Friday's Old Fashioned: Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993)

“Manhattan Murder Mystery” begins with a thunderous overture in the form of Bobby Short’s 1973 recording of Cole Porter’s “I Happen to Like New York” as the camera sweeps overhead with panoramic views of the glittering city skyline at night. Carol Lipton (Diane Keaton) might like New York, or have liked it once, but she seems less enamored as the movie opens, palpably suffering through a New York Rangers hockey game at Madison Square Garden to which she has been dragged by her husband Larry (Woody Allen). Is it any wonder when they return home to their apartment and their down-the-hall neighbors Paul and Lillian House (Jerry Adler and Lynn Cohen, respectively) invite them over some late-night coffee, she jumps at the chance despite her spouse’s protestations? When Lillian asks Carol if she works, she replies that she used to, at an ad agency, but that was many years ago. This comment is never followed up on, but it doesn’t need to be. Her age is never said, but she and Larry have a son in college and Keaton was 47 at the time of “Manhattan Murder Mystery’s” release and there is a palpable middle-age drift in Keaton’s line reading of “many years ago,” one that communicates how Carol’s life did not slip off track, necessarily, but started to coast. When Mrs. House turns up dead, ascribed to a mysterious heart condition, Carol becomes convinced a murder has been committed and sets out to solve it.

In many ways, “Manhattan Murder Mystery” feels familiar, but that’s part of the point. “Paddington” and “Paddington 2” director Paul King might have encouraged his cast to pull inspiration from writer/director Allen’s 1993 comedy, but Allen’s 1993 comedy is pulling inspiration from the noirs of the 40s and 50s. “Too much ‘Double Indemnity,’” Larry cautions when Carol spitballs insurance as Mr. House’s possible motive. In truth, “Manhattan Murder Mystery” is nowhere near as tightly plotted as that masterpiece. There are contrivances galore and myriad gaps in logic and the conclusion, itself an ode to “The Lady from Shanghai,” is a bit underwhelming. Not that it matters. Allen is more focused on comedy than precise narrative coherence, yielding at least one true classic bit, the falsification of a phone call, the scene that to which “Paddington 2” paid gleeful homage. Even more than that, though, “Manhattan Murder Mystery” succeeds via the chemistry and energy of its leads, reteaming for the first time since the 70s, though unlike “Annie Hall” in which Allen’s character led the narrative, Keaton’s leads this one, a refreshing and crucial change of pace.

In his New Yorker obituary for Keaton, Hilton Als noted that what made their collaborations so successful was that “Keaton never gives us the feeling that she actually hears or understands what Allen is saying.” This was never truer than in “Manhattan Murder Mystery,” so much that Allen wrote it into the text, a hilarious sequence in which Larry declares that he forbids Carol from breaking into the House’s apartment in the middle of the night. She breaks in anyway. “Is that what you do when I’m forbidding?” he rhetorically, haplessly asks. Though Larry is spurred to win his wife back over, motivated in part by their mutual friend Ted (Alan Alda, perfect), recently divorced and nursing a longtime crush on Carol, the chief excitement is in watching Carol unlock a newfound sense of joy. At one point, she remarks that she feels “dizzy with freedom,” and Keaton brings that sentiment to life, undergirded in the handheld camerawork. In most movies, the camera drives the action, but in “Manhattan Murder Mystery,” the camera hastening around corners and down halls and across streets always feels as if it’s hustling to keep up with her. 

The Lost Bus

In “The Lost Bus,” the worst wildfire in California’s history, 2018’s Camp Fire, which burned up 150,000 acres, caused 16 million in damage, and took 85 lives, is seen predominantly through the eyes of real-life school bus driver Kevin McKay who was enlisted to evacuate 22 students and their two teachers to safety. Director Paul Greengrass and his co-screenwriter Brad Inglesby load up their Kevin McKay (Matthew McConaughey) with all manner of personal problems, many of which were based on fact, like a sick son, and some which were not, like his work superior (Ashlie Atkinson) not being too keen on his job performance. I understand the dramatic impulse given a factual story that does not provide traditional tidy closure, but it can’t help feeling callous, creating a narrative hurdle for Kevin to cross, as if shepherding kids through an inferno is the only way he can prove his self-worth. It makes “The Lost Bus” feel like the sort of Hollywood disaster movie it often transcends. 

