My Favorite College Football Games: Game 19

November 19, 2005: USC - 50 Fresno State - 42

Why did the Heisman Trophy become the preeminent individual award in college football? Was it merely a matter of timing, created a couple years before the unheralded Maxwell Award was established to honor the same thing? Or was it for no other reason than the name Heisman is more distinct than the name Maxwell? I like to think the Heisman has maintained its unique status for 90 years because of the trophy itself. Modeled after New York University’s Ed Smith, the bronze bust by Frank Eliscu is instantly recognizable. Certainly, it is far more aesthetically rememberable than the Maxwell, never mind the predictably benign NFL MVP Trophy. Though the game has been thoroughly revolutionized, Smith’s pose, the extended right arm to ward off imaginary defenders while safeguarding the ball in his left, remains the premiere gridiron emblem. The image is so potent that 1991 Heisman winner Desmond Howard famously brought it to life, a mimicry that has itself been mimicked by other winners over the years, including last year’s Colorado star Travis Hunter. In this data-driven age where athletic greatness is considered quantifiable and provable, the Heisman can feel anachronistic, even irrelevant. But the trophy’s modern critics have never quite grasped that it was always more about creating an image, something halfway between measured and myth. 

Initially christened the Downtown Athletic Club Trophy in 1935 after the men-only New York social club that awarded it, the moniker was altered the next year not for real-life John Heisman’s gridiron accomplishments as player or coach but because he had been DAC president. And so, the inaugural Heisman winner was Yale’s Larry Kelley, who would recall that upon receiving the telegram of his victory, “didn’t even know there was such a thing,” betraying its paltry origins. Indeed, Kelley spurned professional football and even Hollywood’s offer of a movie based on his life, suggesting the sport’s often fanciful amateur ideals. That quickly changed. 1938 winner Davey O’Brien would sign with the Philadelphia Eagles, 1940 winner Tom Harmon starred in the autobiographical “Harmon of Michigan” for Columbia Pictures, and 1946 winner Glenn Davis would briefly date Elizabeth Taylor. The Heisman’s prominence grew with the game itself, assuming the aura of a gridiron Academy Award, as Dan Jenkins noted for Sports Illustrated in 1969, writing of a “war…waged as earnestly by campus publicity men and by the 1,371 writers and broadcasters who are eligible to vote as by the players themselves.” That’s why Notre Dame’s Joe Theisman literally changed the pronunciation of his last name in 1971 to rhyme with the statue, and why in Hunter’s first game at Colorado in 2023 his coach Deion Sanders was already promoting him in an on-field interview. The Heisman is something to be sold as much as won.

Even as the Downtown Athletic Club remained the award’s stewards for years, eventually giving way to The Heisman Trophy Trust in 2003, it farmed voting out, and at present, there are 928 voters comprised of 57 former winners, 870 media members, and a single vote based on the result of a fan poll. There are probably 928 complaints about voting tendencies too. Accusations of regional and positional bias as well as favoritism toward the game’s biggest brands have existed in perpetuity. ESPN, which began broadcasting the ceremony in 1994, has been charged with promoting certain players ahead of others, typically those featured on their network. Dreaded preseason Heisman watchlists set expectations and narratives that can persist despite evidence while the sheer number of voters tends to elicit a groupthink-induced feedback loop. The hype can become numbing, as it was with Louisville’s Lamar Jackson in 2016, the foregone winner for so long that by the end, certain media members were trying to gin up prosaic lightweights as alternatives. Winners, meanwhile, are often unjustly judged a second time in accordance with their success in the NFL, or lack of it, like judging an apple’s taste by eating an orange. What do I think should define a Heisman winner? I couldn’t hope to explain it, honestly, but I know a Heisman winner when I see one, and as much as Doug Flutie and Barry Sanders are, Chris Weinke and Mark Ingram are not. Reggie Bush of the University of Southern California? He is definitely a Heisman Trophy winner.

A running back, Reggie Bush’s stats were not especially eye-popping, at least, not in comparison to other winners through the years. But that’s why he was the ultimate epistemological Heisman winner, and which is why he remains the ultimate Heisman winner too. How did we know he deserved to win, and how did we know that we knew it? You knew he deserved to win simply by seeing him play, not least because when you saw him play, you could not quite believe what you were seeing. Yet, even if he won the award in what was deemed by most outlets as a landslide, when USC lost the subsequent national championship-deciding Rose Bowl to Texas and the Heisman runner-up Vince Young, so many prisoners of the moment swapped sides and suggested that Young should have won all along. These short-sighted about-faces amusingly and inadvertently epitomized the frequent Heisman critique that it only goes to the best player on the best team but even worse, implied the award should be results-based rather than a matter of taste. And though Young was impressive in imposing his physical will, Bush frequently reconfigured what was physically possible. In other words, Young was inevitable, but Bush was inconceivable. Give me the latter.

