O’Rourke = Rock Musical Fantasy

What if Foss never broke up?

Kirsten Gillibrand = Drew Barrymore Romantic Comedy

It was fine. A lot of people liked it ok. I don’t remember what it was called.

Jay Inslee = The Day After Tomorrow

Dude is Dennis Quaid in this movie. Everyone else is Vice President What’s-His-Face. (Ian Holm will still be played by Ian Holm.)

John Hickenlooper = Low-Budget Indie

Just a bunch of ordinary dudes drinking craft beer and talking through their problems. Shot on location at Wynkoop Brewery.

Andrew Yang = Movie Shot On An iPhone

35mm is dead.

Bill De Blasio = TNT Rerun

Wait, Gene Hackman and Dan Aykroyd were in a movie called “Loose Cannons”?

Marianne Williamson = That Werner Herzog Documentary Bells From The Deep 

You know, the one about the Russian Jesus / Flimflam Man.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Flashpoint (1984)

As border patrolman Bobby Logan, Kris Kristofferson is ostensibly the hero of “Flashpoint” (1984), though he’s not exactly heroic. That’s not to suggest he’s anti-heroic, necessarily, nor outright evil, but, as connoted in his frequent bemused chuckle and “whatever, man, you do you” grin, never gets all that hot and bothered; when he says he took this job for a little “peace and quiet”, you believe him. That peace and quiet is threatened, though, as director William Tannen’s thriller opens with some government flunky advising Bobby and his border patrol pal Ernie Wyatt (Treat Williams) and all the other agents about their imminent replacement with sensors planted in the desert that can detect border crossings. If this provides motivation for Bobby when he comes across $800,000 in cash buried in a jeep buried in the desert, it also foreshadows the government’s looming role in the proceedings, epitomized in a twist I never suspected until the t’s started getting crossed. Compared to the film’s more minimalist tendencies, this twist is rather overwrought, yet still comes off, not least because of Rip Torn’s grand supporting turn, which we’ll get to.

Upon finding the cash, Bobby lets Ernie in on his discovery, not least because Ernie takes this news of potential job displacement the hardest. But if Ernie rages against his employers, he has ideals, glimpsed in his no holds barred excoriation of a local border smuggling kingpin, and so the thought of absconding with money that isn’t his makes him queasy. So rather than simply taking the money and running, they decide to check out the origin of this jeep, running the license plate number through their computer system, setting in motion a chain of events that leads back to the Federal Reserve in Dallas, Texas and November 1963 which, well, connect the dots, hotshot. As the government quickly descends, given face by Carson, played with dependable sneering disdain by Kurtwood Smith, the more Bobby floats the idea of simply high-tailing it to Mexico, which is an irony that “Flashpoint” never pushes too much, Americans crossing the border going the other way.

“Flashpoint”, filmed in various locales throughout Arizona, has an impressive sense of place, the unremitting desert interspersed with jagged rocks and craggy crevices, underlined by a Tangerine Dream score accentuating the eerie emptiness. When Bobby and Ernie inspect the jeep, you never expect the expected moment of someone happening on them at just the wrong moment because you already sense they are too far away from everything. And that oblivion becomes the point more so than it being the border between America and Mexico. In fact, Carson recites a lengthy monologue about how the border and the problems accompanying it is nothing more than a vehicle for keeping a certain kind of patriotic fury in business. And though that feels even more relevant seen through the prism of Right Now, it’s still laying the whole thing on thick, though Kristofferson has his character meet this ornate monologue with the perfect plain-faced expression of bewilderment.

Yes, the American government is the villain here, and those persnickety motion sensors not only are coming for your jobs but symbolize the intrusion of the surveillance state, ensuring that no last speck of America land will go unwatched. The concluding shootout, including a brief bout of ho-hum slow motion, is no great shakes, but Torn, as a local sheriff, is. In his eccentric being, defined by a southern accent so marble-mouthed you almost lean forward in your seat to try and make it out, embodying an older, weirder America, where it still seemed so vast, where secrets seemingly so preposterous no one could ever believe them might remain tucked away out of sight, destined only to be found by accident.