The real drama is strictly elemental, a battle against the elements, man v fire. Rather than a distant cloud of smoke, Greengrass does not recount the start of the fire, a faulty power line stemming from corporate malfeasance and spurred on by unrelenting dry conditions, through the point-of-view of a character but with the camera itself, showing that deadly wind whipping through trees, as if evoking the wildfire’s emergent pulse, not just bringing the blaze to life but making it feel terrifyingly alive. And though Greengrass keeps touching base with the firefighters and their increasingly futile efforts at containment, he smartly keeps his focus on the bus while also keeping any sense of exploitative action set pieces to a minimum. In doing so, the lost bus becomes a kind of allegory, akin to a skiff in a flood, of mankind overwhelmed in a losing battle against the escalating effects of climate change. At one point, rather than continuing to try and navigate their way out of the all-encompassing smoke, Kevin decides to just stop the bus when he realizes they seem to be in the one place where the fire isn’t, hoping to wait it out. But eventually, the fire finds them anyway. 

A House of Dynamite

As best I can recall, “A House of Dynamite” is the only Netflix movie I have ever seen in a movie theater first. And I was distressed to learn that even on the big screen, Kathryn Bigelow’s ticking clock nuclear thriller was coated in that same stale streaming sheen endemic to the small screen. It might have been appropriate, though, at least from my point of view, given that the doomsday movies I grew up with – “The Day After,” “Special Bulletin” – were all made for TV. Yet, even if “A House of Dynamite” can sometimes look like television, it never feels like television, infused with a couple crucial anti-plot touches in the form of an enigmatic inciting incident and ending. And while Bigelow’s screenplay co-written with Noah Oppenheim contains some clumsy dialogue, like a recurring line ripped from the godawful “Armageddon” (“This is insanity” - “No, this is reality”) and the weighty observation giving the film its title cited as being plucked from a podcast, god help us, she is not just visually mapping her narrative but creating a deliberately distressing emotional experience. 

“A House of Dynamite” begins with White House Situation Room Captain Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson) tending to a sick child, and Major Daniel Gonzalez (Anthony Ramos) at Alaska’s Fort Greely missile-defense complex taking a tense phone call, unnecessary dollops of character. The real power comes from simply watching Walker go to work, like she has a thousand times before, a breakfast order becoming a split-second window into her whole character, the necessity of staying on task and not wasting time, which becomes paramount when it becomes clear an unattributed intercontinental ballistic missile is not one more exercise but a real-world threat, headed for the United States, namely Chicago, as if my city hasn’t suffered enough in 2025. Everybody has trained for this, they are constantly reminded, but in carefully laying out the procedures born of that training, we are made to realize that even when every i is dotted and every t is crossed, the system is not necessarily infallible. 

Walker is not the only prominent character in “A House of Dynamite”; there is also Deputy National Security Advisor Jake Baerington (Gabriel Basso) trying to determine the responsible aggressor, General Anthony Brady (Tracy Letts), senior officer at the U.S. Strategic Command, focusing on potential retaliation, and, of course, the President of the United States (Idris Elba), forced to make the ultimate call. Rather than crosscutting between them, however, Bigelow and Oppenheim choose to present “A House of Dynamite” as a triptych. Just as the missile is about to make an impact, Bigelow flashes back twice more to see the same scenario play out from other vantage points. It has a peculiar effect, cutting tension that might have been more preeminent had it presented these events simultaneously, and not really providing alternate viewpoints as a typical Rashomon effect might suggest. What it does, though, is play with and eventually subvert our Hollywood-coded expectations that there must be a solution to this apocalyptic problem. If Walker didn’t solve it, then Brady will, and if Brady doesn’t, then Potus will…but will he?

     
Bigelow keeps her locales limited, never even providing us an establishing shot of Chicago, just a dot on a map. This is akin to “Dr. Strangelove,” which stuck to just a few sets to evoke a small number of increasingly mad men holding the fate of the world in their hands, though in “A House of Dynamite,” it underscores how the people enlisted to help protect our fate might themselves be just like us: helpless. Unlike the former, the latter is not a comedy, and Bigelow’s handheld camerawork emphasizes drama and suspense, but there is emergent bleak humor too. Letts is essentially playing “Dr. Strangelove’s” Buck C. Turgidson straight, and though we are conditioned to expect POTUS to rise to the occasion, Elba’s harried air and the way he slumps in his seat in his Presidential Limo both suggest someone shrinking from it. A phone call to his wife as he labors to make a call about a counterstrike becomes a pointed evocation of how this is all up to him, which might be the movie’s single most terrifying moment if you consider, as Bigelow no doubt intends us to, it in light of the real POTUS. 

Embedded throughout “A House of Dynamite” is the struggle to determine the party responsible for firing the missile in the first place, an ambiguity that foreshadows an equally ambiguous ending. That ambiguity, however, is no cop-out but on purpose. In the great post-Cold War thriller “Crimson Tide, Denzel Washington’s Naval lieutenant commander observes that in the nuclear age, the true enemy is war itself. In the end, Bigelow doesn’t say it; she shows it.

