Shout-Out to the Extra: Report to the Commissioner Version

Shout-Out to the Extra is a sporadic series in which Cinema Romantico shouts out the extras, the background actors, the bit part players, the almost out of your sight line performers who expertly round out our movies with epic blink & you’ll miss it care.

1975’s “Report to the Commissioner”, as we shall see tomorrow, excels at 70s-era NYC location work, frequently seeming to just drop its actors into the midst of genuine street level hustle and bustle and covertly filming them interacting. Indeed, it excels so much at capturing this kind of unpremeditated authenticity that sometimes the extras, as you can see below, don’t even play along.

Pour one out for the extra.

Ranking Luke Skywalker's Outfits

You know when some nominally precocious little kid asks her/his parents why there is a Mother’s Day and/or a Father’s Day but no Kid’s Day and then the Mother and/or Father says because every day is Kid’s Day? That’s how I feel sometimes about “Star Wars.” Like, why is May 4th “Star Wars” Day (May the 4th Be With You) when every day is “Star Wars” Day? I know every day is “Star Wars” Day because over the weekend social media was agog with people ranking “Star Wars” movies. Why? I don’t know. I’ve neither the time nor the inclination anymore these days to track social media tributaries to their source. All I know is, ranking “Star Wars” is not on Cinema Romantico brand; ranking, say, Luke Skywalker’s outfits is.

Ranking Luke Skywalker’s Outfits

NR - Dagobah Workout Clothes

These are purely functionary, the opposite of fashion.

7. Bespin Fatigues 

I mean, what are these? He doesn’t look like an aspiring Jedi coming to Cloud City for the rescue; he looks like a deliveryman dropping off packages at the Cloud City corporate offices. Maybe that brief shot of Lando squinting when Luke shows up isn’t Lando wondering “Who’s this guy” but wondering “What’s this guy wearing?”

6. X-Wing Pilot Suit

This is just functionary too, I suppose, but the orange at least makes it distinct.

5. Moisture Farmer Scrubs

I get that you want to be comfortable under the hot double suns of Tatooine, but I dunno, man. There’s something about Luke’s look here that always suggested 1940s sleepwear.

4. Master Jedi Robes

Shouts to Michael Kaplan, costume designer for “The Last Jedi”, who in concocting Luke’s garb is hearkening back, as you can see throughout this post, to all his previous costuming with various little flourishes, a much more fitting homage, I think, to the predecessors than so much of the New Trilogy’s more cheap nostalgia. 

3. Hoth Snow Cap

Like the J. Peterman Catalogue marketing the bra as a new line in women’s fashion, it is my belief that an enterprising fashion mogul could take Luke’s cap, goggles and scarf from Hoth and transform it into chic city winter wear. Seriously, put Derek Zoolander under that thing and stick it on a billboard on Saks Fifth Avenue and they’ll fly off the shelves. Sonja Tremont Morgan will show up sporting one in the Berkshires. 

2. Throne Room Jacket

As good as Luke ever looked. And it’s interesting to see the look alongside Han, since Han, of course, always wore the same thing, the costume designers hitting on the right Solo attire right off the bat. They could have just taken this Throne Room Luke look and run with it. Imagine Luke showing up at Bespin wearing this! The movie ends not with Luke screaming and falling down the reactor shaft; it ends with Luke coolly flipping a lit match into a gas mine and blowing Darth to kingdom come.

1. All Black

Is a simple black ensemble really more stylish than the Throne Room Jacket? Well, no. It isn’t. It is not more stylish. But it is, I’d submit, the truest piece of Skywalker clothing in a relation to film and performance. That’s because even as the conclusion to the First Trilogy has, as it has for so many people my age, shrunk a bit over time, what with that disgraceful Ben Kenobi hologram scene, I’ve really come to love Hamill’s turn. That’s because even as you can see Harrison Ford checking out, bless his soul, you can also see Hamill trying harder than ever before, painfully exaggerated in his intensity. It is, in other words, Luke at his most goth.   

Rafiki

Early in “Rafiki” teenage Kena (Samantha Mugatsia) joins a few male friends to play cards in a Nairobi public space. The air is convivial. Suddenly, though, when a young man, Tom (Vitalis Waweru ), passes by, one of Kena’s ostensible friends stands up and bullies him. He bullies him, we quickly learn, because Tom is the town pariah, rejected by this closed off society because of his sexual orientation. It’s a moment designed to shift our assumptions about these people into whose company we’ve just been plunged and “Rafiki”, then, which follows the star-crossed, same-sex romance of Kena and fellow teenage girl, Ziki (Sheila Munyiva), becomes about shifting the assumptions of Kenya itself, a place which has struggled in LGBTQ acceptance. Whether it took, I cannot say, though Kenya banned the film which might be all we need to know. And if “Rafiki” feebly refrains from explicit images in love scenes while suffering from an abundance of featherweight montages to demonstrate their burgeoning connection rather than letting us hear what they have to say, it’s hard not to think director Wanuri Kahiu was threading the needle for censors. In that light, it’s impressive what she manages to sneak through.

This alternating desire to confront the truth head on and the necessity of dancing around it is evoked in Kena and Ziki’s first looks. The latter stares straight back, as if challenging Kena to make eye contact, which she only partly does, keeping her head down even as she tilts her eyes up, embodying the risk of just one look. It is fear stemming not just from the surrounding gossip mongers, who seem to live lives merely to judge the lives of others, but from her friends too, like Blacksta (Neville Misati), whose friendliness does not so much mask the society’s retrograde values as demonstrate their deep, immovable roots. You see these roots in Kena’s mother, Mercy (Nini Wacera), whose divorce from Kena’s father, John (Jimmy Gathu), is presented not as won freedom but a cross to bear. Later, when Kena’s secret relationship emerges, her father offers emotional support, insisting such support in the name of love is just that simple, a simple position for a man at the top of the patriarchal chain to take. Mercy knows it is not that simple and says as much.

Ziki’s world, on the other hand, is less filled out. Her parents are wealthy and strict, though Munyiva’s performance comes across less about pushing back against her parents than just a kind of broad free-spiritedness, and the character comes across less an agent of her own change than an agent for Kena’s change, pushing her not to be a nurse but a doctor instead. It makes sense since we tend to see Ziki more through Kena’s eyes but given the film’s otherwise blessedly short run time it’s hard not to wish we could have seen more of Ziki looking back. Her father (Dennis Musyoka), meanwhile, is running for the same political office as Kena’s father, which is what renders the girls’ romantic relationship as star-crossed, ostensibly providing a dramatic hurdle, though Kahiu never sees this inherent drama through, hardly even focusing on the political race, what it entails or why these two men seek office in the first place. Then again, in several church-set scenes, where all the characters congregate, it becomes clear in the Priest’s words that God’s law comes before the government.

That brings me to the photography. “Rafiki” is frequently bathed in pastels, purples and pinks and shades in-between, which Kahiu told Much Ado About Cinema was meant to elicit a “feminine perspective.” It does, but first it’s crucial to note the starkest purple is seen in the purple robes the Priest wears and that adorns the religious banners directly behind him. These, then, deliberately play off not only the pink braids that Ziki sports in church, and everywhere else, but the more lyrical hues infusing cinematographer Christopher Wessels’s frames. In a scene at a dance club, Kena and Ziki pop off the screen in neon against the black lit backdrop, and the morning after, when they say goodbye, the color of their clothes blends so breathlessly with the sunrise’s vivid violent that, for a second, you’d swear the natural world was staking claim to their side.

