On Holiday

Bar Is Closed

It was reported yesterday that the sequel to “Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One,” slated for release next summer in 2024, is now being delayed to summer 2025. This would seem to stem at least in part from the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike, which this blog very much supports. If the next M:I needs to get pushed to the summer of the Brisbane Olympics in 2032 so SAG-AFTRA’s siege of the shareholders ends in victory, I’m all for it. Still, as I have written before, few event movies anymore feel that way to me, but the McQuarrie “Missions Impossible” do. I felt so excited walking to my neighborhood theater to see “Dead Reckoning Part One” this past July. I even waited until Sunday to see it to give myself a few extra days of anticipation. Plus, Tom Cruise could well be breaking into a submerged submarine in the new one just as I have always dreamed! I need to know! Even more than all that, though, well, I mean, like, you know, next year is 2024. That means it’s the American Presidential election. That means I have to wait to see “Dead Reckoning Part Two” until after the American Presidential election. I was counting on this movie to help get me through, man! Even worse, with the way things are going these days, and if the philistines get back in office, you never know, we might not see it at all. 

Some Drivel On...Baseball

Meet this year’s Major League Baseball playoffs, the same as last year’s Major League Baseball playoffs. In 2022, the 111-win Los Angeles Dodgers and 101-win Atlanta Braves were eliminated from the postseason by teams with inferior records who only qualified as wildcards. in 2023, the 100-win Los Angeles Dodgers and 104-win Atlanta Braves and 101-win Baltimore Orioles were all eliminated from the postseason by teams with inferior records who only qualified as wildcards. If once upon a time, the Dodgers and Braves and Orioles and Astros might have met in respective best-of-seven series to determine who won the pennant and advanced to the World Series, MLB’s decision to remake the game with three divisions rather than one and thus add a single wild card team to a 4-team playoff put us on the road to where we are now. That is, a 12-team playoff with 6 wild cards, transforming the hallowed Fall Classic from a certification of regular season results, so to speak, into the finale of the MLB October Jamboree.

The reasons for this are clear. TV revenue, of course, which is as much the Spirit of the Game as anything these days, and TV revenue correlates directly to entertainment. “Are you not entertained?” Joe Posnanski asked of this new playoff format on his blog without necessarily criticizing that format even as his repurposing of the famous “Gladiator” quote made clear the format’s point. Really, it’s March Madness for baseball, and who wouldn’t want that? March Madness is fun! But then, the NCAA Men’s and Women’s Division I Basketball Tournaments are manifestly not designed to determine the best teams over the course of a four-month season but, merely, reveal which teams are left standing at the end of a three-week tournament. “Purdue’s the heavy preseason favorite,” went a recent laugh out loud Athletic headline, “but postseason is the real question,” virtually betraying college basketball’s entire four-month regular season as preliminary. But baseball, as Posnanski has written elsewhere, “is America’s only every-day game.” “Each inning of baseball's slow, searching time span,” Roger Angell wrote famously in The Interior Stadium, “each game of its long season is essential to the disclosure of its truths.”

Now you could interpret Angell’s encapsulation as David Roth did for Defector in attempting to put the gatekeepers in their place, that “the randomness built into the game…the weird hops and hot streaks and fluke caroms” essentially epitomize what baseball turns into in the month of October. “The regular season is the orderly part, October is the opposite; both are important, and the story of the season would not be complete without either,” Roth writes. It is not dissimilar to the argument mounted by Robert O’Connell for The Atlantic, that “After the slowness of the summer, (the wildcard) reintroduces everyone to the craziness of the fall. Time quickens; desperation festers.” O’Connell, though, is more apt to admit the contrived nature of the current playoff system, which Roth elides, never mentioning that for well over 100 years of its existence, the baseball season was in so many ways an “anticlimax,” to borrow another Posnanski word. In fact, in The Interior Stadium, Angell essentially proffers the same argument as Roth, though he notes how such manic swings and terrible reversals are built into the game itself regardless of postseason or regular season, the two closer in spirit than all this radical restructuring would otherwise suggest. 

Indeed, I am not necessarily arguing against baseball’s postseason as it has come to exist so much as I am explaining how I have come to the realization that what I appreciate most about baseball, nay, why I enjoy it at all has metamorphosed over the years as much as the sport’s playoff format. When I was a kid, only the playoffs really interested me, the regular season too much of a slog. That makes a sort of scientific sense, I suppose, because when you’re younger, your attention span tends to be shorter, and the immediacy of playoff baseball naturally lends itself to hyperactive mindset more than what O’Connell deemed the “drowsy daily pace” of the regular season. In writing about his Opening Day experience as an 11-year-old, when he was convinced one game of his beloved hometown Cleveland club would provide the key to the whole season, Posnanski noted that he was too young “to appreciate the length of a baseball season, the drone of 162 games, the numbing effects of tomorrow after tomorrow.” 

I live in Chicago where the Northside Cubs spent this season locked in a playoff chase while the Southside White Sox spent their season going from bad to worse to miserable. I found the latter more compelling. Maybe that’s because in entering middle age and discovering it’s where life truly becomes a grind, all about metaphorically, if not literally on occasion, putting one foot in front of the other, I have developed a newfound appreciation for the grind of the baseball season, of those numbing effects of tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day, where the old axiom of having something to play for becomes less practical than existential. If every burgeoning baseball player dreams of stepping to the plate in the bottom of the ninth of Game 7 with the bases loaded and two outs, what burgeoning baseball player dreams of rolling out of bed in a Ramada in Kansas City on a Wednesday in September to wrap up a three game road series you’ve already technically lost during a season that long ago went to the birds? Out, out, brief candle!