Bush was never as inconceivable as he was that year against Fresno State, an indelible 50-42 seesaw. You knew it would be a wild night at the L.A. Coliseum from the first touchdown which occurred when the ball bounced off the helmet of one Fresno State Bulldog and into the arms of another in the end zone. The Bulldogs were at the apex of their Anybody Anytime Anywhere era, the mantra instilled by coach Pat Hill to demonstrate his proletariat program’s determination to battle any willing blueblood. They knocked off a few but taking down #1 USC, the two-time defending champs riding a 32-game winning streak would have been the crowning accomplishment. The two teams slugged it out with a bevy of big plays, and Fresno State’s sustained excellence provoked Bush to go higher than ever before, ending with 513 all-purpose yards, including 294 on the ground, and scoring two touchdowns, though he set up two more with long runs that came up just short of the end zone, demonstrating power, speed, and agility in equal measure. Yet, for all he did on the night, nothing else, and nothing else in his whole career, compared to his 50-yard touchdown run with barely a minute left in the third quarter.

 

As a game predominantly played with brute force in close quarters, football coaches have since its inception sought ways to manufacture empty space for their fastest players. For all the formational and strategic inventions, however, no grand designs can compete with a player creating that space on all his own, as Heisman winners have done time immemorial, whether it was LSU’s Billy Cannon bulling his way to it, Nebraska’s Johnny Rodgers juking it into existence, or Texas A&M’s Johnny Manziel forging it via his unique gridiron acrobatics. But no Heisman winner ever did what Bush did on November 19, 2005, when he took a handoff, surged up the middle, and followed his blockers to the left where three converging Bulldog defenders essentially guided him out of bounds at about the 25-yard line. Or at least, appeared to guide him out of bounds at about the 25-yard line. Instead, Bush came to a dead stop on the boundary’s edge, if only for a split-second, brought the ball around his back from his left hand to his right and then ran the opposite direction, leaving dumbfounded defenders in his wake while gliding in for the touchdown. Unlike those other plays, it was not so much exhilarating as it was mystifying, a football player scoring a touchdown by pulling a rabbit out of a hat. Reggie Bush did not merely make some space, he reversed the whole damn space time continuum, and in doing so, transmogrified the facts and figures of his stat line into folklore. In other words, it was his Heisman Moment™.  

That no one has ever been more deserving of the Heisman Trophy than Bush made it ironic when he became the first and only winner to vacate his trophy in 2010 after the USC football program was hit with NCAA sanctions directly related to his receiving so-called improper benefits. In lieu of the Heisman Trust retroactively rescinding Bush’s victory, he gave the trophy back of his own quasi-face-saving accord. He broke the NCAA’s Amateurism rules, it was true, and never exactly apologized for doing so, though even a cursory understanding of the NCAA’s formation and invention of the term student-athlete would reveal those rules as one-sided and cynical, and the NCAA never apologized for them either. In fact, they went to the Supreme Court to try and defend them in 2021, getting skunked 9-0. (“The NCAA’s business model would be flatly illegal in almost any other industry in America,” wrote Justice Kavanaugh in his concurring opinion.) The NCAA had sought to make Bush an example, a warning, and it backfired as the argument to return his Heisman marked a tipping point in public perception. Every supposed scandal in the twenty-tens involving a CFB player benefiting from their name, image, and likeness resonated a little less, so that by the time so-called NIL was decreed lawful, it felt preordained. There were other, more influential pioneers in the push for player compensation, like Ed O’Bannon, but in his public pillorying, Bush played an outsized role, nevertheless. He gave up his Heisman so that one day in 2024 he could reclaim it, eating the NCAA’s original sins so they could be cleansed, a fitting emblem of college sports’ great leap forward. 

When you look at it through that light, what Heisman winner’s legacy could possibly compare? 

Some Drivel On...Late-Night Television

“How long they been doing this?” Morty Seinfeld asks his son Jerry upon learning The Tonight Show is taped in the afternoon to be aired at night. “30 years,” Jerry sighs. You understand Morty’s confusion, though. I have never attended a taping of The Tonight Show, or The Late Show, or Late Night, but I imagine the whole thing feeling a little out of place, like watching football in June. (Jimmy Kimmel Live! on ABC has, contrary to its title, also been pre-recorded for years.) When I was a kid, I would sometimes tape Letterman or Conan to the VCR and watch it the next day after school, and while it remained enjoyable, the mood never felt quite right, what with the sun still in the sky and dinner still to be eaten. You wouldn’t tape Good Morning America and watch it at midnight, would you? 

My relationship to late night TV began with Johnny Carson. At first, I didn’t even really watch Johnny Carson, but my parents did, the small color television set in their bedroom flickering the walls with light, the faint sounds of Johnny and his guests and the Doc Severinson Orchestra wafting down the hallway, and I would listen and imagine Burbank, CA as a faraway enchanted kingdom. It was for grown-ups, in other words, not kids, a truth evoked in 8-year-old Kevin McCallister watching The Tonight Show in his parents’ bed in “Home Alone” (1990). But that’s also why paradoxically, and in opposition to modern late night-TV viewing demographics always cited in death of late-night TV pieces, like those in the wake of Stephen Colbert getting the (eventual) axe, I have always associated the genre more with being a kid than an adult.

