Friday's Old Fashioned: The Olympic Games in Paris 1924 (1925)

Industrial smoke & feats of strength.

Motion pictures and the modern version of the Olympics are, give or take, the same age. That means 100 years ago at the time of the 1924 Summer Olympics in Paris, they were both in their relative infancy. And that might go a long way toward explaining the approach of the official documentary of the eighth modern Olympiad. Rather than tell any kind of overarching story, either about the Olympic games themselves or specific events, and limited to the most basic of intertitle information so that it can sometimes be difficult to understand what’s happening, director Jean de Rovera’s “The Olympic Games in Paris 1924” is content to just unspool its footage. Running two hours and fifty-four minutes, it feels exhaustive, epitomized in how it ends with no wind-up or warning, like it literally ran out of footage to show and that was that. You sort of must put yourself in a 1924 mindset to appreciate it, to think how at a time when seeing this international multi-sport event necessitated getting on an ocean liner and going there, how revelatory it must have been to be able to see it without going there. Still, I will confess to watching it all in 15–20-minute intervals at home, even if I also couldn’t help but yearn for a big screen experience given how incredibly crisp and clear the comprehensive footage remains to this day. 

There were over 3,000 competitors at the 1924 Summer Olympics and the conspicuous whiteness of them will jump out, as will the industrial plant parked not far from the Colombes Olympic Stadium, the repeatedly glimpsed smokestacks billowing black smoke right at the field of play. It was a different time, after all. Indeed, the drink stations during the marathon appear to dispense not the grab and go paper cups of today but actual glasses. Then again, when My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife and I were in Paris last fall and bought a bottled water to go with our lunch, we were also given two actual glasses because drinking straight from the bottle is so uncivilized. Maybe that’s just France. Anyway. Gymnastics, I noted, took place outdoors and in the Olympic Stadium and included events like the rope climb and some sort of calisthenics with armies of competitors performing all at once. This event might have been a century old, but it was news to me, and worked well with the silent movie organ as did other events like rugby, and the pole vault, and the pre-Fosbury Flop high jump in which competitors just pitched forward over the bar, kind of athletic flailing.

An intertitle advises that extreme heat and the difficult nature of the marathon course “caused several competitors to break down, but fortunately there were no fatal consequences,” which is just screaming for more follow-up, and more visual evidence, than we get here, and speaks to how some events translate better through this approach than others. There is footage of such famed athletes as American swimmer Johnny Weissmuller and tennis player Helen Wills Moody as well as the exalted English runners Harold Abrahams and Eric Liddell made famous by “Chariots of Fire” (1981), though what we see of them here sadly doesn’t do much to translate their prowess. In fact, what stands out most in Liddell’s race isn’t him but a rival that falls before the finish line. The movie doesn’t mention him, the vanquished lost to time. (A minimal amount of internet digging revealed him to be Josef Imbach of Switzerland.) What isn’t lost to time is Armond Blanchonnet of the host country winning the Gold Medal in Road Cycling. As “The Olympic Games in Paris 1924” does with many of the medalists, we see him posing for the camera afterwards, getting misty-eyed, and now, here, 100 years later, I got misty-eyed too. Some things do translate.

Ranking the Dream Teams

In referring to the informal, yet indelible nickname applied to the 1992 U.S. Men’s Olympic Basketball team, both Michael Jordan and former NBA commissioner David Stern said there was only one Dream Team. They were right, but Jordan and Stern are also men who know how marketing works. And even if the United States is an annoyingly self-serious country that refuses to give its national sports teams colorful nicknames a la Cameroon’s Indomitable Lions, or Jamaica’s Reggae Boyz, every U.S. Men’s Olympic Basketball team since has colloquially been referred to as the Dream Team too. Not all Dream Teams are created equal, however. As an Olympics devotee, I have been there for each of them, and formed some thoughts about...well, almost all of them, as you will see. Indeed, to quasi-honor the latest incarnation, a pleasing amalgamation of American basketball past, present, and future that regardless of Jordan or the late Stern’s only one Dream Team assertion is being heralded in some quarters as the most illustrious assemblage of talent since the original Dreamers, I explored the Dream Team’s brief history by ranking all nine versions preceding the Paris Olympics. And if you say that between Barcelona in 1992 and Tokyo in 2020-in-2021, there have only been eight Dream Teams, I say to you, reader, ha, read on.