My All-Time Top 5 Favorite Springsteen Cinematic Needle Drops

Back in the glory days of the blogosphere, when I was writing part-time for the movie blogging bar & lounge Anomalous Material, I concocted a list detailing the best Bruce Springsteen needle drops in cinematic history. As a Bruce devotee, after all, who spent his lunch break on June 14, 2019 not eating but just walking around downtown Chicago listening to “Western Stars”, I felt fairly qualified to curate such a list. Anomalous Material, though, is long gone and so is that list, though that list wouldn’t be right anymore because, well, things have changed, I’ve changed, more movies have come along, so on and so forth. And this Friday, if you didn’t know, marks the release of “Blinded by the Light”, for which this Bruce-devoted blog is very excited, based, as it is, on Sarfraz Manzoor’s Springsteen-centric memoir “Greetings from Bury Park: Race, Religion and Rock N’ Roll” about growing up as a Pakistani Muslim in Britain and leaning on the sounds of Springsteen to get through. So, in the spirit of Championship Vinyl of “High Fidelity”, where Bruce made a legendary cameo as himself, giving council to the emotionally, romantically, spiritually confused Rob Gordon, here are my all-time Top 5 Favorite Springsteen Cinematic Needle Drops.

5. “Hungry Heart” in “The Perfect Storm” (2000). Rennie Sparks of The Handsome Family once said of this song – I swear, I can’t source the quote now – that it evokes how all of life is grasping. And that’s what this scene captures. If it is nominally a celebration at the infamous Crow’s Nest upon Billy Tyne and the crew of the Andrea Gail returning to Gloucester, it comes on the heels of introducing each character’s respective crisis, all of them grasping for just a little more, a mixture of agony and elation, which, like so much of Springsteen’s catalogue, the song evokes by being at once melodically bouncy and lyrically mournful.

4. “Born in the U.S.A.” in “Canadian Bacon” (1995). Michael Moore’s comedy detailing a few Americans invading Canada under mistaken pretenses was not in any way as good as its premise. Aside from a couple solid throwaway jokes about the C.N. Tower and, yes, William McKinley, there is only one genuinely great moment and it involves Bruce. It happens when John Candy’s Sheriff Bud Boomer and his small band of pseudo soldiers, crammed together in a truck, begin singing “I was Born in the U.S.A.” for a little jingoist inspiration. “I was Born in the U.S.A.,” they sing. “Born in the U.S.A.,” they sing again. Turns out, these are the only lines they know and so they just keep singing them, over and over. Say what you want about Michael Moore, please, feel free, but I will always love for him for slyly satirizing the longstanding comical, disheartening truth that most people have no idea what this song is actually about.

3. “It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City” in “Baby, It’s You” (1983). If Springsteen’s first album is uneven, this is one of the tracks that still illuminated it. Now long into his Revered Old Man phase, it’s a track that reminds you of the Young Springsteen’s swagger, when his voice was more a slur and less a groan, and so John Sayles, essentially a Jersey guy despite being born in New York, in making his 1983, 1966-set Jersey romance of an upper class Jewish girl and a lower class Italian boy nicknamed the Sheik, called on this song for a heightened scene in which the Sheik swaggers into the lunchroom, living out the brash lyrics, “I walked like Brando right into the sun and danced just like a Casanova.”

2. “Streets of Philadelphia” in “Philadelphia” (1993). The beginning of Jonathan Demme’s film is a montage of The City of Brotherly of Love itself, though this is no commonplace scene-setter but an evocative delineation of stakes –Phila-damn-delphia, birthplace of America, and this is us, all of this is all of us. And that’s why the solemn synthesizer and “bruised and battered” vocal of Springsteen’s Oscar-winning track is more a proper hymn to this nation than any Irving Berlin treacle.

1. “Tougher Than the Rest” in “Wild” (2014). The “High Fidelity” cameo is so great because it evokes how we Springsteen disciples cosmically consult with Bruce in our greatest times of need. And that’s what “Wild” does too, just through Bruce’s music. When Cheryl Strayed (Reese Witherspoon), on her Pacific Crest Trail sojourn, happens upon a rushing river with a rickety log bridge the only option for crossing – go forward or go home – she pauses for an instant and says to herself, since no one else is with her, “Come on, Bruce. Sing with me.” And so the needle drops on this all-star “Tunnel of Love” track and together Cheryl and Bruce sing as she navigates the bridge and crosses to the other side and I’M NOT CRYING YOU’RE CRYING.

Tying More Sports to Sports Movies

If earlier this season Major League Baseball sought to broaden its appeal and fan base by playing games in London and Mexico, the MLB marketing department apparently decided that merely stretching the bounds of the real world was not enough. That’s because last week they announced that next season the Chicago White Sox and New York Yankees would square off at the Field of Dreams. Yes, that Field of Dreams, the one from “Field of Dreams”, the 1989 baseball fantasy in which an Iowa farmer (Kevin Costner) constructs a baseball diamond in his cornfield to summon the ghost of Shoeless Joe Jackson, the set erected for the film in Dyersville, Iowa having gone on to become a beloved eastern Iowa tourist attraction.