I only started watching at the tail-end of Carson’s run as the king of late night, meaning the tail-end of the genre as true monoculture, when it was a collective experience essentially limited to one network. Carson’s subsequent retirement in 1992, however, and the ensuing so-called War for Late Night as Jay Leno took over The Tonight Show and David Letterman left for CBS epitomized late-night TV’s fracturing, one that has only grown more pronounced and dire over the years. The bizarre thing, though, is that even when these after-hours variety shows were culturally prevalent, airing in those hours of blackened stillness, when the rest of the house was asleep, it felt like the rest of my small town was asleep too. Unlike, say, the TGIF programming block on ABC, or NBC’s Must See TV, I never felt the whole world watching along with me.

I gradually stopped tuning in to late-night as I aged and learned I was more of a morning person. I still saw Letterman from time to time, or especially the Colbert of Comedy Central’s Colbert Report, but that was in the form of clips and memes disseminated the morning after via the internet and social media. That’s how the world works, adapt or die, etc., but it also suggests that late-night TV isn’t about late at night anymore. The genre is fading away because stars don’t need it to promote their work, and because it costs too much money to produce, and all the other practical reasons that been cited a hundred times over. But when I think of late-night TV, I think of the time on Late Night when Letterman suddenly said apropos of nothing that it was cartwheel time with Regis Philbin and the hardest working man in show business ran in and cartwheeled through the aisles. I cannot, however, find online evidence of this skit. Did I conflate it with something else? Did I imagine it entirely? Either way, it’s a possibly faulty memory that feels apropos of what made it magical. What happened late at night always vanished by morning.

Weapons

“Weapons” has a great hook. Set in a small Pennsylvania town where 17 kids from the same grade school classroom vanish one night without a trace, this mystery is recounted in voiceover by a young girl, initially over nothing but a black screen, imbuing the sensation of a campfire story. Did this really happen? It did, and writer/ director Zach Cregger recounts it through a nonlinear narrative, jumping between fragmented vignettes, each one sharing the title of a character’s name. This proves ironic given how little interest Cregger demonstrates in getting to know who these people are, reducing them to proverbial chess pieces, the performances only able to fill in so much. What’s worse, the most crucial character is the one kid from the class who did not disappear, Alex, played by 9-year-old Cary Christopher. Child performances tend to be sculpted as much by the director, and given Cregger’s lack of interest in character, Christensen is hung out to dry as Alex is rendered a zero. For a while, at least, the disjointed storytelling effectively underlines the confusion and fear gripping the town and provides scattered details intimating at the title’s underlying significance. Yet, as the puzzle of “Weapons” gradually locks into place, all those details are revealed as hollow tricks exposing the whole thing as mere clever artifice. The comedy/horror hybrid of the denouement might have made for something incredible if “Weapons” was ever intended to mean anything at all.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Adieu Philippine (1962)

There’s a great Jonathan Richman song “That Summer Feeling” in which he describes the titular sensation not so much as something real as half-remembered, and something for which we pine in lieu of the present. It’s a nostalgia trap, in other words, that summer feeling, and it can’t help but hold back summer movies to some degree, even the good ones. Maybe the summer movie in question has a linear narrative and no flashbacks and yet, even so, the filmmakers themselves can’t help but be marked by their own past summers, nostalgia seeping into the work, whether they are conscious of it or not, which is why movies struggle to capture summer feelings as they are rather than as we recall them. All except “Adieu, Philippine,” Jacques Rozier’s 1962 directorial debut. It had all manner of difficulties in being produced and released but you wouldn’t know it to watch it, so light does it feel, turning on a love triangle between three French youths - Michel, Liliane, and Juliette. All three are played by non-actors, Jean-Claude Aimini, Yveline Céry, and Stefania Sabatini, respectively, reflecting Rozier’s method for capturing and bottling up the impossible. 

As one of the French New Wave trailblazers, Rozier fuses the genre’s stylistic verve with documentary-like realism, encapsulated in an image of Liliane dancing while looking into the camera. In acknowledging the camera’s presence, she seems to virtually disappear it completely, beckoning us into the movie with her, like a reverse “The Purple Rose of Cairo.” By relying on non-actors and improvisational methods, it’s not only that nothing feels scripted, but nothing feels colored through the lens of looking back, conveying that summer feeling as so many stolen moments and fleeting, fluctuating emotions. In one breathtaking sequence, Lilianne and Juliette promenade down the sidewalk as the camera follows alongside them from what appears to be a moving car. In reacting to the real world, “Adieu, Philippine” literally documents life coming right at them in big unpredictable slices. I can’t stress it enough, this sequence is thrilling, it is absolutely thrilling. 