Zombieland: Double Tap

“Zombieland” became beloved not least because of the rules devised by Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg) to survive America’s plague of the undead. And to critique its ten-year later sequel, “Zombieland: Double Tap”, a title referencing one of the original rules, we now turn to another rules-lover, Randy Meeks of “Scream 2”, who observed the rules of the sequel. “Number One: The Body count is always bigger. Number Two: The Death scenes are always much more elaborate. More blood, more Gore. Carnage Candy!” That’s why “Double Tap” takes everything up a notch, evoked in a monster truck that shows up midway through. That’s not to suggest the sequel is any lighter in tone than its predecessor. If anything, it takes the proceedings less seriously. Not so much, even, in its sporadic meta potshots, like one at its emergent TV competition in the years since, as in its overriding air, where the new & deadlier zombies aren’t so much a big problem as a minor nuisance. A post-credits Easter egg is designed to be the out-of-context hit of any dorm room party also works as a summation of theme – anything for a laugh.

When “Zombieland” ended, Columbus had found his metaphorical home in the company of Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson), Little Rock (Abigail Breslin), and his nascent paramour, Wichita (Emma Stone). As “Double Tap” opens, the quartet has moved into an actual home at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. A Shepard Fairey Obama “Hope” poster hangs over the mantle, reminding (some of) us of the whimsical days when the original was released and suggesting the wasteland outside the White House as comparable to our current world. If that sounds like too much of a bleeding-heart fantasy, fear not, for the characters’ journeys take them to a commune named for Babylon where plenty of comic aspersions are cast on hippies while Tallahassee, at a crucial moment exclaims, “Thank God for rednecks!” This is equal opportunity adventure. Everyone gets along when they’re fightin’ zombies!

Well, almost. A decade is a long time to spend in the company of just a few others and the strain shows immediately. Wichita flees the White House after Columbus proposes marriage, while Little Rock flees just before her, itching to leave the nest in the face of Tallahassee essentially installing himself as a father figure. Indeed, if he comes across overbearing, that’s by design, both in the writing and performance, and, honestly, I kept wanting to tell Harrelson to just take it easy, man. But when Wichita learns Little Rock has hooked up with some anti-gun free spirit – named, predictably, Berkley (Avan Jogia) – Wichita rejoins her male cohorts to initiate a rescue mission, taking them to Memphis and points beyond, to Babylon, an adventure complicated by the presence of a new group member, Columbus’s ersatz new significant other, Madison (Zoey Deutch).

She’s a dumb blonde and Deutch is as committed to the bit as Johnny Depp was to rum-addled camp as Jack Sparrow, and she contorts that single note as long and as deftly as she can. In the end, though, the movie doesn’t really take her character anywhere, even as she gets to go along for the ride. Ditto the hippies. Not so much Berkeley, even, as the Babylonians who initially hint at town folk in a Western who ante up in the face of looming heavies. “Zombieland: Double Tap”, though, mostly forgets about them after a few standard-issue jokes. It’s especially disappointing given the original movie’s propensity to call attention to clichés for the purpose of then subverting them; there’s less subversion here.

There is a little less filmmaking discipline too. If Fleischer’s original stood out for maintaining steady momentum even while effusing a leisurely vibe then “Double Tap” just feels leisurely, for good and bad. A Bizzaro World sequence at an Elvis-themed hotel, quoting the first film’s extended stay at Bill Murray’s pad, cleverly lampoons Columbus and Tallahassee’s tendencies in ways, fear not, reader, I will refrain from revealing. At the same time, this sequence, funny as it is, highlights how the movie is mostly just taking the personalities of the first film and amplifying them rather than advancing or challenging them in any compelling way. That goes for Little Rock too, whose odyssey’s end isn’t much different from Columbus, Tallahassee and Wichita attempting to commander an RV, much ado about nothing.

Columbus’s marriage proposal that Wichita walks out on ostensibly hums in the background, though Stone hardly plays to it, aware that plot points are, like, beside the point. Astutely noting that Harrelson is turned up to 11, she downshifts to a cool 3 or 4, pulling a deft trick of both being in the front row but acting like she’s just shaking her head and sighing from the peanut gallery. (Her facial expressions as her character is forced to watch Berkeley flirt with Little Rock are the single funniest thing in the movie.) And if “Double Tap” is spinning its wheels, there is something simultaneously freeing in it never needing to try for anything more, which Stone encapsulates, speaking for all of us, as we drop in for an hour and forty minutes to see how everyone’s doing and just go along for the ride.

My Favorite College Football Games: Game 9

December 1, 2007: Hawaii - 35 Washington - 28

A couple college football seasons ago, historically irrelevant Central Florida went undefeated and won the Peach Bowl* (*Top 5 Bowl Game name) against the only team that beat the team that won the Playoff. UCF, left out in the cold by the powers-that-be, declared itself National Champion anyway. If it was a flex, it was also steeped in the sort of cavalier whimsy college football once displayed more toward titles, a la Richard Nixon bestowing a Presidentially contrived national championship plaque upon Texas after beating Arkansas in 1969’s Game of the Century. A significant chunk of college football culture, on the other hand, excoriated UCF for not knowing their place, which merely reminds us that despite the playoff’s progressivism, most fans persist as conservative classists, paying fealty to the inherent power program oligarchy. I’m something in-between. I am vehemently anti-playoff yet fervidly pro-UCF. Because while I understand Central Florida’s yearning for inclusion, just as I understand why, so many years later, the 1975, pre-Pac 10 version of Arizona State remains irate for going 12-0 but finishing second behind once-beaten Oklahoma, I nevertheless contend that what sets this sport apart is how its literally perfect seasons can be figuratively perfect too, totally, gloriously self-contained. In “every other sport”, to quote the sports conformists, only one team ends with a win; in college football, the 1999 Marshall Thundering Herd, twenty years on, remain championship-less but also 13-0. Glory hallelujah.

---------------

In one way, 2007 was a tough college football season for me, my beloved Nebraska Cornhuskers descending into their sustained mediocrity. Indeed, in a confluence of fate I still respect, the exact same week I had my appendix removed, Nebraska was demolished by USC, initiating a downfall so swift and complete it remains difficult to fathom. The “famed” Victory Scotches I imbibe after most Nebraska victories were scarce that season, and their emotional opposite, Defeat Scotches, seemed pointless since their losses were so thorough and undramatic. If my favorite part of watching Nebraska Football is living and dying on each play, almost every 2007 contest was a mere flatline. As such, I transferred all my pent-up emotion with no place to go to Hawaii, whom I had fallen in love with a year earlier for its high-flying run & shoot offense piloted by quarterback Colt Brennan, outsider status and best logo in all of sports. Most of their games, of course, kicked off on Hawaii–Aleutian Standard Time, but I stayed up (very) late to watch them anyway. And I saw their overtime win against Louisiana Tech too, where the sight of (Rainbow) Warrior coach June Jones wearing a lei in Ruston, Louisiana colorfully and innately embodied college football’s multiculturalism.

No game was as electric and dramatic as the last, a 21-point comeback against Washington not completed until 44 seconds remained, deep into the Hawaiian night (Midwestern morning), securing the (Rainbow) Warriors an undefeated regular season. That earned them a trip to the Sugar Bowl where they got whipped, a coach turning back into a pumpkin and all that, leading scads of the kinds of fans for whom complaining supersedes joy to insist they were frauds all along. They weren’t, of course, because the goal was always simply 12-0, competing against their own sense of excellence rather than against some inane set of computerized rankings, something far apart from dull conversations about resumes (!), like college football is a white collar job interview, and the whim of angry mainlanders for whom everything means nothing if you’re not #1. In retrospect, I sort of wish they had gone to, like, the Emerald Bowl instead and cut Oregon State to pieces. Even so, I’ll always have that Washington game, Brennan’s 40 yard strike to Jason Rivers for the tying touchdown that I still think is the best throw I’ve ever seen, and my 2 AM Victory Scotch, raised by the light of my Christmas tree to the 2007 Hawaii (Rainbow) Warriors, my favorite non-Nebraska college football team of all time.