As a native Iowan, the Field of Dreams means a great deal to me, and I wrote about what transforming this formerly quaint scenic attraction into a more sprawling, commercialized one might mean and why I was ok with it back in 2014 when it was sold by its original owners. I stand by that piece. If this is what they need to keep that field there, so be it. What I’m really interested in here, however, is the other possibilities this opens up for gimmick games, not just in baseball but all sports. After all, the NFL has played games in London and Mexico too, and the NHL has made a tradition of hosting an outdoor game on New Year’s Day. So what if other sports tried to tie the movies into their game presentation?

Home of the fictional Bridgetown Swing

You could stage games at Durham, North Carolina’s Durham Athletic Park (The DAP), home to the Bulls of the legendary “Bull Durham”, or at Davenport, Iowa’s majestic Modern Woodmen Park, home to the Bridgetown Swing of the should-be legendary “Sugar”, but then both these parks still stand and still host games. You can go buy an undoubtedly cheap ticket to see the North Carolina Central Eagles at The DAP just as you can buy a ticket to see the Class A Quad Cities River Bandits at Modern Woodmen Park. (I’d like to say we could stage a football game at the old Miami Orange Bowl, home to “Any Given Sunday’s” Miami Sharks, but the old Orange Bowl has since been demolished because the world is stupid.)

My longstanding dream has been for “The Naked Gun’s” Frank Drebin to really umpire a Major League Baseball game, preferably with a manager prone to hissy fits. But Leslie Nielsen passed away in 2010 and the California Angels are now the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim Brought To You By Embassy Suites by Hilton Anaheim Orange anyway.

I have long been on record as saying that all Olympic fencing contests should be held not on a piste but in a replica of Nottingham Castle complete with a stone staircase and falling candelabra. But you know how the IOC is, you gotta bribe ‘em at a least a couple million to get anything done and so that’s out.

Golf isn’t a bridge too far for me so much as it is a bridge covered in khaki and polo that I just don’t want to cross. But if you wanted to spruce up golf, maybe take one of your lesser PGA Tour events – The Wyndham Championship in Greensboro sounds like it could use a little more glamour – purposely drop a TV tower on the 18th green a la “Happy Gilmore” and make those pros putt around it. I might tune in.

The NFL, as we know, likes nothing more than to give the appearance of caring about social issues. Why not pretend to tackle prison reform too? Stage a game at the Georgia State Prison in a nod to “The Longest Yard”, sort of Roger Goodell goes to Folsom? Or would Roger Goodell find an excuse to not attend?

Remember in “White Men Can’t Jump” when Sidney Dean explains to Billy Hoyle how playing on the beach means you need to adjust for the wind? Maybe we could make two NBA teams have to adjust for the wind and play a game on one of the courts at Venice Beach. It’s 24 minutes from the Staples Center! Bus Lebron and the Lakers and Kawhi and the Clippers out there on Christmas Day and have them go at it!

The NHL Winter Classic, meanwhile, has gone stale. They’ve played it at baseball stadiums and football stadiums since its inception in 2008. But if you wanna keep playing outdoor hockey, it’s time to get real; it’s time to head north for Banff National Park in Alberta where “Mystery, Alaska” was shot and play some damn pond hockey.

If these are all solid thousand dollar ideas, it’s time for the million dollar idea. Various Major League Baseball organizations have Bring Your Dog to the Park Day, right? So why not tie that into “Air Bud: Seventh Inning Fetch” (2002) and have each team for that night’s game employ a dog (breed to be decided by a fan vote). Don’t wag your finger at me, purists! Bill Veeck would have loved this! What’s more, because “Air Bud” is a whole series – basketball, football, soccer, volleyball – we can tie this into other sports!

See Kevin Durant scowl when an Alaskan Malamute fails to pass him the ball on the fast break; see Bill Belichik scold a beagle playing outside linebacker rush the passer when it should be dropping back into pass coverage; see Ronaldo flop when a Bedlington Terrier scoots underneath his legs; see an American Bloodhound use its nose to set Kerri Walsh-Jennings for the spike at the Manhattan Beach Open! THE POSSIBILITIES ARE ENDLESS!!!