A title card, however, tells us that “Adieu Philippine” is set in “1960, the sixth year of the Algerian War,” a harsh fact lingering throughout in the form of Michel’s mandatory military service: he must report at summer’s end. And though this would seem to ripe to add dramatic resonance and urgency, it has the opposite effect, emphasizing the ephemerality and frivolity of life. If any war leaves a mark, it’s the generational one. When Michel goes home for dinner, his parents complaining about his carefree lifestyle roll off him like water, and when Lillian’s mother notes she never went out at her daughter’s age, she replies, “You’re from a different generation.” This, however, is a tension that just lies there with no interest in resolution because it cannot be resolved; two differing points-of-view only understood when in each one; youth is only wasted on the young to the old. And when the end of “Adieu Philippine” arrives, it is slow and then all at once, as they say, Michel shipping off to war, though you’d hardly know it, Rozier gaily lingering over the trio waving goodbye. They never even decide who goes with who; it all just dissolves in the air. 

In Memoriam: Terence Stamp

If you believe, as I do, that the movie screen is predominantly a canvas for the human face then few have ever belonged up there more than Terence Stamp. His cockney baritone was distinct, he often had a supercharged presence, but above all else, he had those blue eyes illuminating the celluloid in the dark. And it’s why it made no sense that when he arrived on the scene with guns figuratively blazing in the 60s, earning an Academy Award nomination for supporting actor for his very first role in “Billy Budd” (1962), he virtually disappeared for a time in the 70s. “I remember my agent telling me,” Stamp would explain to The Guardian in 2015, “‘They are looking for a young Terence Stamp.’” Hollywood might be obsessed with age, but age is just a number, and eyes don’t lie. Young, old, middle-age, whatever, Stamp’s star might have waxed and waned in accordance with the industry’s fickle demands, but his eyes never dimmed.

 
When Stamp’s death was announced on Sunday, August 17th, at the age of 87, the film author and journalist Mark Harris took exception with the late actor’s frequent categorization in obits as “Superman” costar. “He was sexier, weirder, darker, so much more interesting than that,” Harris wrote, noting that Stamp’s career contained “Many entry points.” And, well, yeah, sure. Many entry points! And for some of us Gen-Xers, “Superman” was the entry point or “Superman II,” to be more exact, which I would half-watch with a bath towel for a cape while pretending to be the Man of Steel fighting Terence Stamp as General Zod in my basement. Still, I understood what Harris meant. Because even if Stamp’s 1999 revenge fantasy “The Limey” worked whether you knew Stamp’s back catalogue beyond “Superman” or not, it worked so much better when you had a fuller sense of the actor’s history. Because Soderbergh infused the movie with that history (underlined in how it used footage of the younger Stamp in 1967’s Ken Loach film “Poor Cow”), as much about the passage of time and Hollywood itself as revenge, a transcendent thriller as the actor’s culmination, not to mention a close-up laden celebration of his face. 

The real Stamp revelation for me, though, was in 2021, when I finally saw Stephen Frears’s “The Hit” (1984), an existential art film disguised as a thriller, which is pretty much my genre sweet spot. Stamp was Willie Parker, a one-time London gangster who testifies against his old criminal cohorts in court, transforming himself into a marked man. Indeed, a decade later a couple hitmen come for him in the Spanish villa where he’s hiding out to transport him to Paris and bring him face to face with the kingpin he put away for his score-settling execution. Stamp, though, plays with an air of stoic resignation, a man who has spent the last 10 years philosophically preparing for this very moment. When his captors briefly lose track of him, he is found not trying to get away but gazing at a waterfall, hardly bothered by the gun that gets pointed at him as if he exists on some metaphysical plain a bunch of puny bullets could never penetrate. 

Yet, when one hitman eschews waiting to off Willie in Paris and just decides to shoot him on the side of the road, all that reasoned forbearance falls away. “You can’t,” he says, as Stamp’s register switches to a pleading whine, and his heretofore impassive expression to a pitiable wince. “Not now.” Essentially, Stamp pulls the rug out from under his own performance. In the end, everyone is afraid of death. Willie turns and runs, making it just a few steps before getting shot in the back, falling to the ground, dead, of course, and the movie just moves on from him, as the world might.

The Shrouds

If you thought “Drop” had dibs on most horrifying meet cute at the movies in 2025, think again, because here comes David Cronenberg. His silver-haired stand-in Karsh (Vincent Cassel) has founded a company called Grave Tech which is introduced during his blind date with Myrna (Jennifer Dale) at a restaurant he owns which is attached to a cemetery he also owns where each body in each coffin, including his late wife Becca’s, is wrapped in a techno-burial shroud providing a view via encrypted apps and screens on the tombstone of the decomposition of your loved one. “Would you like to see her grave?” Karsh asks his date, cuing up a live look-in of his wife’s remains. “That’s an image of your wife’s decaying body,” Myrna says, understandably asking if she might excuse herself for a cigarette. As she lights one up, she remains in the background of the frame as Karsh deliberately takes a step into the foreground, closer to the camera, closer to his wife’s grave, seeming to forget his blind date is even there. It’s a blackly comic image setting up the movie to come: acknowledging the reality of loss in the most subversive way possible while also seeming to entirely evade acknowledging that reality at all. 