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Indian Runner (1991)

In preparation for the release today of the Bruce Springsteen biopic about recording his 1982 album “Nebraska,” I rewatched “The Indian Runner,” Sean Penn’s 1991 directorial debut inspired by a song from that same album. The song was “Highway Patrolman,” telling the story of two brothers, Joe and Frankie Roberts (respectively, David Morse and Viggo Mortensen in the movie), the former a calm family man and a state trooper, the latter a hothead prone to violence, putting a macabre spin on the chestnut Family First by charting how their relationship comes to a head. The song itself is starkly presented, just Springsteen and his guitar and harmonica, a touch of mandolin, but Penn lays “The Indian Runner” on thick with frequent bouts of ominous slow motion and scads of portentous symbolism that strive and fail to create something mythic. (He also tags the movie with a quote to ensure we don’t miss the conclusion’s point, demonstrating a lack of trust in the viewer that grinds my gears.) Penn honors the details of the verses but also fleshes them out, adding characters, a mother (Sandy Dennis) and father (Charles Bronson) for the brothers and a wife (Patricia Arquette) for Frankie, adding an extra layer of irony to Springsteen’s key observation that a man who turns his back on his family “ain’t no good.” 

On the other hand, Penn eschews trying to visually translate the chorus, the one about Joe and Frankie taking turns dancing with Joe’s future wife Maria (Valeria Golino in the film) “as the band played Night of the Johnstown Flood.” It’s as beautiful a lyric as Springsteen ever composed, and maybe Penn knew he couldn’t do it justice, but it also speaks to what’s missing from “The Indian Runner”: just the tiniest crack of light. It is a morose experience, perhaps reflective of a writer/director it is said once smoked four packs a day. Brief montages of happiness feel forced, ostensible beatific images of Joe and his family skew oddly mournful, and though Bronson’s powerful performance as Mr. Roberts initially seems to suggest a hard-won peace with the world, that peace proves a lie.

Frankie’s father has essentially written his son off as a lost cause and you can understand why. He’s a real nasty piece of work, played by Mortensen as such, giving even his few moments of grace the feel of a sly-grinned con. He’s virtually impossible to like and that’s the point: Penn wants to put us in the headspace of Joe, to grapple with the struggle of offering love and protection to someone so unworthy of it. I appreciate that approach, but there is an appreciable lack of tension between the brothers and no genuine sense of their deep roots that renders this central relationship inert. I can’t imagine Penn didn’t see the two sides of himself in Joe and Frankie and meant it as a manifestation of such, and it’s why the whole time I was watching, even if 1991 technology might have made it impossible, I wished Penn would have gone full Michael B. Jordan x 2 in “Sinners” and just played both parts himself. That might have made for something special. 

The Ultimate In-Flight Movie

Friend of the Blog Derek recently concluded an epic traveling adventure across the eastern hemisphere with his family, including a stop in La Serenissima where My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife and I just spent eight days. Thinking like the crack film blogger he is, Derek utilized so many plane rides to ruminate on an essential topic: in-flight movies. It’s a topic Cinema Romantico briefly addressed a few years ago when filmmaker John Magary expressed outrage on social media upon seeing so many people watching “Jungle Cruise” on a flight. It seemed a strange argument to make, however, given that a plane, as Derek noted, is not an atmosphere conducive to watching a movie at full attention. Derek explored this idea by re-examining his various year-end rankings to see how many movies he watched on planes factored in, and whether watching them on a plane necessitated a rewatch. His post, however, got me thinking about in-flight movies in a broader manner. In the last decade, I have traveled a lot, and I have watched a lot of in-flight movies, and I have developed some ideas about what makes the ultimate plane movie.

The truth is, I am not wholly against watching more serious-minded cinema in the air. Indeed, a transatlantic flight can be the perfect place to catch up on movies I have missed during the year. That’s how I wound up watching “Materialists” on my recent flight to Venice, or “I Saw the TV Glow” on my flight last year to Tokyo. Even on a plane, I can give such a movie my full attention to form an honest and informed critique. Trouble is, I can only maintain that necessary attention for the length of one movie, occasionally two, and once I feel my attention wane, knowing my analysis will be compromised, new movies on my must-see list are re-relegated to the mental queue. 

That I am generally only able to concentrate for one serious-minded film a flight, however, goes to show that they cannot really be the paragon of the in-flight viewing experience. More often than not, a flight is not an optimal experience itself, depending upon the size of your seat, the measure of leg room, the amount of turbulence, whether the person in front of you chooses to recline the whole flight, not to mention the headphone jack might be on the fritz, as it was on my return flight from Venice. If on land, I’m generally looking for a movie to challenge me, or surprise me, in the air, I tend to look for something else. 