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Man from Laramie (1955)

Throughout “The Man from Laramie”, director Anthony Mann juxtaposes widescreen, Technicolor vistas of the Old West, frequently with a lone man under the big sky or disappearing between craggy rocks, against just as wide interiors of hearth and home, where characters line up in expert bouts of blocking. These contrasts are not new, the latter typically epitomizing a sense of community and camaraderie and family that the lone lonesome cowboys inhabiting the former yearn for and, eventually, find, redeemed of their wicked companionlessness (sic). And though Mann allows his lone lonesome cowboy, Will Lockhart (James Stewart), brief moments of rapport, like sitting down to tea with Barbara Waggoman (Cathy O’Donnell), the storeminder he has just met, the auteur’s viewpoints surprise, ultimately painting a much more cynical picture than such community-mindedness is supposed to engendervalues, and which must have felt like a punch to the face of the Eisenhower era’s values. Indeed, if Will’s arrival into the movie’s setting sets things in motion, the seeds, as he notes, have long since been planted, insidiously turning that familiar metaphor for family on its head.

Ex-Army man is transporting supplies from Laramie to Coronado as the movie opens, though his underlying motivation skews a little more personal – that is, he seeks the dastardly soul who sold rifles to the Apaches who killed his brother and members of a Calvary regiment. Though this does not devolve into a clichéd rerun of Cowboys & Indians, with the Apaches mostly hovering on the periphery of the story, it nevertheless comes across as a disappointing archetype in a movie otherwise trying to bust them, not even reduced to savages so much as given no voice, employed as a device. The family dominating Coronado, however, ruled by patriarch Alec Waggoman (Donald Crisp), Barbara’s Uncle, is rendered as more than a one-dimensional villain, Lear-like, both kowtowing to a hot-headed son, Dave (Alex Nicol), he knows isn’t cut out to take over the operation but also not willing to acknowledge that his surrogate son, Vic (Arthur Kennedy), is just that, binding Alec to blood even as it threatens to do him in, evoked not just in his recurring nightmare of a mystery man coming to kill his son but in his blindness, perhaps a metaphor too far.

It is Dave who drags Will into the fray, raiding the latter’s caravan on the way out of town, wrongly thinking this interloper a thief, having only taken supplies at Barbara’s behest. If this arouses suspicion that Dave might be the rifle-seller, or merely good old fashioned male orneriness, well, Stewart essentially plays to both, emitting the same sort of immovable defiance the Waggoman family did in erecting this New Mexico Territory outpost by marching right back in. It’s a classic Western scene, the lone lonesome cowboy entering the corrupt town to make things right, though the ensuing sequence, a fistfight between Will and Dave, and eventually Vic too, feels less standard-issue than a majestic mess, rolling around on the ground and right underneath cattle, crashing through fences and gathering dust, looking almost like a precursor to “They Live’s” trash can brawl, never-ending verité, where rather than refusing to put on sunglasses, Will flat refuses to leave Coronado.

You see this steadfastness in a sequence when Alec offers restitution to Will for what Dave has destroyed, asking this out-of-towner if they might both be willing to bend. Mann positions this shot with Alec standing and Will sitting, though, Stewart, tilting his blue eyes upward and letting a pernicious smile curl onto his lips, commands the moment anyway, pointing out the irreconcilable differences in their personalities and demanding “Just where do we bend?”, bending the word itself, brilliantly, like a deliberately dissonant guitar chord. It is my retoractive 1955 Line Reading of the Year. His performance is much more polite in the company of Barbara, and that’s all Will’s scenes with Barbara are – polite, never generating much in the way of romantic spark. In a way, though, that plays right into the end. Will might well find his revenge and ultimately the scales might tip toward justice, but when Will rides away, Mann is taking that traditional shot and twisting it inside-out, someone who has come to learn that family and fellowship is not all it’s cracked up to be.

Old Movies & Yelling at Clouds

"What was that you said about old movies?"

Cinephiles are sensitive these days, and rightly so. The loss of FilmStruck still smarts. Disney, having just acquired 20th Century Fox in its aim of becoming America’s version of a state-owned movie distribution company, have made it difficult for repertory movie houses to get their hands on those older movies. Why just a couple weeks ago I awoke to discover that Turner Classic Movies was no longer part of my cable package. Not enough people watching, apparently; too many pesky mid-Atlantic accents, or something. And so, last week when Esquire’s Jack Holmes interviewed best-selling author Shea Serrano about his new book titled, ahem, “Movies (And Other Things)”, a certain exchange stuck out and caused Twitter to suffer its Daily Meltdown. It went like this:

Holmes: I’m not really an Old Movie Guy, and you chose to focus only on movies from the ‘80s—and really the ‘90s—on. Are you like me in that you don’t see a ton of appeal in movies older than that?

Serrano: I'm with you on that. I watch old movies and I'm like, "No, thanks." They're not fun. It's clear they were still trying to figure out how to do things. Some of them, of course, were undeniable, like a Jaws or Star Wars or Indiana Jones. You watch those and you go, "Oh, I see in this the bones of what eventually became whatever action franchise.” Or Alien. [But mostly], they’re just not that fun to watch.

When I was working on the “Heist” chapter, I was reading best lists of heist movies. One that kept appearing on the list was this movie called Rififi. It's in black and white. Everybody talks about how great it was. They do this really cool trick in there where there's a long stretch of just straight-up silence while they try to break into wherever. I get it. That part was cool, and I imagine, at the time, it was really fun. But you watch it today, and it's just not that great.

Perhaps because Holmes is not, as he says, an “Old Movie Guy”, which makes Old Movies sound like something hazy and imprecise, like not knowing “the Old Vienna before the war” (Whoops! Sorry! Old Movie reference! Apologies! Don’t click away! We continue!), he failed to ask the follow-up question I might have submitted. Like, when Serrano says “(I)t’s clear they were still trying to figure out how to do things”, what “things” does he mean? No, because Holmes is already on board with not liking Old Movies, he follows up instead by asking “Do you think people just get accustomed to a certain [technical] level of moviemaking?”

As an answer, Serrano trots out a familiar analogy about basketball – you know, if you put LeBron James in an 80s Celtics/Lakers game then yada yada. LeBron in a game from another era, alas, refers merely to a physical difference. And while it is true that New Movies have a different level of technical moviemaking, moviemaking is also a craft. Does Serrano think the blocking of actors is better in movies today? Does he think movies of today have better editing and, consequently, better pacing? Does he think the acting is better?

Now the Constitution does not stipulate that Serrano is mandated to like Old Movies, as one helpful Twitter user noted. And we must note, as Serrano did himself, that he is not, despite how the Tweet was framed, a film critic and doesn’t consider himself one. He is not a film historian either, as an interview on the podcast The Gist with Mike Pesca makes clear, where Serrano explains the structure of his book, chapters that can be read any order, is, and I quote him exactly, “A sneaky trick that absolves you of having to cover the history of everything.” No, Serrano is what the kidz call a Pop Culture Critic, who I once referred to right here, on this very blog, in taking a Serrano piece at The Ringer and building my own piece off it, “the Interwebs master at quasi-alternate fiction and delightfully oblique variations on listicles.” And in his book he is writing, as Pesca puts it, the “reflections of his own personal relationships with movies”, a la Nick Hornby’s “Songbook”, or like a hipster version of Charles Taylor’s recent “Opening Wednesday at a Theater Or Drive-In Near You.”