Cronenberg has always had a gift for seamlessly incorporating futuristic technology into mundane worlds that feel very much like the present, but rarely has it felt so acute as “The Shrouds.” We live in a world where it can feel as if anything is accessible via our phones so why shouldn’t the deceased be too? It’s striking how plausible this all feels. And though the dead might be happier dead, as the philosopher Harry Lime once observed, what about the living processing the dead? That’s the question, or at least the primary one, driving “The Shrouds.” Yet, even if Cronenberg is famed for his oft-grisly body horror, it’s important to note this premise seemed to stem at least in part from processing his own wife’s death in 2017, and when Karsh views Becca’s remains, it is presented lovingly, and wistfully. The minimalist design of Karsh’s home might be Japanese inspired, but his stated beliefs on the afterlife are less Buddhist or Shinto than Jewish, the gradual separation of the soul from the body, as if providing a window this otherwise ineffable process.

Through this window, however, Karsh also notices strange nodules that have appeared on his wife’s skull since being buried, like post-death tumors, which are impossible, a doctor explains. Where did they come from? And who is responsible for vandalizing his wife’s grave, as well as other graves in the cemetery? Karsh is on the verge of taking Grave Tech global, as any avaricious entrepreneur would, and the list of potential suspects who might want to spoil these plans, or steal the technology for themselves, is endless. Karsh summons his tech-savvy brother-in-law (Guy Pearce) to help, or former brother-in-law, separated from Becca’s sister, twin sister, that is, Terri, played by Diane Krueger in a dual role, a little Doppelganger dynamic cribbed from “Vertigo” but mixed with a splash of necrophilia. 

In fact, is it a spoiler to tell you that Karsh and Terri consummate this twisted attraction? Even if it is, nothing could prepare you for the conflicting feelings that will flood your body when this scene transpires, a fitting, frightening, riveting evocation of the pervasive confusion that grief can bring. The scene is also evocative of the hysterically morbid style of humor coursing through “The Shrouds,” like Terri’s fetish for conspiracy theories, a macabre manifestation of the kink know-nothings seem to get from the fake news industrial complex. But not every joke has deeper meaning. Cronenberg's patented flat dialogue, for instance, creates the most bizarre laughs in the most delightfully odd ways. “I knew I was in trouble when I coughed up my entire esophagus,” will undoubtedly prove the grim gut-buster of the year. 

“The Shrouds” was originally envisioned as a Netflix series and you can sense it, not just in the procession of twists that no doubt would have concluded one episode to set up the next but in the considerable dialogue spent explaining the twists. Unlike a television series, however, “The Shrouds” is not moving toward any kind of ultimate resolution. The conspiracy theories themselves become one more method for prolonging grief, and as its two-hour runtime wraps up, I thought of another Guy Pearce joint, “Memento,” though rather than a circular puzzle snapping into place, “The Shrouds” seems to suggest that sorrow stretches out into forever. 

Friday's Old Fashioned: Green Ice (1981)

“Green Ice” begins with a gruesome massacre and segues directly into a jaunty meet cute between some sort of vaguely defined idea American man, Joe Wiley (Ryan O’Neal), who ironically has wound up in Mexico for a lack of a better idea and a wealthy American heiress, Lillian Holbrook (Anne Archer), who has also wound up south of the border. It’s evocative of the oddball blend of this 1981 adventure-thriller, one that has a score composed by Rolling Stones bassist Bill Wyman, meaning that at one point we hear “Green Ice’s” attempt at a “Greatest American Hero”-like theme song composed by the man who played bass on “Let It Bleed,” and one in which Joe and Lillian get involved with Colombian revolutionaries while also plotting to steal the emerald diamonds of Lillian’s would-be fiancé Meno Argenti (Omar Sharif) from his ostensibly impenetrable vault. “Green Ice” was directed by Ernest Day, who came to prominence as a cinematographer, which is ironic given how the four-person screenplay based on a novel is overflowing with exposition. Not that I entirely minded. When Argenti explains his security protocols to Joe on a tour of his emerald-holding skyscraper stronghold, Sharif does so with real relish in his words and a gleam in his eye, like he’s daring Joe to try and break in.

Joe does break in, of course, intending to use the loot to help fund the Colombian rebels, and does so via hot air balloon, like “The Wizard of Oz” in reverse, which strangely, no one mentions. If the revolutionary subplot never feels like it has real weight, the heist sequence does via strictly diegetic sound, practical effects, and deliberate shot length. It’s gripping, and even more so when you grade it on a curve in comparison to our over-stimulated modern standards. On the other hand, the central relationship between Joe and Lillian is not just devoid of romance and tension but ultimately comes across a little too much like John Cleese and Jamie Lee Curtis in “A Fish Called Wanda” without noticing. The biggest laugh in the whole movie is when Archer is forced to say her character is falling in love with Joe which merely reminded me of Roger Ebert’s classic line describing Cleese and Curtis’ relationship: “This illustrates a universal law of human nature, which is that every man, no matter how resistible, believes that when a woman in a low-cut dress tells him such things she must certainly be saying the truth.”