The Sox began September by losing 4-2, 10-0, 3-2, 12-1, and 7-6 on an end-of-game, bases-loaded balk. If you lost a game on a walk-off balk in October, it would always be remembered. As it was, the unlikely White Sox balk-off was washed away in the daily baseball tide, which means when they won 6-4 the following day, it wasn’t about redemption. It wasn’t even rememberable; I don’t remember anything about it right now. Like so many of the days of our lives, it was not a game to be remembered, just lived and then forgotten.

Some Emerald Drivel On...Runaway Jury

Released this week in October 2003, “Runaway Jury” was the last John Grisham legal thriller adapted for the big screen. Recent laments regarding the demise of the subgenre tend to blame the comic book monolith. That, however, was a good way off in 2003, and I wonder if just a few months after America had been lied into a forever war through false evidence and trumped-up testimony, we were all weary of what The New York Times’ Elvis Mitchell dismissed as Grisham’s “tired morality.” Yet, while that plagued the author’s work, as did a lack of “guts for real debate,” to quote Peter Travers’s own withering assessment of the same movie, Grisham movies were made in the image of all that sweat Joel Schumacher deployed in “A Time to Kill,” not serious drama but pulp. And it’s why “Runaway Jury” always played to me not merely like a conclusion of the subgenre but a culmination. Director Gary Fleder might well have been a hack, as Salon’s Charles Taylor pooh-poohed him, but I’m not sure who else you’d want at the wheel of this movie then a craftsperson. Ty Burr of the Boston Globe deemed “Runaway Jury” the cinematic equivalent of a beach novel, though I prefer the term Barcalounger cinema, to borrow a word of movie’s, made to wash over you from the comfort of a recliner, the ultimate modern middling thriller.

The set-up to “Runaway Jury,” as Manohla Dargis wrote for the LA Times, is a “fiendishly smart way to stack the decks,” not so much introducing us to Dylan McDermott’s stockbroker as allowing us to bask in his angelic presence so that when he is killed in a mass shooting, it comes across as the ultimate sin, the accompanying videos of his child’s birthday party rendering Fleder as something akin to the movie’s prosecuting attorney. In fact, we never see this stockbroker’s widow (Joanna Going) without her own attorney present, which is to say in the same scene with her, evoking how we are never allowed to know who she is even as she files suit against the fictional gun manufacturer responsible for the weapon in her husband’s death. No, given that the book is about cigarettes and the movie about guns, it only underlines how the subject itself is less the point than the idea of a jury trial in the first place, “the perils,” writes Dargis, “of leaving the law in the hands of the people,” epitomized in Rankin Fitch (Gene Hackman), a jury consultant brought in by the defense to rig the tribunal in their client’s favor.

Fitch is first seen in the back of a taxi in a series of tightly cropped shots that don’t let us get a good look at him, as if he’s an apparition, and eventually standing before a big bank of monitors, Beelzebub as Big Brother and able to summon each prospective juror’s entire personal history with a virtual snap of his fingers. He reduces all his ostensible peers to stereotypes just as the movie inadvertently (brilliantly?) does too, leaning on people like Nora Dunn, Luis Guzmán, Bill Nunn, Rusty Schwimmer, and Jennifer Beals to represent themselves. The wildcard jury member proves to be Nicholas Easter (John Cusack) who in tandem with his girlfriend Marlee (Rachel Weisz) claim they can swing the verdict toward either Fitch and the defense or the prosecuting attorney Wendell Rohr (Dustin Hoffman), whoever pays them more, though this extortion masks deeper ulterior motives both personal and political.

This means the case plays out less in court than in so many spiritual backrooms, suggesting a modern paranoid thriller in which one of the foundations of our free and fair democracy is unmasked as not so free and not so fair, the will of the people ripe for manipulation by the highest bidder. Despite a plot that is generally to the contrary, however, the four-person screenplay still pledges callow allegiance to the law, and despite one line of dialogue near the end trying to escape the corner it has painted itself into, accidentally evoking the trial by jury system as bunk. Given this muddled point-of-view, then Fleder steals a march, “crack(ing) the whip,” as David Edelstein noted for Slate, by lighting the fires and rendering the movie in the manner of his darting, dipping camera. And though such a relentless pace means some story points drop by the wayside, like Jeremy Piven’s jury consultant for the good guys, the trade of momentum in place of meaning works well enough, “a patina of noir,” per Dargis, “by way of a luxury-car commercial.”

A luxury car like, say, Jaguar, selling The Art of Performance for 89 years running, and which “Runaway Jury” does too. The cast is more top-heavy than “A Time to Kill,” and though no one gives a truly indelible turn, either dramatically or melodramatically, no one is phoning it in, all professionally present, Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band playing Albany, say, instead of East Rutherford, New Jersey. Though the script lets him down in this regard, sanding away some edges, Cusack comes closest to a three-dimensional turn, mischievously playing both to and against his innate likeability. Her character isn’t a femme fatale, but Weisz exudes some of those characteristics, nonetheless, as Marlee cockily keeps Rohr and Fitch on a leash. Bruce McGill should be in everything, which is why it’s nice to see him in “Runaway Jury” as the presiding judge, who the wily vet plays as the butt of the joke without knowing he’s the butt of the joke. Rohr is sort of the butt of the joke, too, and though the movie doesn’t always know it, Hoffman mostly does, his hammy tendencies here helping rather than distracting by helping emphasize the desperation of a naïve man lashing out at a rigged system he wants to believe is fair.

Part of the movie’s pre-release appeal was that Hoffman and Hackman, longtime friends, and one-time roommates, were finally appearing in a movie together, and is why they are given a scene not in the book, a courtroom lavatory confrontation. Theirs, though, is not as forceful as the one between Hackman and Weisz, a palpable physical menace in the air even as she maintains a playful edge before, right at the end, letting through this incredible whoosh of vulnerability.  It’s not vulnerability that Hackman creates in his part so much as “pro forma villainy,” to quote Dargis, though she does not really mean it as a criticism and neither do I. That’s what the role requires, evil exuberance rather than depth, though in his penultimate part, Hackman never goes too far even as he brings all sorts of delightful actorly flourish. Trials,” says Fitch, “are too important to be left up to juries,” a gauche line made for trailers that Hackman sells by the way he has his character sell it, the little expectant chuckle at the end, willing his employers to laugh, making it sound like his catchphrase. If you close your eyes, you can picture him delivering it in some cable TV commercial, one you might wake up to after dozing off, washing over you from the comfort of your Barcalounger. 