A good movie is always a good movie, and a bad movie is always a bad movie, but at 35,000 feet, well, a bad movie is not necessarily so bad it’s good, as the saying goes, but often plays better, or at least a little bit different, like how the low pressure at cruising altitude brings out a better taste in tomato juice. The Amy Adams rom com “Leap Year” was wretched, but following its mechanical rom com formula on my way back home from the Big Island of Hawaii in 2010 felt as relaxing as a geography nut might find following the in-flight map. The subpar Meg Ryan-directed/starring rom com “What Happens Later” did not work at all and yet worked as well as it ever could wedged into a middle seat on a Dreamliner somewhere over the Pacific on my way to Japan.

That gets us closer to what makes the ultimate in-flight movie. One that fits the mood of an airplane, or maybe more accurately, helps soothe the mood an airplane creates the longer the flight goes. And no movie soothes like a movie you have already seen and liked and/or loved. It’s why toward the end of a long flight I often like to watch the first hour or so of Bradley Cooper’s “A Star is Born,” so long as it’s available, because Lady Gaga is my balm for everything. “Mission: Impossible – Fallout” makes no sense on a teeny-weeny seatback screen, in a manner of speaking, but watching it on my flight home from Berlin in 2019 would have sent me soaring among the clouds were I not already literally above them.

Coming home from Italian COVID jail in 2021, my father-in-law nobly upgraded me to business class and knowing this was my one chance to be free of coach, I took full advantage to my delight and detriment by having pre-flight champagne, a pre-dinner Campari and soda, goose for dinner itself, a post-dinner espresso, a ginger ale in an actual glass, a bottled beer even though by that point I was beginning to feel the effects of my living large because when (no longer) in Rome, all of which made my stomach feel so upset that midway through my rewatch of the original “West Side Story” to prep for the Spielberg remake I decided to switch to “Music and Lyrics.” I didn’t feel better physically, but I felt better mentally. Put that on the poster: at 35,000 feet, “Music and Lyrics” is better than “West Side Story!”

Still, nothing in the annals of cinema has ever soothed me more than a Humphrey Bogart/Lauren Bacall movie; I just never expect them to appear on planes. Yet, for our flight to and from Tokyo last year, all their classics were available. I watched “The Big Sleep” going and “Key Largo” coming and, well, here’s the thing: I don’t really sleep on planes. I might want to, but I can’t, not even that time in business class when I discovered the bewildering wonder of a seat that would literally remake itself into a bed. (As Elaine Benes once said, “Do you realize the people up here are getting cookies?!”) Yet, in watching “Key Largo,” at some point, without even realizing it, I drifted off. And though we might typically issue a ticket to a movie that sedates, well, as established, in the air, the rules are different. And I can pay no higher compliment to an in-flight movie than to say, it put me to sleep. Bogie and Bacall really are magic. 

The Naked Gun

Though we live in an age of reboots and sequels, “The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!” (1988), genuinely one of the greatest movies ever made, was one that seemed sacrosanct. What compelled director Akiva Shaffer to give it another go, I don’t know; maybe he thought resurrecting a fallow franchise that sadly fizzled out in 1994 with the suitably subtitled “The Final Insult” would be the perfect way to give a beaten-down world a laugh. If so, he succeeds in abundance by a creating a self-aware police procedural parody in the same vein as his Team ZAZ forefathers. Self-aware, but not really revisionist. This is not “The Naked Gun” commenting on the “The Naked Gun”; this is just “The Naked Gun” (2025). And though it does also employ an actor mostly known for being serious in service of straight-faced comedy, Liam Neeson, he is perhaps the one way in which Shaffer’s version most deviates from its predecessor.

Neeson is Frank Drebin Jr., son to Leslie Nielson’s Frank Drebin Sr., who like his father, becomes involved with a femme fatale (Pamela Anderson, a real hoot) and finds himself on the trail of a dastardly technocrat (Danny Huston) who wants to save humanity by transforming it into survival of the fittest. That plot sounds more akin to “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” frankly, which is maybe why that old TV series is referenced, not that “The Naked Gun” has anything to do with the plot. The storyline is strung to hang jokes on and Shaffer and his two co-writing cohorts Dan Gregor and Doug Mand succeed in so much as far more jokes land than miss, dead space and straight parodies of other movies proves minimal, at least one joke made me laugh so hard I cried, and most importantly, it never runs out of steam, not even through the closing credits. Even so, only on occasion does it evoke the wild spirit of the original, like in a snowman-starring montage, or in concert with Neeson’s performance.