[Here I pause to note that, no, I have not read nor bought the book. Serrano, however, advised Pesca that if the climactic scene between Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck in “Armageddon” did not make you teary-eyed then you should not buy the book. So...I guess I’m not buying it.]

I’m not against Serrano getting a deal for that kind of book. Movies are popular entertainment too and if you want to write about them purely through that lens, go for it. But. It’s not even so much that Serrano, in his interview with Pesca, in referencing the Martin Scorsese/Marvel brou ha ha, invokes people in “black turtlenecks” and “horn-rimmed” glasses as not getting to be gatekeepers, which skews awful close to gatekeeping from the other side of the fence, but that Serrano also discusses a chapter in his book about 2019’s “Booksmart.” He cites an “evolution” of “Election’s” Tracy Flick to the characters of the “Booksmart”, a movie, he says, that “will live for a long time.” And in this observation he is essentially explaining the relationship of Old Movies to New Movies, the connective tissue of Past to Present to Future. He sees it! And for a smart guy like Serrano, who has such an open mind in so many other areas, it’s disappointing to see him, someone with a best-selling NYT platform, to essentially dismiss decades and decades of cinema with a wave of his hand.

Yelling At Clouds is considered the province of Old Men, like Goose Gossage, the baseball Hall of Famer, who has deemed modern baseball “unwatchable” and said people who played “Rotisserie baseball...thought they figured the fucking game out”, which sounds sort of like a Reverse Shea Serrano, doesn’t it, that classic cinema is unwatchable, that they hadn’t figured the fucking movies out. What a twist, huh? Turns out, young men can yell at clouds too.

Judging a Stranger's DVD Collection Part II

Much like the mixtapes of my analogue youth or hanging certain works of art by certain artists on your wall are a means of expressing your taste, so too is a DVD collection, something I fear these kidz, these kidz with their streaming platformz, will never understand. And so, a couple weeks ago, when I slid open the doors behind a giant entertainment center in the semi-remote cabin where I was decompressing on Minnesota’s North Shore to locate the wires connected to the speakers that initially didn’t seem to want to play, and suddenly, unexpectedly found myself face-to-face with a line of DVDs, I forgot all about the wires and just perused this collection for a good ten minutes, analyzing the cabin-owners’ taste. And while you might argue it was just a random collection of hand-me-down discs, contributions to the cause by random people staying over, well, not only would that ruin this whole exercise, but 1.) The DVDs were in alphabetical order, suggesting they weren’t just piled up garage sale-style and 2.) The collection included the complete works of “Harry Potter”, “Indiana Jones” and “James Bond.” Who, I ask, is showing up with the whole “Harry Potter” series in tow and just saying “Here”?

This commitment to collections, though, simultaneously shines a spotlight on collections that remain incomplete. Granted, some of these unfinished DVD assemblages are not necessarily worthy of mention. Yes, the cabin-owners only had the first three “Rambo” movies but so what? The most recent one was just released and who needs to own “John Rambo”? Ditto “Under Siege.” They probably don’t even know there was a second “Under Siege”, “Under Siege 2: Dark Territory”, where Steven Seagal plays guitar. (Did I know there was a second “Under Siege” where Steven Seagal plays guitar? Who’s asking the question? Prank caller!) But then you come upon “Die Hard” and “Die Hard 2” and…..no “Die Hard with a Vengeance.” (No “Live Free or Die Hard” or “A Good Day to Die Hard” either but those are the “Saved” and “Shot of Love” of the “Die Hard” series so that’s beside the point.) “The Road Warrior” is included but “Mad Max ” and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome”, never mind “Fury Road”, are MIA. Then there is the strange case of “Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines.”

Linda Hamilton and Michael Biehn? Not on this DVD shelf!

I liked “Terminator 3”, not least for its practical effects, but it’s a bold move, man, to put that one in the collection and leave out 1 & 2; the kind of bold move, love it or leave it, that endears me to your DVD collection. Cheers, cabin owners. Even bolder, though, is the inclusion of “Ocean’s Twelve” and…that’s it; that’s the “Ocean’s” list. Loyal frustrated followers know my eternal adoration of Steven Soderbergh’s egregiously under-appreciated “Ocean’s” sequel – which too many people didn’t like because it wasn’t what they “expected” – and, moreover, really longtime loyal frustrated followers may recall the last time Cinema Romantico rated a North Shore cabin DVD collection it too had “Ocean’s Twelve” and none of the others. Egads! Grand Marais, which we were near, is known as an artist’s community and methinks they, more than much of my overrated Big City brethren, get that “Ocean’s Twelve” is a brilliant art film and so much better than the first one. Rock on, cabin owners.

It is in these decisions of what to include and leave out that the collection’s uniqueness begins to emerge. And if alphabetized collections of art were lightly mocked in “High Fidelity”, this North Shore DVD medley demonstrates how going from A to Z can put such uniqueness into even clearer light. Like “The Road Warrior” sandwiched between “Ratatouille” and “Robots” or “Pulp Fiction” flanked by “The Proposal” and “Quigley Down Under”, which I forgot existed until perusing this collection. Elsewhere, “The Saint” was propped up next to “Singin’ in the Rain” while “Ben Hur” was slotted directly next to “Blast from the Past.” The cabin owners opting for lesser Shue and Silverstone is canceled out simply from these DVDs going side-by-side. (I’m precluding John Wayne’s 1960 “The Alamo” and 2004’s “The Alamo” because I also saw an Alamo history one of the cabin bookshelves and assumed they were merely Alamo enthusiasts.)

But now let’s go to the Hs where we find “Heaven Knows Mr. Allison” side-by-side with “Hot Shots! Part Deux.” You might wonder why there is no “Hot Shots!”, and I wondered that myself, though not for long, simply because pairing Robert Mitchum with Topper Harley is like pairing Lou Reed with “Weird Al” Yankovic on a jukebox playlist. To quote Saul Bloom in “Ocean’s Twelve”, the North Shore’s favorite movie, you’re all aces in my book. This DVD collection, simply, wins.

Last Black Man in San Francisco

San Francisco is home to director Joe Talbot and his leading man, Jimmie Fails, playing a version of himself, a character named, conspicuously, Jimmie Fails. They grew up together as teenagers, brainstorming the whole time for “The Last Black Man in San Francisco.” It shows, the movie bulging with bits and ideas, as if the two men took notes of every encounter and every experience to be used later, evoked in Mont (Jonathan Majors), best friend of the movie Jimmie, a playwright cataloguing what he sees and who he meets. Talbot and Fails’s film, then, having seen San Francisco slowly take its gentrified shape, becomes both a love letter and a lament, about a man trying to find space for himself in a city squeezing people like him out. As such, “The Last Black Man in San Francisco” begins not with an establishing shot of the glittering Golden Gate Bridge but men in hazmat suits cleaning up a contaminated shipyard in Hunter’s Point. Across the way, Jimmie and Mont wait for a bus that won’t come. This is not, however, the enigmatic city transit of “Ghost World” because these two men have some life left in them yet, together boarding Jimmie’s skateboard, a four-wheeled bridge from the Bay’s fringes to its downtown, virtually soaring as the whole populace – coastal cosmopolitans and eccentrics – seem to rise up around them.