The Ultimate Movie Star Advertisement

Among its many virtues, Sofia Coppola’s “Lost in Translation” (2003) comically exemplified not just the soul-sucking experience of a movie star shooting a commercial but how commercials take the shine off the movie star shooting it, as it did fictional American movie star Bob Harris (Bill Murray). You can be the most famous actor in the world, but when you’re shilling, you’re shilling, can’t get around it, reduced to the humiliating totem of some corporation. That’s why, as “Lost in Translation” knew, so many American movie stars choose to do their ad work overseas, where the humiliation can’t be seen in their home country. Or couldn’t be seen in their home country, anyway, until the advent of YouTube, which Harrison Ford probably wasn’t counting on during all those old Kirin Beer spots. This post is specifically about movie stars, yes, but before movies took over my life, nobody was cooler to my youthful Olympics-addled brain in the late 80s and early 90s than American Athletics superstar Carl Lewis. And while his ad for Coffee Pokka does not completely diminish all those Gold Medals and 28 inch long jumps, it doesn’t help.

Those T-Mobile ads airing right now where John Travolta recreates “Grease” alongside Zach Braff and Donald Faison for T-Mobile don’t help either; they merely remind you how much the actor’s star has already dimmed (again). Matthew Broderick taking a Ferris Bueller-ish day off for Honda in 2012 relegated his once larger-than-life character to something more adult, which is to say more parental, which is to say something squarer, like Jason Sudeikis in “Booksmart” asking, cluelessly, “Was that Cardi B?” Karl Malden repurposed his plainspoken persona for those long-running American Express ads with the omnipresent catchphrase in the name of fearmongering, if Columbo had become a F*x N*ws commentator. In some weird way, those AMC movie ads have been a boon to Nicole Kidman, at least where meme culture is concerned. But memes, in which imitation and repetition is the thing, are antithetical to the singular notion of the Movie Star. Matthew McConaughey’s Twenty-Ten spots for Lincoln played like stone-faced parodies while James Garner going to bat for Mazda in the 80s mostly became an accidental reflection of David Leisure becoming Joe Isuzu that same decade.

Come to think of it, Leisure put into perspective how utilizing comic actors rather than Movie Stars has long been the likeliest winning ad strategy, with Leslie Nielson and John Cleese doing crack work, respectively, for Coors and Magnavox (see above) back in the day. In our postmodern present, then, some Movie Stars have tried duplicating that comedic strategy, whether it’s Melissa McCarthy’s light-hearted spots for Booking.com or Ben Affleck’s more meta bits for Dunkin’, though like so many, these effect a try-hard strain. Burt Reynolds tried way too hard in making fun of his divorce from Loni Anderson while getting paid by Quaker State back in the 90s, cringy meta. Jeff Goldblum’s bits for Apartments.com as a tech tycoon Brad Bellflower barely effect anything, impossibly managing to throw cold water on the actor’s unique energy. Andy Samberg appearing in all these ads for Corona (along with Snoop Dogg and now Eli Manning too) work best to remind us that all Corona ever needed was that one palm tree decorated for the holidays. 

Some dramatic actors have found a way around the negating power of advertisements by only lending vocals, a la Sam Elliott for The Beef Industry Council and Gene Hackman for United Airlines, their commanding voices giving each spot’s tagline surprising heft, echoing the accompanying Aaron Copland’s “Rodeo” and Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” respectively, rather than being overwhelmed by them. Could Orson Welles have managed such a trick had they kept him offscreen way back when for Paul Masson wine? We’ll never know. 

Keira Knightley’s ads for Chanel honored her Movie Star quality, a la Daniel Craig dancing for Belvedere Vodka, but those where essentially short films, cheats, in other words. No, reproducing that cinematic je ne sais quoi in 30 seconds or less, that’s the true test. Wilford Brimley was a perfect match for Quaker Oats, though his unassuming air always ran counter to the room-filling sensation of movie stardom, not unlike Jennifer Garner, really, who has managed to survive all these spots for Capital One for so long because her best Movie Star quality is an un-Movie Star-like affability. 

George Clooney’s Nespresso ads never compromise his innate magnetism even as they tend toward comedy, making splendid use of his penchant for droll facial expressions, one of the few successes of the genre. (In his more recent commercial work for Casamigos Tequila, on the other hand, Clooney is trying way too hard to appear as one of the guys, though that might be a product of him being a founder, knowing he has to sell it and working too hard at it.) James Coburn succeeded for Schlitz in the 70s in commercials that were kinda comedy bits, though Coburn played them less straight than unaffected, in his wholly committed but insouciant vibe presaging the celebrated Most Interesting Man in the World ad campaign of Dos Equis by a few decades. But no Movie Star – and here, now, finally we reach our point – has ever managed to maintain his or her Movie Star allure while pitching a product more than Penélope Cruz for Emirates.  

Every time in the last few weeks that I have seen this commercial, during every college football game, and every baseball playoff game, and every Real Housewives of Salt Lake episode, I have gasped. Every single time. These days may well be the strangest of my semi-long life, and I submit as Exhibit QXY-102 the above advertisement. Because the above advertisement more skillfully conveys the majesty of the Movie Star than most, nay, virtually all modern movies. It was directed by Robert Stromberg, who also directed Angelina Jolie’s “Maleficent,” suggesting he knows his way around a Movie Star, and in the above advertisement, all he and Pé require to maximize her Movie Star wattage is sixteen seconds and three shots.