Where We Are

In casting Kenneth Colley (1937 - 2025) as Captain cum Admiral Piett in “The Empire Strikes Back,” director Irvin Kershner apparently indicated he wanted someone who could have terrified the F*hrer of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party for the part. But the role didn’t really appear to be written that way and it was not how Colley played it. Colley played him first as an underling eager to make an impression and then as a superior who realizes only too late that he’s stepped in it. It’s in the third movie (Original Trilogy Division), “Return of the Jedi,” however, where Colley really left a mark, playing his first scene as an Imperial middle manager who has become experienced in having to suck it up whenever Lord Vader gets one of his inklings. It’s quite a feat, essentially turning Piett into the Galactic Empire version of the nameless subservient nodding dude in the scene in Mike Judge’s white collar comedy classic “Office Space” where the arrival of the dreaded consultants is announced, and for a moment, effectively turning the baddest man in the galaxy into an imbecilic CEO. The way Colley says “As you wish, my Lord” translates to “This fuckin’ guy.”

This occurred to me on Monday while watching clips of the White House press conference at which King Big Brain I announced the federal government would be taking control of the District of Columbia police in addition to deploying National Guard troops to regulate the nation’s capital which, at least in the pudding of his brain, may as well be the subway car in “Adventures in Babysitting”  24-7. The whole thing was insulting, made up under phony pretenses (like Chicago, where I live, and which was also threatened during this press conference, whatever genuine crime problem DC may or may not have and how to best address it is of no actual interest to the President), echoing his un-American strongman ethos and potentially laying the groundwork for even greater federal abuse, making me want to say to the people who still, even now, a decade into this, spin some version of the “Even I don’t agree with everything the President says or does but...,” in the manner of Jerry on “Seinfeld” consulting with Kramer after the latter has been accused of being The Smog Strangler and doesn’t seem all that bent out of shape: “Do you realize what’s going on here?” But maybe the one moment of the whole grotesque carnival that stood out most was when His Imbecility mentioned all the “bloodthirsty criminals” and “drugged-out maniacs” and “how we’re not going to let it happen anymore.” And then he half-turned to Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel, whose eyes as always made it look like he was watching “The Parallax View” recruitment test, standing directly behind him and rhetorically asked “Right?” Bondi and Patel sort of snapped to attention as if they had not even been paying attention to Dear Leader’s typical mealy mouthed mumbling and as the shit-fed bootlickers they are, nodded right on cue, improbably manifesting in real life Admiral Piett as Nodding Guy in “Office Space.” 

Ain’t that (present-day) America?

Eddington

“Eddington” begins with a homeless person (Clifton Collins Jr.) wandering down a desolate road at night in New Mexico, shouting into the void. You know, the void, the place where all meaning seemed to go during the COVID-19 pandemic. And that’s the time in which writer/director Ari Aster’s film takes place, the COVID-19 pandemic, late May 2020 when masks and social distancing were foremost topics of concern, and so was defunding the police in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis cop, all of which are injected into a sprawling two-hour plus movie that isn’t so much interested in examining the novel coronavirus, per se, as it in evoking it as a manifestation of the great American divide. If it might be described as a western/noir hybrid, I kept thinking of it more like a Twilight Zone episode written and directed by an edge lord. Do I recommend it? Well, what does that matter? Go see for yourself; do your own research.

When we first meet Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), he is admonished for not wearing a mask, not just immediately transporting us back in time but immediately seeking to instill in the viewer a sense of drawing a line in the sand: who’s side are you on? It’s obvious whose side Aster is on. The mask is presented as a symbol, one worn by Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) as much to signal dreaded virtue as a safety precaution, and one eschewed by Joe to signal individual freedom, betraying the filmmaker’s thumb on the scale from the get-go. The ensuing plot is not even so much a series of events as it is a series of buttons being pushed. If everything in the last 10 years of American life has become politics, then Aster runs with that idea, creating a gallery of characters that are virtually inextricable from their political ideology, whether they realize it or not. 

Joe is at loggerheads with Ted not just over a mask mandate but the possible construction of a data center on the outskirts of town. Eschewing his role to keep the peace, Joe becomes the match that lights the fuse when he all of a sudden decides to run for Mayor against Ted in the upcoming election. As he transforms the two-man police department into a campaign committee, his wife Louise (Emma Stone) disappears down the conspiracy rabbit hole, prodded by Joe’s own mother (Dierdre O’Connell), meeting with and becoming close to some right-wing cult leader, Vernon Jefferson Peak (Austin Butler). Peak does not turn out to be much of a character, mostly existing in opposition to Joe, but Butler’s performance is still a delight of malevolent unctuousness. When Peak invites himself to dinner, watching Phoenix as Joe is watching a man in real-time lose a loved one to unreality.  