This idea of belonging – this idea of where you belong – is paramount. Jimmie and Mont almost seem out of time, living together, sleeping together in the same bedroom, not because they’re in a relationship but more like a less comic version of Laurel and Hardy. Outside, a group of trash-talking males – literally billed as Greek Chorus – loom every time Jimmie and Mont come or go. If this Greek Chorus embodies a rougher kind of masculinity at odds with Jimmie and Mont’s genteel, sad-eyed natures, they are also staking claim to this block, a kind of emotional right of property possession that is deliberately juxtaposed as small scale compared to the overwhelming overall urban displacement.

That displacement is epitomized Jimmie’s old family home in a gentrified neighborhood. Upon first arriving there, Jimmie enters through the vine-covered gate, and a point-of-view shot finds him looking up at the house, toward the turret, bushes on either side of the path framing it, momentarily rendering the Victorian-style architecture as an almost otherworldly wonderland. In a way, it is. Though his family once lived there, it now belongs to a middle-aged white couple who bemusedly stand off to the side and wonder why Jimmie, painting and trimming, is playing maintenance keeper. Indeed, in brief encounters with his father and mother, where something seems to flicker behind Fail’s eyes and then disappear, you sense Jimmie sensing his own sense of history vanishing beneath his feet. If the character feels a little short on lived-in details, almost as if Fails and Talbot know the real person so much they forgot to sculpt a character, this lack of a persona also functions as inadvertent underlining of his overriding fear. Sometimes he hops the back of trucks with his skateboard in tow, evoking Marty McFly, and like Marty McFly was in danger of being erased from history, so too does Jimmie fear his impending erasure.

That’s why when the white couple is forced out of the home, Jimmie and Mont movie right in, squatting since they can’t afford the hefty price tag. Here, they act like kids, shouting at their top of their lungs and talking dreamily of big restorative plans. Home, in other words, becomes an antecedent to the outside world, an idea taking root elsewhere too, like the car where Jimmie’s Uncle Ricky (Mike Epps) lives. That’s an idea steeped in tragedy, though Uncle Ricky has spruced up his vehicle with Christmas lights while Epps’s air emits pride in his wheels. In one scene, late at night, we see him parked near the water when a gunshot echoes off screen. It’s one of several times Talbot alludes to violence without showing it to us, as if home, even if it’s this car, functions like insulation against all the encroaching meanness out there, holding it at bay.

But it can’t be held there forever. Even if Talbot eschews the specifics of gentrification and real estate law, a fatalism permeates the film, like a San Franciscan fog that settles and refuses to dissipate, evinced in an indelible closing shot where we finally see the Golden Gate Bridge, not in its normal splendor but half-shrouded in darkness as Jimmie pulls the oars of a small rowboat toward some unknowable destination. He looks like a refugee in his own city.

Ad Astra

“Ad Astra”, as a concise opening title scrawl makes clear, means To the Stars, a phrase full of awe though director James Gray’s film often feels in direct opposition to such wonderment, glimpsed in the space of a shot of Saturn outside a spaceship window equating the sixth planet from the Sun with a thumbnail-sized Grand Canyon seen from a passenger airline. Indeed, despite considerable space-set derring-do, “Ad Astra’s” oft-alone astronaut, Roy McBride (Brad Pitt) is nothing more than an emotionally scarred son journeying from the Earth to the Moon to Mars to Neptune to try and reconnect with an emotionally distant father. It is, frankly, a funny metaphor when you type it out, and therefore can only be as good as how the movie peddles it, which, between Gray’s controlled aesthetic and Pitt’s austere performance, is pretty good.

“Ad Astra” opens with an incredible sequence marrying show-stopping action to character as Roy, working on the International Space Antenna, extending from Earth up through the atmosphere and then into the low rung of space, takes a tumble in the wake of a mysterious power surge. This plummeting turns your stomach as his body turns over and over, though the surrounding chaos only stresses Roy’s professionalism in the face of such peril, hardly batting an eye as he doesn’t so much fight to maintain consciousness as just unflappably keep it, eventually parachuting to safety on our blue marble below, heart-stopping and bizarrely serene all rolled into one. Afterwards, his Space Command superiors track these surges to the Lima Project, a spaceship out toward Neptune prowling for intelligent life and captained by Roy’s father, the legendary H. Clifford McBride (Tommy Lee Jones), long presumed dead. And here Gray, who wrote the screenplay with Ethan Gross, smartly forgoes techno-babble, relaying only pertinent information, that 1.) The entire universe is threatened by these surges and 2.) Roy’s father might still be alive, triggering a quest from Earth to the Moon to Mars to Neptune.

This defines “Ad Astra’s” general indifference to exposition. Liv Tyler, playing Roy’s wife Eve, might hardly be in the movie, but this is shrewd filmmaking, not an inconsiderate filmmaker. Her few flashbacks function as snippets of Roy’s memories, demonstrating his tendency to block out everything, including, sure enough, her, glimpsed in a cruel, evocative shot where she is virtually blurred out in the background, like he’s losing focus on her in the moment. His voiceovers too, while occasionally grasping for too much Malick-y religiosity, function as deliberate contrast to his outward placidity, giving you a sense of the terse tempest kicking up inside. They also call to mind the film’s recurring computerized psych evaluations, as if L. Ron Hubbard’s Auditing has become standard practice.

The psych evaluations are one element of Gray’s excellent world-building, accentuated by Kevin Thompson’s production design and Karen O’Hara’s set decoration, sculpting a world that isn’t the joyous future of “Star Trek” nor the dystopia of “Blade Runner” but a bizarrely believable-feeling progression from where we are now to where we might be if space travel became a reality, with Virgin Atlantic flights to the moon and the framed Welcome to the Moon picture – “Where worlds come together” – comically suggesting a lunar visitors center, like you’ve just crossed Iowa/Illinois border. Seriously, that poster is hilarious. The dark, red-infused interiors of the Mars outpost, meanwhile, suggest a lack of daylight akin to Antarctica’s famed Palmer Station, an unmoored sensation that also comes through in the narrow, claustrophobic settings and in the performances, Ruth Negga’s dour fatalism and a walk-off cameo you deserve to discover on your own if you don’t already know about it implicitly summarizing Martian bureaucracy. Even the action scenes feel built off such matter-of-factness, Roy’s rover escort on the moon coming under attack from pirates, recounted with a sober lyricism that not only befitting Roy’s level-headedness.

This grim, believable world-building is not simply for its own sake but illustrative of Roy’s strange, strangely familiar journey, where pushing the limits of human achievement are deliberately juxtaposed against conventional human failings, reimagining the reckoning of “Apocalypse Now” as nothing more than a son finding his father puttering around in the garage, a sequence where the thought “This is it?” says everything. Yup. This is it. This is all we’ve got. And that’s why we’ve got to hang onto it, which is why it’s so affecting when he lets it go. And if too often as a true leading man Pitt has languished, as Achilles in “Troy” and in the more recent “Allied” where he mistook stiff sullenness for searching, here Gray emphasizes that stiff sullenness as part and parcel to the character which Pitt translates by turning his face into a blank slate where the slightest physical flourish, like an eye twitch, feels like foreshocks before the concluding seismic eruption, brought home in a cup of coffee packing as much punch as a nuclear explosion.