The Operative

The eponymous operative of Yuval Adler’s film is Rachel Currin (Diane Kruger), whose rootless, global upbringing makes her a perfect target for Mossad, the Israeli security agency. This inherent lack of identity, therefore, built into the character also becomes something of the point, as movies about undercover agents often do, with the emergent possibility that Rachel gets In Too Deep or Might Never Have Known Herself At All, clichés “The Operative” flirts with giving genuine emotional heft. Alas, If there are moments when Adler’s film, based on Yiftach Reicher-Atir’s novel “The English Teacher”, suggests an immersive character study, she more often filters that character study through the framework of a traditional thriller, one that never capitalizes on the inherent tensions of its Iran-Israel relations, and duplicates standard-issue suspense scenes of, say, Rachel nearly being caught downloading sensitive information without expanding on it in any meaningful or exciting way.

“The Operative” begins mid-stream, with Rachel making an unexpected call to her former British handler Thomas (Martin Freeman), making him and Mossad worry something non-copacetic is up. The movie then circles back to Rachel’s beginning by way of Thomas explaining to his betters who she was, why she was recruited, what she did, cutting between past and present throughout, the sort of convoluted spy game suggesting John le Carré, though Adler does not evince the same sort of visual delicacy present in, say, “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” where so much could be said without saying anything at all. Consider Rachel’s first mission to Tehran where she is woken in the middle of the night by men speaking in the hall. Seen only through the keyhole, these men may or may not be after her, though rather than waiting to find out, “The Operative” cuts to Rachel telling Thomas how this moment gave her confidence to live out her necessary lie to the fullest. It’s not that Adler shortchanges the suspense but that she presents Rachel’s epiphany entirely through dialogue rather than a short sequence laying it out visually instead, causing a crucial moment of characterization to feel perfunctory.

Exactly what renders Rachel so perfect for this position is mostly just assumed from her background, while her training is non-existent, leaving Thomas to continually explain why, for us as much as the Mossad higher-ups with whom he’s communicating, why she’s cut out for such significant intelligence. Going through Tehran airport security, however, Kruger plays the moment with such manifest fear that everything will go wrong it’s hard to believe she isn’t stopped and questioned, which is not a plot hole but a betrayal of the character as presented. Kruger is better elsewhere, however, in scenes of Iranian street life, where merely her air and loving looks to locals suggests what her voiceover also jumps in to tell us, an affinity for the place seeping in, an affinity that possibly clouds her judgement when the stakes rise and she is asked to infiltrate an electronics company, falling for the playboy, Farhad (Cas Anvar), who runs it.

Playing opposite him, Kruger is truly in her element, never betraying whether her affection for him is true or a put-on, evoked in a scene on a bench at a family wedding where in tenderly touching his face while definitively stating she hopes his ex-wife knows who he belongs to now, a moment which feels so formidable in her tone you wonder where this was when she was going through airport security. This question, in fact, yields more suspense than the more action-oriented avenues, Kruger making her love or not-love so hard to decipher that the open end might have been an electrifying summation of it, leaving her character to wander in the wilderness of a secret identity, if “The Operative” had more forcefully latched onto this idea in the first place.

Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood

If Quentin Tarantino’s eighth feature film, “The Hateful Eight”, was a western, so too is his ninth feature film, “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood”, consumed, as it is, by myth, not so much of the Old West as Old Hollywood, which makes the film’s 1969 setting pertinent, on the cusp of New Hollywood, when stars like Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), of a fictional TV western “Bounty Law”, were fading. But if “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood” is a western, it is also a fairytale, evoked in the title and the title’s ellipsis. Tarantino has no interest in challenging myths, as westerns often do, let alone tearing them down, but reveling in them, building them back up, at least for one night.

This fairytale turns on Rick’s friendship with his loyal stuntman, Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), such a spot-on double that when they sit down side-by-side at a bar for cocktails they imbibe them with a similar slurp. Not just his stuntman, however, Cliff is also his confidante, his Sundance Kid, his driver, seen when he escorts Rick back to his bachelor pad in the Hollywood Hills, next door to new neighbors Roman Polanski (Rafał Zawierucha) and Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie), the former emblemizing that looming New Hollywood. Rather than immediately merging these neighbors’ stories, however, Tarantino runs them parallel for a good long while, denoting “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood’s” languor. While most directors might be content with one freeway aerial shot to convey L.A. as a driving city, Q.T. lingers over the act of driving itself, through the narrow, twisty streets of the Hills and down boulevards, placing the camera at a low angle in Cliff’s car to ensure we can make out every painstakingly created billboard hovering just over the character’s shoulder. In that way, the backdrop becomes a character, in so much as Tarantino consciously draws our attention to it even as we are ostensibly watching the people, immersing us in the time and place. Sometimes he even does away with the people, like a brief sequence cutting from from neon sign to neon sign, each one lighting up come twilight.