Ted’s son Eric (Matt Gomez Hidaka) becomes a BLM activist along with his best friend Brian (Cameron Mann) for no other reason than they both like Sarah (Amélie Hoeferle), a social media influencer cosplaying as a social justice warrior, or so Aster would say. This is a deeply cynical view of the world. Just as the ostensible secret that Louise is harboring becomes campaign fuel for her husband, activism is merely the means to some selfish end. Sarah’s belief in racial justice is dismissed by Joe as something she learned in social studies class, an allegedly trenchant observation peddled by social media reactionaries the world over, equating public education with indoctrination, if not a waste of time altogether. Aster underlines his belief that the kids lack any real beliefs themselves with scenes of them ignoring the vagrant when he is right in their midst. Of course, Aster pays the homeless man as much attention as the kids do, demonstrating how his button-pushing tends to tie itself in knots.

Aster does not really cast about looking for who or what to blame for this state of rampant division and ignorance but rather makes it clear: it’s the phones. On its face, that’s a glib diagnosis, but Aster compellingly renders it, nevertheless. If modern movies often seem hesitant to over-include phones in their narratives, as if it might be cheating, “Eddington” shares no such equivocation. The cooling tower accompanying the potential data center on a hilltop outside town stands like an anti-monolith of “2001.” Characters faces are buried in their handheld screens throughout, a potent juxtaposition to the wide-open southwestern landscapes. It put me in mind of another New Mexico-set movie, “The Vast of Night” (2019), where the wonder was in looking up at the sky. In “Eddington,” on other hand, everyone is forever looking down.  

Joe is as addicted to his phone as anyone else, curling up with it in bed when Louise turns her back to him, though he is also oldfangled, imploring for community and fellowship. The way Phoenix has him say this, though, I don’t think he could explain what he means by community and fellowship if he tried, and subsequent events suggest Joe’s belief in these ideas might be dubious. The character sports a white hat, yet just as frequently doesn’t, revealing a severe case of hat-hair below, deploying nothing less than hair and makeup (Anji Bemben: hair department dead) to evoke the mess Joe eventually makes of just about everything. When he says COVID is not even present in Eddington, you know it will have arrived by movie’s end, and it does, triggering an over-the-top fever dream climax that comes across like a western-styled showdown between good and evil reconfigured as the fever dream of an aggrieved white man. And even if “Eddington” struggles figuring out how to conclude, the open ending also underlines America’s lack of reckoning with that time, so many sins lying unatoned. 

Friday's Old Fashioned: So Long at the Fair (1950)

“Anything can happen in Paris.” So says Vicky Barton (Jean Simmons) who is arriving in the City of Lights for the first time on the eve of the 1889 World’s Fair in the company of her brother Johnny (David Tomlinson), a bit of a wet blanket, if you ask me, but nice enough, at least, to give her the hotel room with a view of the Eiffel Tower. He winds up in Room 19, a room which vanishes the next morning along with Johnny. Anything, indeed. And when everyone in the hotel claims not to have ever seen Johnny at all, Vicky is forced to find a way to prove his existence, eventually aided by a kindly artist, George Hathaway (Dirk Bogarde), the only person who seems to believe her. “So Long at the Fair” makes great use of the Paris Exposition setting, including a hot air balloon blown to bits over the fairgrounds that is recounted in a long shot underlining Vicky’s stricken helplessness. Simmons is riveting, making the emotional turn from naïve to enraged to steely self-possession look like nothing, frequently holding the camera in the palm of her hand, so to speak, with powerful close-ups that communicate emotion directly to us. She’s so powerful, in fact, that she doesn’t quite match up with Bogarde who plays the whole thing too much like a drawing room mystery lark rather than something grave, diminishing the tension, not to mention their ostensible romance. The concluding twist is definitely grave. It’s grave but it also recalibrates everything in a way that does not make quite as much sense as it thinks, transforming a would-be bombshell into a senseless head-scratcher, a brewing tragedy into a limp whodunit. 

Neighborhood Watch

The “Neighborhood Watch” of director Duncan Skiles’s crime-thriller is comprised of just two men, ostensibly mismatched next-door neighbors Simon McNally (Jack Quaid) and Ed Deerman (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). Suffering from what appears to be schizophrenia, plagued by voices in his head, Simon has been institutionalized for a decade to no real medical or mental breakthrough, and since released. That 10-year gap in his resume means he can’t get a job, like one at a diner, where he bombs an interview as the movie begins, desperate to re-enter a society that won’t have him. His past also means the police brush him off when he comes to them claiming to have seen a woman abducted in van. Ed is ready to brush him off too when Simon seeks his help, having heard that Ed used to be a cop, or something. That something was a campus security guard, a position from which he has reluctantly retired, though in his introductory scene, he is still prowling the university cafeteria for would-be offenders. This is played for broad comedy, though it belies Morgan effecting both an indignant and melancholy air of someone who wanted to be a cop and never was. And though Ed hardly believes Simon any more than the real police, he agrees to help, seemingly as determined to playact his own man in blue fantasy as find this missing mystery woman.