My Favorite College Football Games: Game 8

November 3, 1990: Georgia Tech - 41 Virginia - 38

For all its accompanying hype, the Super Bowl is merely the last game of a season, a logical end point, which is why an NFL champion is official, like getting a vendor contract notarized. Bo-ring. In college football, on the other hand, playoff-less for 145 of its 150 years, national champions were colloquially, wonderfully referred to as mythical, like the culmination to an adventure book. Occasionally, if the stars aligned, a New Year’s Day bowl game doubled as a kind of Super Bowl, like the 1987 Fiesta Bowl, but those instances were rare and still created less by a linear process than bowl game official skullduggery. No, the most famous college football games have taken place during the regular season, which is why no other sport’s regular season can compare, and those games have come replete with their own overblown moniker – The Game of the Century. There have been fourteen Games of the Century, which is not to suggest that each one was a Game of the Century because every Game of the Century was the Game of the Century, see, part of a whole but simultaneously singular. And though all these Games of the Century have featured #1 vs #2, not all #1 vs #2 showdowns have been Games of the Century, a kind of dream logic that only exists in this mad, glorious sport, where a rare confluence of events – polls and P.T. Barnum-esque press proclamations – will such contests into being. The playoff will kill them, of course, since it is designed to manufacture its own ersatz super bowl, conforming to supersized normalcy. Boo. Hiss. But don’t get me started.

Virginia and Georgia Tech’s showdown for the ACC title in 1990 was not an (un)official Game of the Century. The former Cavaliers were undefeated and ranked #1 but more a novelty than a blueblood, while the latter Yellow Jackets, destined to split the Mythical National Championship with Colorado, entered this game once-tied and ranked merely 16th. The setting, meanwhile, was not hallowed gridiron ground like South Bend, Indiana or Tuscaloosa, Alabama but modest Scott Stadium in Charlottesville, before it expanded, when one end zone was still open, autumn-colored trees swaying in the breeze. Of course, that’s what made it feel different, not inevitable but a joyous quirk in the college football order, emblemized in the contest itself, not a defensive struggle born of coaching conservatism a la the first Game of the Century, or the most recent one, but a frenetic, sloppy, magnificent shootout.

It began in the sunshine but ended in the fall twilight, sort of mirroring Virginia’s day, roaring out to a 28-14 halftime lead only to have Georgia Tech claw its way back, aided by two Cavalier turnovers, and then a final quarter seesaw that ended the only way a game like this can – on a last-second field goal. If the end was familiar, in its way, the game itself felt like something close to emotional pandeonium, desperate even, especially as the sky got darker and the conclusion drew nearer, where the notion of this being each team’s opportunity on the biggest stage imaginable didn’t fade into the background but rose to the top. You could sense it; you could see it. In re-watching the goal line stand, there comes a moment when the CBS camera is right in Virginia coach George Welsh’s face. “Can you move the camera, please?” he says, right to it, to us. He is oddly polite but completely on edge, befitting color commentator Tim Brant’s recurring observation that Welsh is someone who has never been in this position and might never be in this position again, which befit the entire game’s air. It still felt to me now as it felt to me then – like it was The Game of the Century.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Navy Blue and Gold (1937)

“Navy Blue and Gold” is a nice movie. That’s not to suggest “Navy Blue and Good” is a good movie, per se, though that is not to suggest it’s a bad movie, necessarily, just that it’s, you know, nice. Like, it’s apple-cheeked, fresh-faced, scrubbed and shampooed and ready to go. It’s a Navy recruitment film, after all, in the guise of a Hollywood production, where despite its football scenes being filmed at the L.A. Coliseum, plenty of Annapolis footage is still served up, letting viewers behind the hallowed walls of the Academy, a how the silver screen of the 1930s could double as a tourist trap. And that seems the point as much as the drama, which is all dutifully recounted, emphatically hitting each story beat right on cue, in the manner that you would expect a Naval plebe to, I suppose, where rigorously adhering to the inherent structure is preeminent. That might be why they don’t offer a film directing program at the Naval Academy. Film encourages mavericks and, as we all know, Maverick wasn’t admitted to the Naval Academy.

As military films often do, comedic, dramatic, or otherwise, director Sam Wood brings three disparate personalities together as dorm mates at Annapolis, each one a football player, or aspiring football player. Dick Gates Jr. (Tom Brown) is a more privileged Rudy, obsessed with football and desperate to make the team; Roger Ash (Robert Young) is the lazy rebel, walking out on his current team once he gets accepted to the Naval Academy, punching out his hard-charging coach’s lights along the way, but loafing around on the field for Navy, wasting his considerable talent; Truck Cross (Jimmy Stewart), meanwhile, is something of the man in the middle, emblemized in how Stewart pulls the neat actorly trick of managing to both look like he finds Roger’s light razzing of Dick funny while simultaneously sympathizing with Dick for putting up with the razzing in the first place. Truck is also, though, the one with a secret, which becomes the one angle that skews a little less than nice.

The lesson here, of course, is one for all and all for one, imparted through a series of events we’ve all seen a hundred times before, whether it’s Roger getting even with the upperclassmen who take their hazing of Dick too far or Dick and Truck tracking down Roger when he goes on a bender, all of which is rendered professionally if less than thrillingly. Not that a movie like “Navy Blue and Gold” wants to make too much of an aesthetic stink. No, like Roger, praying to the statue of Tecumseh, the moment when he truly goes all-in on the Naval tradition he has resisted, the film colors inside the lines, only getting a little hot under the collar in the form of an instructor unwittingly telling a story about Truck’s Dad that Truck stands up to say isn’t true, revealing that he used a false name when enrolled, meaning possible dismissal right before the big football game.

If you can figure out how it ends, Stewart still makes it count. Indeed, in the last couple years I’ve watched a few of Jimmy’s old westerns for the first time, most of which are not only refreshingly morally ambiguous but studies of an individual reluctantly forced to work within a collective. “Navy Blue and Gold” is sort of that in reverse, at least where Stewart’s Truck Cross is concerned, a guy excited for the collective but only wants to remain within it so long as he is able to maintain his individual honor which in what’s otherwise an Arrow Shirt Man of a movie feels pretty radical.

Some Drivel On...Zombieland

“Zombieland” begins by dropping us straight into its infested New America. We are not dropped into it, however, alongside an unknowing surrogate, a la “28 Days Later”, learning everything as he learns it. No, we are introduced to Zombieland by Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg), who has already been here a long time, evoked in elaborately staged shots of him wandering through post-apocalypse America’s wreckage on the interstate with his rolling suitcase in tow like all the world’s now a depressing airport concourse. He has survived, he explains in voiceover Eisenberg gives the ring of a man leaving behind auditory instruction manual, by adhering to a strict set of rules, which comically pop up on the screen as he demonstrates them, like shooting a zombie twice to ensure it is dead (Rule 2: Double Tap). In other words, “Zombieland” is both acknowledging and sending up the clichés typically inherent to such films, a deft balance director Ruben Fleischer strikes throughout.

A flashback to his Columbus’s pre-Zombieland life shows him as a gamer recluse, and when he lets in a panicked female only for her to be revealed as a zombie, the Meet Cute cum Self Defense set-up sort of suggests a burgeoning Men’s Rights Activist. That trap, glory hallelujah, is avoided, as it is elsewhere, like with Wichita, (Emma Stone), a con artist in cahoots with her sister Little Rock (Abigail Breslin), who fleece Columbus and his cohort Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson) not once but twice. Columbus, summarized in Eisenberg’s comically courtly air, still chooses to put his trust in her, and when they finally start to fall in love, the movie allows Wichita to be more of the romantic aggressor.