Nielson was a buffoon in so much as he was a straight man in a whole world gone crazy. Neeson is a straight man, too, but he infuses the part with more simmering rage than Nielson’s mere bewilderment. Indeed, Neeson does not have the way with malapropisms and puns that his predecessor did; those tend to fall flat. But he manifests this hysterical kind of aggression and resentment, and this “Naked Gun” is at its best when yoking its gags to Neeson’s air. Indeed, skepticism of the police has always been buried in these movies, like it or not, and Shaffer brings it up in the mix. Drebin Jr. is often driving into pedestrians just like his dad, but Shaffer eschews the rule of thumb that comedy is best in long shot to show such comical hit and runs in close-up, rendering the character less oblivious than indifferent. Best of all is a sequence seen mostly through a bodycam that does not feature Drebin Jr. intoning “I am the law!” like so many renegade movie cops before him but instead brilliantly lives it. 

My Favorite College Football Games: Game 6 redux

October 19, 1985: Iowa - 12 Michigan - 10

In the 1920s when the Notre Dame Fighting Irish football team would come to New York for its annual neutral site game with Army, scores of the city’s Irish Americans jammed the train to go see their de facto team, acquiring the nickname subway alumni. Like a great deal of Notre Dame football, it’s hard to know how much of this backstory is mere mythology. Murray Sperber, who has written extensively on the history of the Fighting Irish, once noted it was unlikely many of the first-and second-generation immigrants could afford tickets to the game. But the moniker was evocative, and it stuck, and as the program’s prominence and publicity machine grew, subway alumni became a catch-all for Notre Dame’s national following. Few of these fans were actual alums, mind you, epitomizing former Sports Illustrated writer Rick Telander’s observation that college football is “an entertainment vehicle for people who have nothing to do with the university.” That’s not wrong, per se, but it also strikes me as ungenerous. Even Sperber, no less cynical than Telander, would concede there was something real in the Notre Dame “fan identification of ethnicity and religion.” The esteemed Charlie Pierce pinpointed this sensation to the 1940 film “Knute Rockne, All American” which did much to solidify the Fighting Irish folklore while also demonstrating how the place and the football team represented the purchase on their life in a new country in a real way.

In Iowa, where I’m from, a state with no professional sports teams, people tend from a young age to become supporters of either the University of Iowa football team in Iowa City or the University of Iowa State gridiron squad in Ames. And while some may grow up to attend one of these schools, just as many will not. It’s a Midwestern version of subway alumni, in other words, sometimes referred to as T-Shirt Fans, or Walmart Fans, as in, no, I didn’t attend Iowa, but I bought this t-shirt at Walmart. This, too, strikes me as ungenerous. In my experience, the people wearing these shirts are rarely trying to pass themselves off as graduates, and if the Notre Dame football team stood for a sense of belonging to so many newly minted Irish Americans then the Iowa and Iowa State football teams give form to a state pride for many native Iowans. It’s a state pride, though, that winds up split down the middle, two tribalist subsects, though that fierce sense of loyalty also evokes individual expression. Like any Cubs or White Sox hat resting atop a Chicagoan’s head comes a whole personal history attached, so, too, does every Iowan’s Cyclone or Hawkeye t-shirt. I have my own backstory.  

If you’re a person like me in conformity-minded small town central Iowa, you seek to individuate from your peers wherever possible. And so, when it came to college football, like a contrarian ten-year-old northside Chicagoan rooting for the St. Louis Cardinals, I eschewed Iowa and Iowa State and hitched my wagon to the enemies to our west, the University of Nebraska, and their famed Cornhusker football team. Yoked to educational institutions and extolling the mythical student athlete, college football has always been divided against itself, and in becoming a Nebraska fan in Iowa, I learned a lot about living in the sport’s contradictions. My devotion to the Big Red became so inextricable from my identity that even when I applied to, was accepted at, and briefly attended Iowa, I maintained it. I have even maintained it into middle age, which can admittedly feel peculiar, like I’m a punk at 48 still sporting liberty spikes. I have become good friends with a pair of Nebraskans, and have met more Nebraska fans through them, all of whom come across accepting of my affiliation if a bit perplexed. But what I don’t tell them is that while Nebraska has come to define by college football fandom, it’s not where my fandom started.

Iowa head football coach Hayden Fry confers with his most exalted quarterbacking charge, Chuck Long.