In the first shot, Cruz beckons us into her private cabin aboard the Emirates airliner, allowing us to share this small space with her, at once rendering her Movie Star quality more intimate and more luminous. In the next shot, we are in the cabin with her, looking at her in repose in a medium shot, and though she is elegantly dressed and impeccably coiffed (that goes without saying), Cruz’s air is casual, relaxed, making us feel like we belong there too. Even so, the light pouring through the windows, like that scene in “The Irishman,” still gives her a tinge of the ethereal, which comes fully into focus when it cuts to the signature Movie Star shot, a close-up, overwhelming us. And if for her other myriad Emirates spots, Cruz is doing something, texting, watching fútbol, even showering, by doing nothing here other than basking, the ad becomes about nothing more than us basking in her presence, Emirates and the majesty of Pé becoming one.

Master Gardener

Marking the conclusion to Paul Schrader’s informal trilogy of lonely, haunted men, “Master Gardener” is at once, the strangest, least successful, and yet, on some level, purest Schrader of the bunch. Because this is not just the conclusion to an informal trilogy. Nearing 80, this feels like a true late period film of the meticulous screenwriter and transcendentalist director, a harnessing of all his usual devices and themes, a man journaling at a table, a figurative poking in the eyes of polite society, and an interrogation of his own Calvinist upbringing, but also a movie that feels weirdly, wonderfully, not altogether successfully more unadorned than the previous two. “Master Gardener” does not gather force like “First Reformed” (2017), nor does it elevate to the mystic a la the unexpectedly Buddhist “The Card Counter” (2021), but pulses with something electrically strange nonetheless, this ineffable, inaudible hum suggesting everything on the surface is just for show. That means aside from isolated moments, and a mesmerizing performance by Sigourney Weaver in which she plays malicious with a high handedness that is, honestly, hilarious, nothing in “Master Gardener” feels believable, per se. But Schrader, like it or not, and you might not, has moved past all that, living out the movie’s own pruning metaphor by reducing everything to pure gesture and symbol, almost as if at his age, he has decided there isn’t time for anything else.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Yellow Sky (1948)

William Wellman’s 1948 western “Yellow Sky” is half a good movie. That’s true of many movies, really, though rarely have I seen a half-good movie so exact in its demarcation line between good and bad, literally etched in a character’s face. That character is Stretch Dawson (Gregory Peck), barely breaking a sweat as he and his gang rob a bank to open the film, only to sweat a lot as they are forced to make an escape across the salt flats of Death Valley. “Saves us the trouble of hanging ‘em,” observes one of the cavalrymen giving chase who chooses to let them go. Rather than perish in the desert, however, Stretch and his band of outlaws eventually stumble upon a ghost town. Exhausted and thirsty, barely able to focus their eyes, standing on a derelict main street before a collapsed sign heralding “Yellow Sky, the fastest growing town in the territory,” Wellman’s movie momentarily suggests a proto-acid western, almost dream-like. Or maybe it resembles something closer to western noir, given how Wellman and cinematographer Joseph MacDonald utilize the setting for all manner of shadows, jagged angles and beguiling close-ups (see above) that evince as much tension as the brewing situation itself, one to do with the town’s lone inhabitants, an aged prospector (Robert Arthur) and his daughter Mike (Anne Baxter), sitting on a cache of gold that Stretch and his men determine to take for themselves.

As the race for the gold heats up, and even a group of Apache Indians swarm main street, “Yellow Sky” reverts to a more traditionalist mode. Indeed, Mike’s real name is Constance Mae, and as a photo of a woman in a dress and hat affixed to her wall suggests, there is a struggle here between tomboy and being proper, to quote Alma Burke. The real Pygmalion, though, turns out to be Stretch. Peck isn’t exactly an ugly duckling in his whiskers and bandana, but once he shaves midway through and changes his shirt, the character’s identity changes too, all the more conspicuous given how little Peck modulates his performance. One minute he’s Henry Fonda in “Once Upon a Time in the West,” the next he’s Henry Fonda in “My Darling Clementine,” and by the end, when he’s literally returning the money he stole at the movie’s start, it really did feel like an acid western. Am I dreaming this?

Let's Talk About the Born in the U.S.A. Scene(s) in Air

There’s a scene in the 1984-set “Air,” director Ben Affleck’s retelling of how one Michael Jordan came to be the face of Nike, when the shoe company’s VP of marketing Rob Strasser (Jason Bateman) explains how he has not so much misconstrued the lyrics to one of Bruce Springsteen’s big pop hits of that summer, “Born in the U.S.A,” but never really listened to them at all, assuming the song to be a message of hope, to borrow the 40th President’s distortion, when, in fact, it’s a blistering critique of the land of the free and the home of the brave. It is not the best “Born in the U.S.A.” scene in movie history. No, that remains Michael Moore’s otherwise mediocre “Canadian Bacon,” in which a few overly gung-ho Americans invading Canada (it’s complicated) begin singing the chorus to “Born in the U.S.A.” in celebration…and then realize they don’t know any of the other words. It’s a better scene because it essentially lives out Strasser’s speech, though as a longtime Springsteen fan who has been driven around the bend for years by so many misinterpretations of the song, I appreciate the monologue, nevertheless. Once, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and fed up with the patriotic correctness coursing through American culture, and in a fit of embarrassing self-righteousness, I told some dee jay at some bar who saw fit to play “Born in the U.S.A.” that he wasn’t hearing the song right. I was surprised my friends were still at the table when I returned.