This relationship epitomizes the film’s overriding theme of togetherness which ingeniously does not impede the essential matter of killing zombies but becomes part and parcel to it in more interesting ways. Indeed, if the group is being chased by ravenous freaks, as Columbus puts it, Fleischer boldly diffuses the traditional tension this situation implies, coloring the action scenes more as the strengthening of bonds and, even better, stress relief, most notably in Tallahassee, whose relish for undead-slaying Harrelson plays with an amusing gleam in his eye matching the movie’s. If this is the new world order, he’s just rolling with it, which is sort of lyrical in its own violent way, and offsets the more extreme instances of blood and gore. (A scene where they smash up one of those interstate Indian trading outposts doesn’t feel insensitive but like the logical end point to Manifest Destiny.)

This not just the characters but the movie itself honoring Rule 11 – Enjoy the Little Things. That’s true of the movie’s celebrated cameo, Bill Murray, playing himself as a guy impersonating a zombie, spiritually tipping a cap to “Shaun of the Dead’s” best scene, explaining how this disguise allows him to “get out and do stuff”, and Enjoying the Little Things proves true of Wichita, too, whose foremost goal is taking her little sister to Pacific Playland on the faraway left coast for a playdate. That playdate culminates the film when Wichita pushes away from Columbus after getting too close, taking Little Rock with her and suddenly severing their proxy family ties.

If it’s merely a way to set herself up for a rescue from Columbus – and Tallahassee – which, sure enough, comes true, Stone alternating throughout the film between exuding smoky charisma, emotional brusqueness, and dry disdain here becomes almost quietly unhinged, which Breslin smartly plays off with an air of dubious Big Sister Knows Best, I Guess, deference. “Zombieland” never shies away from the knowing the ostensible zombie-less paradise of Pacific Playland is just a pipe dream and in these moments Stone leans hard into it, negating any deGrasse-ish Plot Holes Criticism of turning on amusement park lights at night which is sure to attract zombies.

The nigh maniacal look in Stone’s eyes is so convincing that despite having seen this movie several times before, I momentarily let myself think the movie might indulge in her expressive fatalism. That’s not what it does, of course, which isn’t bad, the happy ending here earned and emotionally true. But it’s not as if a night out at the amusement park with the fam won’t make one think they can see the end of the world from the top of the rollercoaster. And that’s what the conclusion of “Zombieland” feels like – a subversive family outing where the family unit threatens to come unglued only to emerge even closer than before.

Movies as Theme Parks Theme Parks as Movies

If I briefly checked out of the Film World to try and let the cacophonous, ahem, discourse surrounding the forthcoming “Joker” film die down a little, I underestimated the never-ending war between cinephiles and the commonalty. Because not only did the “Joker” brouhaha remain at a fever pitch, another Film Twitter tempest kicked up when Grandmaster Marty Scorsese told Empire Magazine that Marvel movies were, ahem, not cinema. “Honestly,” Scorsese said, “the closest I can think of them, as well made as they are, with actors doing the best they can under the circumstances, is theme parks. It isn’t the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being.” Thus begin the great theme park outcry.

I’ve had plenty of mean Marvel commentary on the blog, but it’s mostly connected to their role as unrelenting content producers, setting up a new Studio System as a Studio System of 1, attempting to cast themselves as sole tastemakers of an increasingly closed-off cinematic landscape, preferring to have a conversation within the context of their franchise rather than with the world at large. And anyway, given their increasing dominance and constant opening weekend box office success I’m always hearing so much yapping about, you’d like to think Marvel fans, basically rooting for the Mongol Empire at this point, could just let Marty’s comments roll off their shoulders. But then, Genghis Khan didn’t conquer by just hanging back. And that’s not what I’m here to discuss anyway. I’m also not here to discuss whether Marvel movies are theme parks. Because I’m just sick of it, okay, I’m just absolutely sick of it. And that is why I’m here to discuss theme parks becoming movies.

Now I’m not talking about, say, the Griswolds going to Six Flags, “Beverly Hills Cop 3” taking Axel Foley to Paramount’s Great America or even “Adventureland”, which was filmed at Kennywood Park in Pennsylvania, sadly, and not in my old Central Iowa home at Altoona’s Adventureland, because these movies are tacking original narratives around amusement parks. What I’m talking about here is more like when I’d hop the Sky Ride at Altoona’s Adventureland and soar over the park in a gondola dreaming of an action movie taking place almost entirely on the Sky Ride (a non-existent precursor to “Frozen”), ending, perhaps, with a plunge into the Raging River.

There have, of course, been movies based on theme park rides, like 2003’s “The Haunted Mansion” and 2004’s “Pirates of the Caribbean.” The latter, you might recall, was, in a rare convergence, at once properly rated, overrated and underrated; properly rated because of Johnny Depp’s performance, overrated because the rest of the movie (beg your forgiveness, Keira!) did not match Johnny Depp’s performance and underrated because Johnny Depp’s subsequent turns in subsequent sequels, never mind Depp’s real-life turn into abhorrent burlesque, have caused the supreme quality of that original performance to egregiously, irrationally lose some luster. But I’m getting distracted. And the point is, we want to go above and beyond movies as mere theme park rides.

We don’t just want, say, Richard Linklater making a movie about the world’s largest lazy river at BSR Cable Park in Waco, Texas where, I dunno, like, Jenny Slate and Natasha Lyonne float along and encounter eccentrics, even though we really, really want that too, just as a sweeping epic about conceiving and constructing The Matterhorn Bobsleds might make for a solid helping of Oscar bait but does not go far enough for our purposes. (Btw, I can’t wait for the Indiana Jones movie that isn’t based on actual Indiana Jones movies but on Walt Disney World’s Indiana Jones™ Epic Stunt Spectacular! which would be an Epic through the looking-glass moment.)

No, I’m thinking something more along the lines of Mt. Olympus Water & Theme Park in the Wisconsin Dells, a resort based, as the name implies, on Greek mythology with its Hermes Swing and Cyclops Rollercoaster. I’d like to think we could somehow use this theme park to convey a theme of consumer culture being our own mythology, or something, but, then again, that sounds an awful like cinema. Ack! Cooties!

In the invaluable Bryan Curtis’s piece at Grantland (rip) about the father of America’s Water Park, he writes “Waterslide designers compete in a parallel-universe version of The Right Stuff, vying for height and speed records because — this can be the only reason — it seems like a really awesome thing to do.” Well, that sounds like something. That, or perhaps we take Orlando’s since shuttered Wet ’n Wild, home of a wave pool called Surf Lagoon, also cited by Curtis, and have the wave pool go rogue and transform Wet ’n Wild into The Poseideon Adventure? Is that possible? I’m not sure. We’ll have some people set up the typewriter, see what comes out.

While we’re working that, though, what about Yellowstone Bear World? Up there in Idaho? Did you see the entrance sign to this place? That’s a “Jurassic Park” just waiting to happen!

If the Bear Lobby, however, takes umbrage, fear not. Have you heard about this upcoming NPR Dolly Parton podcast, Dolly Parton’s America? “In this intensely divided moment,” NPR explains “one of the few things everyone still seems to agree on is Dolly Parton—but why? That simple question leads to a deeply personal, historical, and musical rethinking of one of America's great icons.” It sounds excellent! But it also sounds a bit, uh, shall we say, erudite. So let’s make Dollywood about a magical journey to find Parton, like “The Wizard of Oz.” Except Dolly can’t be a fraud. Hmmmmm. Maybe then we’ll make it like a Muppet movie where some true blue baddies have taken over Dollywood and are trying to bleed it dry and some good-natured folks have to find Dolly and rise up to help save her theme park.