My first college football season as a full-time fan was 1985 and if you were an Iowan just becoming a college football fan in the 85th year of the 20th century, and if you didn’t have family or geographical history with Iowa State, it would have been practically impossible not to be captivated by the Hawks. Were the ’85 Hawkeyes the best Iowa football team of all time? It’s debatable. Several of Kirk Ferentz’s 21st century teams have finished higher in the polls. The 1958 team coached by Forest Evashevski was voted #1 at season’s end by the Football Writers Association of America. The 1985 squad finished 10-2, losing to Ohio State, and to UCLA in the Rose Bowl, but they were also the last Iowa team to win the Big 10 outright. And anyway, whether they were the best is immaterial in the face of what they indisputably were: the coolest Iowa football team of all time. That might sound strange to a modern college football fan who only knows the latter-day Hawks as an offense-challenged joke with a Punting is Winning punchline. But I am here to tell you, kids, that it was not ever thus. In 1985, the wreck of the Titanic was discovered, Marty McFly became the first time-traveler, and the Iowa Hawkeyes averaged 36.7 points per game, second most of all teams in Division I Football.

For much of its football-playing existence, the Big 10 Conference existed in black and white, even after the advent of color television. It was dominated for decades by Ohio State coach Woody Hayes and his dyed-in-the-wool three yards and a cloud of dust approach and his equally atavist protégé Bo Schembechler at Michigan. Through that lens, Hayden Fry, who took the reins of Iowa in 1979, was a breath of fresh air. Unlike Woody and Bo, who stuck to what they knew, Fry was an innovator with a predilection for exotic plays. But it wasn’t just strategy; it was aesthetic. The eponymous character of ABC’s “Coach” was based on Fry, but the real Fry was far more a character than Craig T. Nelson’s sitcom archetype Hayden Fox. Fry wore white pants, snakeskin boots, sunglasses, sported a moustache that seemed plucked from the face of Deputy Marshal Sam McCloud, and had his team dance the hokey pokey after big wins. He was a born and bred Texan, coaching for a spell at SMU in Dallas, and with “Dallas” the hit TV show of the 80s, Fry brought some of that Big D swagger to the stoic Hawkeye state. Not that he didn’t understand his new place. In 1985, with Iowa mired in the Farm Crisis, Fry commissioned stickers for his team’s helmets bearing the acronym ANF: America Needs Farmers. And if we all agree that the Farm Crisis was at least in part a result of political policy, then we can agree that the ’85 Hawkeyes weren’t sticking to sports, and that Iowa Football hasn’t been sticking to sports right there on their helmets for the last 40 years all thanks to Coach Fry.

In his introductory press conference, after the mandatory pledge of fielding a “competitive” and “tough” football team, Fry also promised they would be “colorful,” a guarantee kept by the 1985 team. They were an eclectic intermingling of Iowans and out-of-state players, a defensive lineman from Dyersville, Iowa and a defensive back born in Kingston, Jamaica, white and black, so much so that wide receiver Robert Smith from Dallas, Texas would cite playing for Fry as his “introduction to” - look out! - “diversity, equity and inclusion.” (For all he did at Iowa, Fry’s greatest career achievement was integrating the Southwest Conference.) Consensus All-American Larry Station not only had the exemplar of a linebacker’s name but his own poster, one tacked to my best friend’s basement wall for years. Quarterback Chuck Long sported a regal era-appropriate perm, finished second in Heisman Trophy voting, and gave the whole season a tinge of the hero’s journey by eschewing the NFL draft to return for his senior season which is why he took out a $100 million insurance policy on his body. The latter offended Schembechler and his ostensible tough guy values so much that he openly groused about it in the run-up to Michigan’s epic duel with Iowa that year. But wait, before we get there, we have one more ’85 Hawkeye to discuss. 

If Hayden Fry brought Texas with him to Iowa, then running back Ronnie Harmon brought New York, Queens, to be precise, off the field wearing wraparound sunglasses along with lots of leather and chains, like those other heroes of the same borough, Hollis’s Run-D.M.C. He came to work like a professional, which he effectively was, eventually revealed to have accepted money from agents during the 1985 season with an essentially non-existent academic workload. This complicated (some would say tarnished) Harmon’s legacy, but I found it invaluable, innately impressing upon me the myth of the student-athlete well before I intellectually grasped it, how Harmon’s body was his briefcase, to quote 80s college basketball player Daren Queenan, which is to say he was physically laying himself on the line for his work and deserved compensation. In a 1985 New York Times interview, without even reading between the lines, Harmon was already revealing that truth for anyone who wanted to hear it. Harmon, though, not only impressed upon me the sport’s realities but its subjective beauty. He mixed patience with lateral quickness, a unique running form so that you could see him virtually shifting between gears, like someone in a manual transmission Camaro with a lot of hills and nothing but time; he might have dressed like Run and D.M.C., but he ran like Rakim rapped. In the twenty-tens when football writers would cite Pittsburgh Steeler Le’Veon Bell’s fast-in-slow-motion running style as singular, I always thought, well I’ve seen someone who ran like that before: Ronnie Harmon. For me, he’s the answer to the question, who was your first favorite football player?