 

 

The dee jay, it should be said, conceded my point vis-a-vis the song’s point only to then explain that given the late 2001 context, he was compelled to play it anyway, which struck me as bizarre, confirming the song’s truth while furthering its misconception. And that’s sort of what “Air” does too, explicitly stating that the song, it’s not about what you think it’s about, and yet, misappropriating the ironic triumphalism by dropping the needle on the song for the triumphant end credits, including one showing how the Jumpman logo, the pinnacle of corporate emblems came to be. In explaining the decision to use the song in that spot, Music Supervisor Andrea von Foerster told Esquire, “Many people do still think of that song as like, ‘Yay, America,’ so it was a nice way to end the story about these underdogs,” which, what? “Everything about the sequence hints at some troubling, unspoken tension between what we’re seeing and what it means,” Adam Nayman summarized for The Ringer, “but not to the point where it actually changes the material’s meaning: It’s irony without teeth, and it wouldn’t know who to bite if it could. The main takeaways from ‘Air’ are that an essentially faceless corporation found a way to humanize itself through a perfectly chosen surrogate superhero, and that the middle-aged dudes who made the pick were visionaries—cool rocking daddies in the U.S.A.” 

Bruce might be the American artist for whom I have the greatest affinity, as I said when my friend Jaime posed that question during her Walt Whitman Bicentennial Shindig a few years ago, but recently, whether he knows (cares) or not, the two of us have been on the outs. He played Wrigley Field not long ago and I didn’t go, didn’t want to go, wasn’t even sad about missing it. The tickets, they were just too much and that exorbitant price pissed me off as it did many other fans. “If there’s any complaints on the way out, you can have your money back,” he said in the aftermath of the uproar, as if that meant anything. I wouldn’t want my money back after having lunch at Le Grand Véfour either, Boss, but the question is, can I afford to have it in the first place? A songwriter who has excelled on putting himself in other people’s shoes, suddenly couldn’t. I know, I know, you can’t fight Ticketmaster. Pearl Jam fought Ticketmaster in the 90s and Ticketmaster won. If they couldn’t win, then what was Bruce supposed to do? I don’t know, at the absolute least, he could have not written all this off to market forces. He could have made some move toward understanding and remedying the fan’s lament, as The Cure’s Robert Smith nobly did. Thinking bigger, if not dreamily outlandish, given that he sets his prices, he could have set his prices as zero, meaning the tickets would have solely been Ticketmaster fees, exerting pressure on the monopoly by starkly putting into perspective its highway robbery. 

It might be unfair to ask an artist, any artist, to charge literally nothing to see them live, but then again, Springsteen sold his entire catalog to Sony in 2021 for what was reported as $500 million. And per a Credit Suisse 2016 wealth report, there are less than 2,500 US citizens with a net worth of $500 million or more. That means Bruce Springsteen, blue collar icon, meets the criteria of the so-called “super-rich.” A super-rich person couldn’t play a few shows for free to say, hey, look at what Ticketmaster is doing to you? In fact, that $500 million deal is why “Born in the U.S.A.” was allowed to appear in “Air” in the first place. When Lee Iacocca came calling in 1986 with an offer of $12 million to recast Springsteen’s protest song as the “Like a Rock” of Chrysler, Bruce could tell the CEO to stuff it because it was his song, literally his recording and his intellectual property. And upon selling his catalog to Sony, he literally gave away his recording and his intellectual property, and if, say, Bank of America wants to license “Born in the U.S.A.,” he has signed away the power to stop them.  

“I guess nobody likes the feeling that they wrote a song and in some way the song is bein’ stolen from them,” Springsteen told Kurt Loder in 1984, “or presented in a fashion they don’t feel they’d want to present it in.” He was talking about bootlegs, but he could have been talking about his music in general, though, of course, once he sold it to Sony, it couldn’t be stolen, just possibly presented in a fashion he might not have wanted it presented in, and part of me hopes when he saw “Born in the U.S.A.” kick in at the end of “Air” that he thought, wait a minute now. I’m being unfairly idealistic, perhaps, especially in a world where streaming has reduced the earnings of musicians to a measly trickle. But Bruce is also one of the few musicians remaining who could absorb that hit, and more than that, one who once opined that the key to adulthood is finding a way to maintain your idealism after your innocence is gone, a sentiment I have carried with me, and that I suppose I had hoped he was still carrying with him too. He frequently puts his music where his mouth is, true, and reliably votes blue, fair enough, but it was gravely disappointing to see that in the one way in which he can make a direct and immediate impact on his own fans, he was content to sit it out, lest his pocketbook take a hit, becoming the very cool rocking daddy he legendarily mocked. It’s funny, in a sad sort of way, that at a time when American unions and workers seem more galvanized than ever, and despite still being in strong enough shape to power his marathon shows, workaday hero Bruce Springsteen has gone soft. 

Air

In “Air,” when Nike sits down to pitch Michael Jordan and his family about being their preeminent brand ambassador, they fire up a highlight video. This video, it is Marketing 101, slick, entertaining, and empty. Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon), the shoe company’s foremost scout for basketball talent, the one who has convinced a reluctant Jordan to take this meeting in the first place, immediately senses Jordan’s family, especially his mother Deloris (Viola Davis), tuning out this video and stops it, much to the chagrin of CEO Phil Knight (Affleck). It’s ironic, given how Affleck doubles as director and yet never senses that his own movie ultimately comes across as slick, entertaining, and empty as that highlight video itself. You see it straight away in an efficient opening credit pop culture nostalgia trip, not even so much setting the scene, though it does, as function like an advertisement for 1984, even as it dazzlingly gives away the game, as if we are seeing the world through “They Live” sunglasses outfit with the wrong prescription. 