The script for “Neighborhood Watch” is Sean Farley’s first, but it does not always feel that way, fitting exposition into believable exchanges and situations, and crucially never treating Simon’s mental illness with anything other than respect. Oh, Ed makes plenty of cruel jokes at Simon’s expense, but coming from the character as written and played, these jokes make sense, and work to underline the hard time Simon has navigating a society that’s quick to make him a punchline. Farley also utilizes innumerable set-ups and payoffs, some obvious but some unexpectedly enlightening, none more than Ed’s punch card at a diner working his way toward a free dinner. Skiles tends to favor long shots, letting us see the characters inhabit their different spaces, and presenting a world that feels very lower middle class, people struggling to fit in and hang on. And when Ed offers that punch card to a bus driver (Maggie Ballard) when they can’t afford the fare, her eager acceptance feels less like a joke than a quiet evocation of that struggle.

In fact, “Neighborhood Watch” does a better job of this innate world building than it does in conveying the seedy underworld where Simon and Ed’s investigation ultimately leads them. That lack of detail holds the movie back to some degree but also puts into perspective how the real throughline is Ed and Simon unwittingly developing a support system. Crucially, Farley’s script does not overdo that idea, the resolution of the case not magically yielding a resolution of their emotional, mental, and physical problems. Those will still have to be dealt with long after the credits roll. Instead, the final moments movingly suggest nothing more than the thrill of being able to matter.

Deep Cover

In “Deep Cover,” three improvisational comedians are recruited by Detective Sergeant Billings (Sean Bean) of London’s Metropolitan Police to run a sting operation by utilizing the number one rule of improv – “Always say yes” – to improbably penetrate the deepest reaches of the criminal underworld. Sort of suggesting an inverted version of Bill Murray’s “The Man Who Knew Too Little,” director Tom Kingsley’s straight-to-Amazon-Prime action-comedy sounds like such a can’t miss idea that I’m surprised it hasn’t already been done. But even if in blending occasionally gruesome black comedy with a true heart of gold, “Deep Cover” is often fun and funny, it also skims along in one gear, never quite blooming into something that feels truly outrageous and alive to its own enticing possibilities.

The unlikely undercover team is commanded by Kat (Bryce Dallas Howard), a struggling stand-up comic rendered insecure by her more successful friends, and improv teacher, a living manifestation of a version of that Liz Lemon line from “30 Rock” about where she sees herself in five years: “Teaching improv on cruise ships.” She is joined by Marlon (Orlando Bloom), a commercial actor yearning to go Method, and IT worker Hugh (Nick Mohammed) who signs up for the class in effort to gain some confidence. And though the four-person screenplay affords them little dimension beyond these set-ups, their distinct comic traits work well together, as do the actors, impeccably harmonizing with their roles. Bloom is over the top; Mohammed is deadpan; Howard is the glue melding them together. In the end, though, no one, perhaps, is more important than Bean. If the plot strains credulity, he credibly effects the air of someone who would send three amateurs into harm’s way.

Less successful is Kingsley’s decision to recount the action scenes in that familiar Hollywood house style of shaky camerawork and herky jerky editing. I suspect the intention was to underline the characters’ out of place sensation by plunking them down in a real action movie, which I kind of admire, even if only winds up undercutting the comedy and creating a tonal imbalance. It’s bolder, at least, then a script filled with quasi-outrageous reversals tracking to a predictable conclusion. Predictability is not inherently a bad thing, but in the case of “Deep Cover,” it counteracts the whole notion of these improv comedians responding to one another in the moment. Rather than seeming to make it all up as they go, they follow the outline to the end.

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Big Night (1951)

“The Big Night” giving Joseph Losey’s 1951 film its title is the 17th birthday of George, nay, Georgie La Main (John Barrymore, Jr.). One minute he’s being bullied by some peers for refusing their dare to kiss a girl and the next he’s watching a man bully and beat his father Andy (Preston Foster) to a bloody pulp. His reaction: to slip on his father’s jacket and hat, both a little too big for him, like he’s merely some out-of-his-element mini-me, grab his father’s gun, and set off on a rash quest for vengeance. That quest becomes a coming-of-age checklist as he attends a boxing match, gets scammed, goes to a club, has a drink, falls in love, discovers his father isn’t quite who he thought he was and that the world doesn’t work quite the way he thought it did. That suggests noir, and “The Big Night” has the look and feel of one, though Barrymore, Jr.’s overwrought performance feels cut and pasted from a melodrama. That’s not necessarily a bad thing as it unexpectedly reinforces the feeling of someone thrust into a world where he doesn’t belong. And though “The Big Night” can sometimes lay things on thick, like the birthday candle on Georgie’s cake that ominously fails to extinguish, it also has moments of searing truth. After being smitten by a black jazz singer’s (Mauri Leighton) performance, he compliments her, only to make such a casual and clueless racist remark in doing so that he doesn’t even seem to realize his own inherent prejudice until he’s cruelly spoken it into the world.