Iowa began the 1985 season ranked fifth, swiftly moved to #3, and upon demolishing their in-state Cyclone rival 57-3 at the end of September, ascended to #1, where they remained three weeks later when #2 Michigan and Schembechler rolled into town. Michigan had hosted plenty of big games over the years, but the spotlight was new for Iowa, evoked in how Iowa City’s Kinnick Stadium did not even have lights, forcing them to truck in massive portable ones to accommodate CBS’s primo mid-afternoon kickoff. It might have been 1 v 2, but the showdown failed to merit the sport’s colloquial Game of the Century designation, likely because the Hawks were not considered bluebloods. Whatever. In Iowa, it felt like the Game of the Century. In the week before, it was all I thought about, and all anyone seemed to talk about, even at school, where my 2nd grade student teacher Miss Long, a fellow Midwestern college football fan, and I made a wager: if Iowa won, she would have to draw me a picture, and if Michigan won, I would have to draw her a picture. In retrospect, this was a bad bet. I can’t draw now, so you know I couldn’t draw then. What would I have drawn? A shrugging stick figure? It speaks to my nascent fandom and how I did not yet grasp the brutal reality that my team could lose a big game.

Light cast from the Kinnick Stadium parking lot.

Between the explosive Hawkeye offense and stout Wolverine defense, the game proved a real unstoppable force meets immovable object situation. Points were precious, but Iowa dominated time of possession and did so because of Harmon. He might have contributed mightily to the eventual Rose Bowl debacle, infamously fumbling four times, but he did as much as anyone to help beat Michigan, between running and receiving accounting for nearly half of Iowa’s yards on his own, including several crucial carries on the final, fateful drive in the middle west autumn twilight. Because if the Hawkeyes were robbed, as any Hawkeye fan advise, of a touchdown in the 2nd quarter on a missed call, that was mere cosmic intervention to allow Rob Houghtlin to kick the field goal as time expired to win 12-10 and send the stadium into stratospheric jubilation, the crowd storming the field, semi-illuminated by the eerie glow of those makeshift lights, not strutting and their fretting their hour on the stage but flourishing.

Miss Long made good on our bet and drew me a block I with the team’s Tigerhawk logo in the foreground. I tacked it to the wall of my first bedroom, I remember that clearly, but what happened to it after we eventually moved, I cannot recall. After turning traitor, I probably had to destroy the evidence. I regret it. I wish I still had it, tucked into my keepsake box with my copy of the Des Moines Register the day after Nebraska won the 1995 Orange Bowl and the mythical National Championship, and the Tommie Frazier jersey I have worn so rarely that it smells as fresh as the day I bought it from the Big Red Shop in Lincoln, this one seemingly out-of-place Tigerhawk, the emblem of my college football origin story. 

A Few of My Fellow Americans

The blog will be shuttered for the next week or two as I make my triumphant return to Italy, site of one of the worst experiences of my life. Like I could have stayed away. I have really taken to Europe in my travels there, the cafes and the piazzas, the prioritization of leisure, the emphasis on making cities walkable, and how even if the apparatus of the state sometimes moves slow, it is there to help you, as I learned during my Roman misadventure in late 2021 when I might have wound up in a COVID hotel but didn’t have to pay a dime and even got served chicken on the bone and cuttlefish for dinner. Even so, by the end of my extended stay, I was longing for home, for giant mugs of coffee and college football and Hallmark Channel Christmas movies, for America.

It has reached the point in the United States, a current 3.8 million square mile flood zone of atrocity and evil idiocy, that I don’t even know what to say, not least because if you say something, it might be deemed by vile actors as un-American. That is but one reason it is hard to love my country these days, though I do. Not just the idea of America, mind you, of what it can be at its best, but America itself, here, now, still. This country is not supposed to be made in the image of one man, no matter how much that one man at the top wants it to be, and no matter how hard he tries to make himself the main character of every day of our lives. America is a country of 340 million others; here are eight of them. 

A Few of My Fellow Americans

Selena Gomez. The Grand Prairie, Texas native was so unbearably wooden in the first season of “Only Murders in the Building” that it kept threatening to sink the whole venture for me. But she worked at it, got better, and has kept getting better, and so far in this fifth season she has been better than ever, truly becoming the deadpan straw that now stirs the whole drink. She’s a billionaire, she doesn’t care what I think, that’s fine, but I’m proud of her.

Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone. America might have the world’s worst leader, certainly its dumbest, but despite it all, we still have the World’s Greatest Athlete. After charting new courses in the 400m hurdles, McLaughlin-Levrone of New Brunswick, New Jersey transitioned to the 400m flat with the intent of boldly going where no woman had gone before save for one who competed for a track program that has openly confessed to state sponsored doping. At the recent World Athletics Championships in Tokyo, she came as close as anyone ever has to surpassing that 40-year-old world record, though it was not just what she did but how she did it. The glory in the 400m is only achieved by surviving the agony of the last 100m when a proverbial piano lands on your back, rigor mortis seizes your body, locking up your muscles as you try to finish, a herculean struggle waged against your own body as much as against the other runners. She was pushed to her world championship record by the Dominican Republic’s equally incredible runner-up Marileidy Paulino, but in the homestretch, Paulino turned into every 400m runner ever, grimacing and flailing while McLaughlin-Levrone just pushed through what must have been immense pain with transfixing grace. It’s impossible, but she makes it look easy. I’m thankful every time I get to see her run.

Maria McKee, Ryan Hedgecock, Marvin Etzioni, Don Heffington (1950-2021). On Friday I saw this Portlandia-inspired variety show with Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen and they did a whole bit talking about bands that were destined to be forgotten. The list they flashed up onscreen included Lone Justice, the Los Angeles cowpunk band that blazed across the sky for a short time in the 80s before the hype and the imagemakers (and the struggle to translate the energy of their fabled live shows to record) quickly did them in. And though Brownstein and Armisen settled on The Plimsouls as the band they wanted our crowd to focus on keeping alive, I’m respectfully eschewing their appeal to instead venerate the memory of Lone Justice. If there are three bands from any era that I wish I could have seen live they are the 1978 version of Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band, Emmylou Harris when she toured with the ephemeral Spyboy in the late 90s, and the classic lineup listed above of Lone Justice. I mean, Maria McKee was the greatest rock and roll front woman of all time and I’ll bet most people don’t even know it.

Meredith Marks (on the right) on a recent episode of RHOSLC giving off some real Billy Zane in Zoolander energy.

Meredith Marks. In playing with modes of storytelling in what is tantamount to real time and with a slippery sense of not just reality but truth itself, “Real Housewives of Salt Lake City” more so than any so-called prestige TV drama, encapsulates and expresses our weird postmodern age. Season 4 went through the looking glass completely. And no one inhabits this world with more revelatory magnificence than Meredith Marks, Windy City native turned Pharoah of Park City, whose air constitutes a class alone, charismatically illuminating equivocation as the ultimate shield against inconvenient truth, and who hasn’t won an Emmy only because there is no award for Best Performance as Oneself. 

John Mellencamp. Like my Iowa homegirl Hailey Whitters, I never stopped being a fan of the Bard of Bloomington, IN. Even so, I had not listened to a new Mellencamp record since “Cuttin’ Heads” at the turn of the century. The algorithm, though, finally did one good thing this year when streaming served me “Hey God,” the opening cut off his most recent album, 2023’s “Orpheus Descending.” The song is essentially that line from “Everyone Says I Love You” about mankind collectively filing a class action suit against God but remade as an angry dirge. It’s direct, and didactic, but listen to Mellencamp’s voice, reduced it a primal growl that makes it sound like he has no time to waste on couching what he wants to say in poetry or subtext. What’s more, on “Orpheus Descending” he reteamed with violinist and fiddler Lisa Germano, one of his preeminent collaborators in the late 80s, early 90s glory days, which I learned upon checking the album credits after hearing the violin solo in the middle of “Hey God” and thinking, “Is that Lisa Germano?” The whole record sounds like a man taking stock of the world as he nears the end and not liking what he sees and therefore evoking something life-affirming by bringing an old friend back into the fold.

Anyway, apropos of all that, here are my 5 favorite Mellencamp deep cuts:

Beige to Beige. A takedown of mindless conformity with an upbeat melody that suggests pulling on the party’s blue, nay, beige overalls and whistling while digging your own grave. 

Women Seem. The funniest joke the thrice-divorced Mellencamp ever wrote and refreshingly he made himself the butt of it.

Danger List. “American Fool” is mostly known for its two big singles but, man, the whole album has some monster heartland riffs. Like on this track where he so thoroughly inhabits the mind of the sort of self-isolated male that has come to dominate our present that honestly, it’s a little frightening.

We Are the People. An anthemic reminder that this country belongs to us; that we the people have the power. Even given such timelessness, or maybe timeliness, of the theme, what I like most about this one is how it showcases both Germano and backup singer Crystal Taliefero as true co-stars, evoking how Mellencamp’s masterpiece “The Lonesome Jubilee” is as much about his band. 

Between a Laugh and a Tear. “Authority Song,” sure, “Jack and Diane,” of course, “Pink Houses,” obviously, but to me, this is the ur-Mellencamp-text.