Oh, “Air” is a sheer pleasure to watch, don’t get me wrong here, just as the commercialist and jingoist 1984 Los Angeles Summer Olympics were a sheer pleasure to watch. The Olympics comparison is apt. Despite the geopolitics and Hollywood machinations, Affleck’s Oscar-winning “Argo” was structured very much like a sports movie, designed to elicit similar weepy uplift, and so it makes sense that Affleck would be so in his wheelhouse on “Air.” This is an underdog story with a sports shoe rather than a sports team, evoked in one two-faced image where a glowing neon Nike sign is framed to look an awful lot like the picture of the Hickory Huskers above the gymnasium door at the end of “Hoosiers.” Indeed, Nike might be named for the Greek goddess of victory but in 1984, it lagged far behind its competitors, an anomaly in Oregon fronted by a nouveau hippie like Knight, sans a cutthroat competitive edge which is what Sonny gives it, introduced as both a gambler and a student of game tape, who sees the young Jordan for the cutthroat competitor he is and is determined to risk it all on him, just as Jordan’s mother Deloris (Viola Davis) is determined to shift the business paradigm. 

This three-pronged narrative structure goes a long way toward giving “Air” so much juice, ensuring there is always a new angle to play and meaning the movie never lags, moving forward at a pace that is not quite frenetic but just fast enough, underlined in how major characters are often introduced with intertitles, keeping us firmly committed to the narrative treadmill. And though “Air” is sculpted almost exclusively out of conversations, writer Alex Convery renders inside baseball with wit and comedy, often solid throwaway jokes, like a James Worthy-level one about Kurt Rambis. During the more business-y dialogue, meanwhile, Affleck keeps his camera roaming and quivering and editor William Goldenberg crisply cuts them, refusing to let us get bored, while for more emotional and personal moments, the camera and the cutting calms down, letting us truly absorb it. Scene after scene, and transition after transition, meanwhile, are marked by pop hits of the era, so much so that the movie has the feel of a jukebox musical, one more tune to keep you engaged (“I know that song!”), even if the curation, like Run-D.M.C.’s “My Adidas” when the action briefly segues to Adidas headquarters sometimes skews bleatingly obvious.

In the manner of “Air” itself, Damon’s turn both does and does not work. He evinces a love for the game that helps evince a love for his work, resulting in a likable presence that helps carry us through, even though, well, there’s just enough dirt under those figurative fingernails. He has several phone scenes with Jordan’s agent David Falk (Chris Messina), so single-focused and unlikable that the character himself says he’s destined to end up alone. Sonny, however, is portrayed the exact same way, an irony neither Damon nor the movie itself ever grasps, an incredible oversight that inadvertently exposes an overall lack of dimension preventing “Air” from finding another gear. Affleck fares better as Knight, playing an eccentric, perhaps, but also a sort of unlikely and, in turn, stressed out CEO who never feels exactly like a business genius, more like an eccentric in over his head, who in some ways knows it, and in other ways doesn’t. And while Dolores Jordan has far less characterization, Davis’s turn fills out the role anyway, simultaneously caring and commanding, effusing parental protection and control, split right down the middle. 

All these conference table dramatics suggest “Moneyball,” and while there are distinct similarities, despite the fudging of some real-life details and hints of hagiography in its presentation of mastermind Billy Beane, there was also shading to Beane, in the way the character was written and not just in how Brad Pitt played him, anguish and regret. Even more, there was tension in the plot, between science and romance, between business and romance. Such tension is weirdly absent in “Air,” rendering the whole movie [frantically searching Thesaurus for synonym of airless] insubstantial. Part of this stems from Affleck’s own hagiographic insistence on essentially making Jordan invisible onscreen (occasionally seen more than played by Damian Young), preferring to let his admittedly massive place in the culture do the work for him. The impulse is understandable, but in doing so, it makes what we already know paramount, turning Sonny and Deloris into prophets, negating so much drama and depth. Even then, however, Affleck might have made it work with a more expressionistic sensibility. Alas, that isn’t Affleck’s forte, and just as the shoe itself is mostly kept offscreen, there is no sense of how the shoe became an expression of Jordan, or how Jordan expressed himself through the shoe. Even there, Affleck turns to the historical record, literally tagging his movie with the Be Like Gatorade ad, finally dropping the facade and literally just becoming a commercial.

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Last Run (1971)

The poster for the 1971 thriller “The Last Run” is pretty funny. It deems George C. Scott’s character, Harry Garmes, a one-time driver for the mob, as being “(i)n the tradition of Bogart and Hemingway.” It feels as aspirational as it does desperate, seeking to sell the movie as something it is not, the character of Harry emerging as neither a charismatic cynic in the mold of Bogey nor a raconteur like Papa. No, he’s more akin to the existential heroes of French noir, played with supreme restraint by Scott. When his character gets back into the game for, uh, well, one last run, Scott makes you believe it stems from boredom with his existence as much as a desire for the thrill of the chase, and when he proposes to the girlfriend (Trish Van Devere) of the prison escapee (Tony Musante) he’s transporting to run off with him to the states, he makes you believe it’s less from love than lack of a better idea. He is so downbeat, in fact, that he doesn’t always jibe with director Richard Fleischer’s tone, as the frequently jaunty Jerry Goldsmith goes to show, striving for something closer to a reflection of James Bond, while Fleischer’s tone doesn’t really jibe with the conclusion, one spurred by mammoth convenience and coincidence, would-be fatalism that falls fatally flat. The car chases, so key to a movie all about cars, are often oddly evoked without suspense despite the stakes, more like joyrides, which is what Scott seems to be playing to most of all, a character happiest behind the wheel. It’s why the best sequence is the first one as Harry tends to his car over the opening credits and then takes it for a spin on the Pacific Coast Highway, the wind in his hair, metaphorically seeming to drive into the sunset before the movie even begins.