If Dolly doesn’t sign off, though, where does that leave us? I’ll tell you where. In Bruce Springsteen’s recent autobiography, as well as in Steven Van Zandt’s memoir, the two E Street cohorts tell the story of trying to visit Disneyland and not being allowed entrance because of their bandanas. “Silently, morosely, we drive back to Los Angeles and for two solid hours,” writes Bruce Springsteen, “Steve pours it on. The Constitution! The Bill of Rights! Fucking dress codes! Nazis!” Where am I going with this? I think I forgot.

Forget it. I’m with Steve. I’m calling the whole thing off. The blog is back and I’m still in a bad mood. Let’s burn theme parks to the fucking ground.

My Favorite College Football Games: Game 7

November 10, 2012: Texas A&M - 29 Alabama - 24

Keith Richards once observed that rock ‘n’ Roll is music for the neck downwards, evoking something innately physical rather than intellectual, which is why it’s humorous that multi-National Championship winning Alabama coach Nick Saban is frequently cited as a Rolling Stones devotee, as he was in Alan Siegel’s piece for The Ringer earlier this summer. After all, Saban’s success is built on the back of his so-called Process, a kind of lifestyle psychology stew of focus and preparation, which is more Airport Marriott conference than Rock ‘n’ Roll. But if Saban describes even the libertine Stones through the banal vernacular of coach speak, proclaiming their “exceptional ability to deal with success and maintain a high standard of how they do things”, he occasionally flouts his intentional vagaries, astonishingly admitting of “Gimme Shelter”, his preferred post-victory tune, “if you’re digging for purpose, I can’t really give it.”

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What’s remarkable about the single best college football play of the twenty-tens is what precipitates it – that is, Texas A&M quarterback Johnny Manziel, on a third down and goal from the ten-yard line, against undefeated and top-ranked Alabama in 2012, standing in the shotgun and then looking to the sideline where, the coaches having examined the defense on his behalf, signal in a change of play. This is modern college football’s preeminent recurring image – eleven players turned toward the sideline, like video game characters waiting to receive their command. In this case, however, Manziel essentially unplugs himself from Coach Kevin Sumlin’s Matrix when no receivers get open and Manziel’s pocket of protection closes in on him. As it does, Manziel, stepping up, collides with his own lineman, the ball momentarily popping into the air, though Manziel snatches it and then instinctively rolls to his left where the defense has suddenly given way because they think they have him trapped. So does CBS play-by-play man Verne Lundquist. “Got him,” he says with an air of finality. And then, “No, they didn’t!” And Manziel side-arms a touchdown to Ryan Swope who has come wide open in the end zone from the sudden burst of awe-inspiring confusion. A year later, after the infamous Kick Six, in which Auburn returned Alabama’s missed try at a game-winning field goal 100 yards to win instead, cameras caught Saban mouthing “I told you that would happen” through his headset to the assistant coaches, suggesting the Process foresaw all outcomes, even the worst one. After Manziel’s play, on the other hand, when the camera found him, Saban merely had the look of annoyed incredulity. Sometimes if you’re digging for purpose, you can’t really give it.

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Saban’s Process is essentially risk management, suggesting college football as akin to running an insurance company (Steve Spurrier weeps), an aversion with roots in Woody Hayes’s old crotchety line about three things can happen when you pass and two of them are bad. If it portrays Big, Tough Football Men as Scaredy Cats, it also suggests how football, which can appear so chaotic in the scrum of 22 players, as mere exertion of coaching control, like how Mario Verduzco, quarterback coach of my beloved Nebraska Cornhuskers, subjects his, ahem, student-athletes to 700 question tests meant to account for every possible on-field situation. I imagine Manziel being given this test and then showing up at Verduzco’s door to explain he’s not taking it, a la goalie Jim Craig of the 1980 U.S. Olympic Hockey Team to Coach Herb Brooks. No rehearsal could account for Manziel, which is why even when Alabama ground its way back from a 20-0 deficit, the outcome of that 2012 tilt felt inevitable in Manziel’s improvisation, like watching the reverse of Deep Blue make Kasparov go batty, an antidote to Saban’s Process in spirit as much as (non) strategy. That’s not to say Manziel was drawing plays up in the dirt, of course, but that his coaches smartly crafted a system around his unique penchant for what the esteemed Charlie Pierce deemed “real-time audibles”, just sort of making it up as he went along. And in a sport increasingly more about factions of angry old men in khakis conducting war games, that’s a virtue to remember and encourage – to play college football from the neck downwards.

My Favorite College Football Games: Game 6

October 19, 1985: Iowa - 12  Michigan - 10

In the 1980s, my native state of Iowa was mired in the Farm Crisis. That’s why in the eighth game of their 1985 season, the Iowa Hawkeye football team slapped decals on their helmets bearing the acronym ANF (America Needs Farmers), demonstrating that they haven’t been sticking to sports since the mid-80s, right there on their helmet. But if Iowa was suffering, it was also rejoicing, as for 5 glorious weeks that autumn the ’85 Hawkeyes ascended to #1 in the polls. There might have been better football teams to come out of the state before or after, I don’t know, after all, this team, despite winning the Big 10, lost twice, including the infamous Rose Bowl debacle. But there has never been a cooler football team from the state of Iowa than the ’85 Hawkeyes. And their rock star air, understand, ultimately rendered those losses meaningless. (True to rock star form, they were also breaking rules, with both running back Ronnie Harmon, who we’ll get to, and defensive back Devon Mitchell taking money from agents. I note this with love.)

It wasn’t simply that Iowa ran a pass-heavy offense in a conference long defined by former Ohio State Coach Woody Hayes’s grim Three Yards and a Cloud of Dust mantra, but that Iowa’s overall aesthetic ran counter to the Big 10’s stodgy values, illuminated in how Coach Hayden Fry had his team dance the Hokey Pokey in the locker room after wins (I imagine Hayes viewed dancing as a mortal sin), never mind the bright white pants Fry wore on the sideline and the black leather pants Harmon wore off it. Ah Harmon, whose angular, stop-start, fast-in-slow-motion running style was so captivating I mimicked it in my front yard, while the way he held the ball, out away from his body, became a virtual extension of his leather pants and wraparound sunglasses to boot; if it flouted football fundamentals, it just ineffably, manifestly, undeniably looked RAD. All-American Quarterback Chuck Long, meanwhile, had a perm and a one-million-dollar insurance policy on his body in case of injury, the latter annoying the reigning dinosaur of the 80s Big 10, Bo Shembechler, and his ostensible tough guy values so much that he groused about it out loud. Incidentally, it was Schembechler’s Wolverines who played the Hawkeyes in the sport’s biggest game of 1985, #1 (Iowa) v #2 (Michigan), so big that Iowa’s Kinnick Stadium, in an era when there were few night games because so few were nationally televised, trucked in portable lights to accomodate CBS’s primo mid-day kickoff.

The weather, an overcast Iowa autumn afternoon, the kind that restores my spirit the way a blue-skied summer afternoon restores everyone else’s, yielded a defensive struggle where points were precious even as Iowa maintained most of the ball possession simply through Harmon hunting and pecking the Wolverine D to death. (Seriously, in rewatching large swaths of this game recently, I was enthralled in just watching Harmon run. Grainy footage be damned, his style still translates.) And if the Hawkeyes were robbed, as any Hawkeye fan advise, of a touchdown in the 2nd quarter on a missed call, that was mere cosmic intervention to allow Rob Houghtlin to kick the field goal as time expired to win 12-10 to send the entire state into stratospheric jubilation, the crowd storming the field, semi-illuminated by the eerie glow of those makeshift stadium lights. And if from one perspective it looked kind of like a theatre stage with a few bulbs burned out, I remember thinking my native state had never shined so bright.