The neon signs, though, are not as luminous as Tate, who is emotional ground zero for OUTIH even if, in a virtual non-speaking role, she receives less screen time than Rick and Cliff. If a more interior examination might have unlocked deeper truth about Tate, Tarantino, as elsewhere, is not so much interested in the truth. That’s why her romantic backstory is conveyed by Steve McQueen (Damian Lewis), wistfully, from afar, demonstrating not so much the mere Male Gaze as a certain image of her, one which Tarantino freezes in time; Sharon Tate as the life of a party that would never end.

Not that she gets no time to herself. In one of the film’s most moving scenes, Tate guilelessly talks her way into a screening of her own movie (“The Wrecking Crew”) and sits unnoticed amongst a half-full theater, watching her performance and listening to the laughs around her. This is not sad but joyous, further illuminated in how Tarantino and his editor Fred Raskin cross-cut between this and a scene where Rick films a guest starring appearance on a TV western as the macabre, mustachioed villain. Here “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood” delightfully idles in the actorly nuts and bolts as Rick, desperate and hungover, tries to nail his scene. (The moment when, at some saloon table, DiCaprio erupts with frustration at forgetting lines, Timothy Olyphant, playing opposite him as the show’s star, reminded me of William Goldman’s old anecdote about Roy Scheider coolly standing by on the set of the “Marathon Man” while Dustin Hoffman flipped out.) Eventually, though, Rick rises to the challenge and brings the house down, and his reaction to getting it right, where DiCaprio improbably manages to slowly let the poignancy push through the self-pity, rhymes with the scene of Tate at the theater; we are literally seeing how production gives way to release.

Yet in playing a heavy slated to die at episode’s end, this scene spiritually connects to the demise of Rick’s career, furthered in his pre-shoot encounter with an adolescent co-star championing the Method. “Who are you?” he asks as if confronted by the Ghost of Christmas Future. By the end, in fact, when “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood” flashes forward, Rick returning home from shooting Spaghetti Westerns in Italy, he has acquired girth and sideburns, evoking the aging Elvis. The aging Elvis, in fact, was no fan of hippies and neither is Rick, accosting a car full of hippies in a late night scene, clutching a pitcher of frozen margaritas, laying bare his rage as ridiculous.

As ramped up as Rick gets, Cliff remains mellow, someone wholly at ease in his body, which Tarantino, noted foot fetishist, visually underlines in the character’s moccasins. When Cliff fixes Rick’s TV antenna, he ascends to the roof in the three quick leaps, a comic moment made so by how blazingly fast it happens even as it illustrates how Cliff moves with little wasted motion. It suggests a ferocity ready to uncoil at a moment’s notice, and Pitt’s laconic smile and speaking style, never employed better than here, harmonize with that notion, like someone sizing you up and half-a-second away from punching you if he decides he doesn’t like you. Indeed, a disturbing flashback to Cliff and his ex-wife, whom he is said to have murdered, though we don’t see the murder, arguing on a boat, ends with him just sitting there, a harpoon gun in his lap, a concise portrait of an itchy trigger finger.

His penchant for unbothered cool and sudden violence converge when he picks up a youthful hitch-hiker, unbeknownst to him a member of The Manson Family, and ferries her to their commune, Spahn Ranch. An old dilapidated western movie set, Tarantino effectively brings it back to life, not with any special effects or fantasies but the simple act of Cliff sauntering down the make believe main street, a marshal in moccasins, while Manson’s followers crowd the boardwalks beside him, jeering, like extras in a B movie, all leading to a near escape. The scene is portentous, The Manson Family gathering on OUTIH’s edges like storm clouds, building to the infamous, tragic night of August 8, 1969, cutting between the respective evenings out of Rick & Cliff and Sharon and her friends, every detail accounted for with time stamps and voiceover, like a more elegiac version of “Goodfellas” busy day sequence, brought home in perhaps the greatest of all Q.T. music cues, The Rolling Stones’ “Out of Time”, an astonishing eulogy to the very era Tate represents.

“Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood” culminates, as Q.T. movies often do, with an expected yet still abrupt explosion of violence, mimicking the movie’s overall fantastical presentation in its grisly exaggeration. And if the great myth of Hollywood is that it’s where dreams come true, this denouement, in its way, embodies that myth through Tarantino’s preferred slight of hand, dispensing a kind of cosmic justice by living out Western-style revenge, brought home with an ingenious narrative payoff by way of a prop, improbably giving rise to the title track of Bruce Springsteen’s latest album: “Tonight the Western Stars are shining bright again.”