Adventures in Movie Posters, part 272

You didn’t necessarily need to see the ostensible romantic comedy “Six Days, Seven Nights” in 1998 to know it went bust. No, working in a movie theater that late spring, early summer of 1998, I could see its brewing non-success clear as day in the gargantuan “Six Days, Seven Nights” standee set up in our lobby. Like an old salt who knows when the color of the sky portends inclement weather, that standee predicted rain. It was the air of both Harrison Ford and Anne Heche, betraying the movie’s lack of froth, romantic or otherwise, sight-unseen, and in their holding hands, which looked a little too airbrushed. You didn’t see that standee and think, “Fun!” You saw it and thought, “Are we sure these two like each other?” That came flooding back to me when I stumbled, in an online sort of way, onto the poster for the upcoming “Freelance,” which like so many movies these days, this less-and-less ardent movie blogger didn’t even realize existed.

Thing is, the premise of this comedy/adventure, I sort of like it, an-ex special forces operative (Cena) working as private security for a has-been journalist (Brie) finding themselves in the middle of a coup when she interviews a dictator. “Freelance,” in other words, is “Plane” crossed with “The Lost City,” which is to say, one more spiritual remake of “Romancing the Stone,” even though it can’t be as good because just like air conditioners, rom coms aren’t built to last anymore. But. Like “Six Days, Seven Nights,” hoo boy, I’m getting – wait, what do the kids say? – bad vibes from that poster. I mean, did I say, “The Lost City?” I meant, Photoshop City! Yikes! These two likenesses of John Cena and Alison Brie have just been dropped into some likeness of some tropical locale. I mean, if it’s gonna look fake, why lamely try to make it look real? Just give us the version of a Harlequin book cover. Like “Romancing the Stone!”

Because what even is this? Cena’s expression is defined by a lack of one. If it wasn’t for the gun in his left hand, he could be here to fix the smartphone that is photoshopped into her right hand. (And I guess the smartphone is in her hand in order to denote she’s a journalist? Because this is 2023 and they couldn’t photoshop in a notepad and pen because nobody would know what those were?) They might be in some pool of water, but he’s not even wet, as if he’s not even rescuing her from a lagoon but, like, a wet t-shirt contest at Porky’s in the Everglades. 

What’s more, their facial expressions, his lack of one and her more panicked one, look less like a comedy/adventure and more like something…serious? I mean, it does say right there above the title that Freelance is from the director of “Taken,” an action/thriller. That means it is also from the director of “Peppermint,” and “The Gunman,” humorless both, and “From Paris with Love,” described by the late Roger Ebert as “mostly bang bang and not kiss kiss” which does not bode well for a comedy/adventure.

But the writer of “Freelance,” it turns out, is from the staff of Jimmy Kimmel Live! You’re pairing a Kimmel writer with the director of “Taken?!” What is this, Coverdale/Page?! 

Wait! As if this confounding recipe required one more unlikely ingredient, do you see whose name is also on the poster, getting the boost of the classic “and” credit? Christian Slater! I mean, what?! This could be anything! This could be “Broken Arrow”; this could be “Kuffs”; this could be “Dawn Rider”; this could be Arkansas Dave Rudabaugh at a Sonny Chiba triple feature! NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING!!!

And though I’d be smart to walk away, to paraphrase Pop Culture Conqueror Taylor Swift in my desperate gambit to inject some relevance, here, right at the end, and not see “Freelance” come October 27th, rom coms like this, they’re quicksand.

Let's Remember a Guy

Let’s Remember Some Guys was a series started at (real) Deadspin by David Roth in which he would, to quote the baseball podcast Effectively Wild, “nostalgically recall players from years past, primarily those who are relatively unremarkable.”

As mentioned before on the blog, I have been gradually winding my way through Rob Harvilla’s aptly titled Ringer podcast 60 Songs That Explain the ’90s, since upgraded to 90 Songs That Explain the ’90s, even as it seems like any day now he might up-upgrade to 120 Songs That Explain the ’90s, so many songs, are there, that explain the 1990s. I only just recently made it to Episode 84, dropped all the way back in January, a deep dive into Hootie and the Blowfish’s “Only Wanna Be With You.” As is Harvilla’s pleasingly discursive tendency, he began not by talking about, like, Hootie or the Blowfish or, you know, “Only Wanna Be With You” but by imagining his youth as a series of mid-to-late ’80s Topps Baseball Cards (and one Upper Deck Baseball Card). I am not an exact peer of Harvilla’s, but we are close, and I am familiar with mid-to-late ’80s Topps Baseball Cards too. Indeed, when he cited the wood-grain colored bordering of the 1987 version of Topps, I was overwhelmed by my Pavlovian response, one baseball card in particular immediately springing to mind, so clear in my memory, I felt like I was holding it.

Leon “Bip” Roberts played for six Major League Baseball teams during a 12-year career that spanned from 1986 to 1998, from Buckner to The Maris Sweepstakes, seven teams, though, if you count the San Diego Padres twice, which is where he began his MLB odyssey and then returned in 1994 after a two-year stint with the Cincinnati Reds. (He also played for Kansas City, Cleveland, Detroit, and Oakland.) He was quite successful in the Queen City, turns out, making the All-Star game in 1992, even if to me, in my heart, for all of eternity, Bip Roberts is a San Diego Padre, simply because of that 1987 Topps Card. Not that I saw him play that year. I lived in central Iowa. You didn’t see the Padres play in central Iowa in 1987 unless they made the playoffs and they very much did not, finishing last in the NL West. In fact, I do not recollect seeing him play for anyone, ever, and yet, just as Bip makes an unexpected appearance in the middle of Joe Posnanski’s piece about Derek Jeter becoming Mr. November, so is Bip as integral to my baseball memories as any Hall of Fame titan notwithstanding my never having seen him, a cosmic linchpin, like how I would put mid-’80s DePaul forward Dallas Comegys on my all-time college basketball team (a subject for another post) even though I can’t rightly claim to remember having seen him play. 

This is all because Bip Roberts is the platonic ideal of my favorite baseball player, a switch-hitter who generally batted lead-off, good for base hits more than power, and even better for speed, an excellent base-stealer, and I love stolen bases more than I love home runs, not least because base stealers, a la track & field sprinters, tend to have “a little mustard on (them),” to quote the man himself in a Sports Illustrated preview from his rookie year. And yet unlike some of my other faves in the same vein, centerfielders Jerome Walton and Kenny Lofton, he was short, 5'7", living out that Bip name, which makes me love him a little more, imagining him, in an alternate existence, despite being born in Berkeley, as an option quarterback for the Air Force Academy. 

Of course, it’s also the name. Bip. Bip Roberts. It’s a name for a guy born to help turn the double play and his career .976 fielding percentage bore that out. It’s as good a baseball name as John Kruk, Tom Brunansky, Andrés Galarraga, Chipper Jones, or Ozzie Albies, such a good baseball name that as relief pitcher cut-up Sean Doolittle once cheekily pointed out, a real baseball sabermetric, BABIP, is unwittingly sort of named for him. The origin of his nickname is easily Googleable, and I’m torn as to whether the genesis is fun and sweet or a little disappointing, like how football defensive back Sauce Gardner acquired his moniker, which was definitely not ingesting a whole bottle of Old Bay Hot Sauce before a game in which he had three interceptions. I’ll let you look up the backstory of Bip’s nickname and decide for yourself. No, I’m more fascinated by how there is no entry on the history of his nickname in Wikipedia, suggesting Bip is inextricable from Leon, as William F. Reed’s Sports Illustrated article on the 1992 Reds does, writing that Bip was known among Reds fans as the Bipster, as if Bip is the given name and Bipster the nickname. That’s lucid. Indeed, much like Kamaal Ibn John Fareed has for all intents and purposes settled into the historical record as Q-Tip, nicknamed The Abstract, so has Leon settled as Bip.

In a manner possibly befitting a Bip, he turns out to have a famous baseball card, or maybe just infamous, from the Score 1996 collection in which he is sporting a sombrero, looking toward the camera with eye black and an expression that might make you think the headwear was photoshopped if you didn’t already know it wasn’t. A Sports Illustrated article explains that it happened to be Mexican Heritage Night at the ballpark, and so Bip asked a dancer participating in the festivities if he could borrow their sombrero. There’s a card shop a few blocks from my home, and I suspect if I went in there and asked for the Bip Roberts, they’d pull out the Score 1996, not the Topps 1987, which is what I’d want, that wood paneling framing him as exquisitely as the wood cabinet framed our RCA TV set, evincing an air that evokes insouciant card without the aid of a prop. The previously mentioned Joe Posnanski has written that everyone’s favorite baseball season is the one when they are 10, and as it turns out, it might just be the season of your favorite baseball card too. 

The Adults

The title of Dustin Guy Defa’s “The Adults” taken in conjunction with its premise, prodigal son Eric (Michael Cera) returning to his hometown after a multi-year absence, might sound so hoary as to dismiss it sight-unseen with a wave of your hand. “Let me guess, he is of adult age but not quite an adult.” True, true. Like the opening shot, however, a static one of a basic motel room – bed, chair, desk, window with parking lot view – Defa sees this similarly basic set-up as a virtual stage, an opportunity to transform a familiar concept into something original, as Eric’s one-time dreams of becoming some sort of performer manifest themselves in unexpectedly delightful and revealing ways. After going to brunch with his sisters Rachel (Hannah Gross) and Maggie (Sophia Lillis), the siblings return to their mother’s home, one which Rachel has taken ownership of, and after disinterestedly sipping at some Bloody Marys for a bit, they semi-hesitantly fall into a song and dance routine, all at once hinting at the fun of their youth, foreshadowing the movie’s conclusion, and evoking the idea that, to Eric, all the world’s a stage. 

Maggie has dropped out of college with little idea of what to do now while Rachel has a public radio job and suffers from depression, but the details of Eric’s life are minimal. That is by design. The one thing we learn about him, that he plays poker, often for big money, becomes a virtual extension of not just the poker face he puts up in terms of his own personal identity but his penchant for performance at the poker table itself. Rather than play silently, he talks non-stop, needling and nudging other players, partly as a way to decipher their tendencies and call their bluffs but more from his own aching need for a platform, brought home in one mid-game monologue that concludes with fake tears. He may as well be auditioning as much as he is playing poker. The climactic contest, of sorts, in which another player confronts him afterwards, then becomes so much more, the threat of an unseen gun becoming either a performance that Eric can’t match or a reality he can’t handle. Both, really. 

Eric’s performative mask also takes the form of impressions, like one of the animated sitcom character Marge Simpson, which he calls up when challenged or, in one instance, when he wants to ask real questions of his sister that he can’t quite bring himself to ask in his own voice. It suggests Michael Winterbottom’s “The Trip” series (somewhere, Rob Brydon is still doing celebrity impressions), though imbued with much less comedian flop sweat as Cera has a surer grasp of both the insecurity burbling beneath and the pointed irksomeness, ably assisted in this regard by Gross. Though the one scene we see of her at work is a little too on the nose in conveying her lack of sentimentality, Gross’s turn effects an agreeable bluntness all on its own. In a walk and talk sequence in the woods, a brief look exchanged between Gross and Cera, in her glare and his emotional recoil, the physical space between the two characters becomes supercharged by the gulf of so many unspoken realities between them.

Given that Cera gets the most screen time, and serves as an executive producer, “The Adults” can sometimes feel like his movie, but as that scene between he and Gross suggests, it just as attuned to the crucial sibling relationship. Late in the movie, at a small house party, as the trio converses with another character, when that character suddenly excuses herself, in the air of Cera, Gross, and Lillis and the way Defa positions them, you can feel three people alone in their togetherness and yet all each one of them has. Their bond is finally reaffirmed during an ensuing dance routine, one we do not need to be explicitly told stems from their youth because innately we know that it does, to a song about stepping into the unknown mirroring their own journey, as if upon ending, it draws the curtain on childhood.