Ersatz Official Dream Team Rankings

9. 2016. This team really didn’t thrill me, and that I don’t even have the desire or energy to try and figure out why says it all. 

8. 2004. It was unfortunate that Allen Iverson was the face of the one Dream Team that didn’t win Gold. He was a divisive player, berated as much as he was beloved, fair or not, and yet, unlike so many NBA stars that backed out of their commitment to playing in the 2004 Olympics, he honored his, and because he did and subsequently existed as that team’s most preeminent personality, he functioned as the lightning rod for its myriad critics. And yet, it was also apropos. Because if anybody was tough enough to be the face of the one Dream Team that didn’t win Gold, it was Iverson. 

7. 1996. In those days when the evening NBC Olympic broadcast was all you got and you had to watch whatever they wanted you to watch, I would beg them to cut away to indoor volleyball, or water polo when Dream Team II showed up. They weren’t really a Dream Team, even, more like a Somnambulant Team, a sluggish hardwood colossus that only occasionally rousted itself to excellence, and even then, more out of duty than anything else. They were the unsatisfying follow-up record to the multi-platinum smash. The 1996 Dream Team, in other words, was the answer to what happens after the dream comes true?

6/5. 2000, 2012. Both teams won Gold, even if both teams nearly lost to Lithuania, and yet, what stands out most about these two iterations were not the teams themselves but, respectively, Vince Carter posterizing Frédéric Weis of France and LeBron James’s three-quarter-court bounce pass. And if one might argue the Olympics are as much about athletic excellence, about extraordinary feats of strength, as they are victory and defeat, then Vinsanity and King James exemplified it. 

4. 2008. The only Dream Team that earned a different sobriquet – the Redeem Team. They followed the ignominious 2004 Dream Team, after all, earning storybook redemption when they defeated Spain 118-107 for Gold in a truly dramatic, tense contest that I got up in the middle of the night to watch live, one of my favorite sports-watching experiences of all time. This team’s real legacy, though, might be making their coach, sanctimonious Mike Krzyzewski, lovable, I swear, if only for a moment, when each member of the team hung its Gold Medal around Coach K’s neck (Olympic coaches do not receive medals). The Olympics have a lot of problems, so many problems, so many significant problems, and yet, this moment illustrates how they still retain the power to momentarily turn a bunch of egomaniacal millionaires into little kids having the time of their lives. 

3. 1992. Here is where I confess that as a youthful contrarian who did not take issue with professionals competing at the Olympics but who felt these particular professionals violated the (quasi) sacrosanct space of The Games where swimmers and divers and table tennis players were meant to be stars of the show, I rooted against the one true Dream Team every step of the way. (Also, I just love upsets!) But my perception not just of this team, and its manifestly awesome collection of talent, but of Dream Teams in general has evolved over the years. I see the value and the joy in how one might say that at the Olympics, the Dream Team players and the swimmers and divers and table tennis players are equals. But my eventual fondness for the original Dream Team ran deeper.

The alpha dogs of the Redeem Team and its 2012 Gold Medal-winning redux, Kobe Bryant and LeBron James, would occasionally peacock and say one or the other squad could have taken the 1992 Dream Team, a boast at which the originals scoffed. Maybe they could have, maybe not, but I know that their 2022 Netflix documentary, The Redeem Team, cited that squad’s tone-setting moment as one during training camp when several of its players returned in the wee hours of the morning from a night out and saw Kobe already up and going to work out. This was business, see. But no one styled himself after Michael Jordan more than Kobe, and as Jack McCallum recounted in his Dream Team book, Jordan and cronies won the Gold Medal against Croatia in 1992 the very day after playing cards into the wee hours of the morning. If you can’t win the Gold hungover, you’re not as good as the real thing. Case closed.

2. 2020-in-2021. The Pandemic Era Dream Team won Gold but not without some serious struggles and some serious skepticism along the way, epitomized in their coach Gregg Popovich excoriating the critics and the doubters afterwards with a variation of the Nobody Believed in Us speech, the ubiquitous and utterly banal go-to motivational tactic of virtually every modern sports team in existence. If it was unfortunate, given Popovich’s general dislike of cliché, it was also revealing. It was revealing because it demonstrated how over time, the mighty Dream Team has become, in essence, just another team, as well as the warped sense of risk and reward that now goes along with choosing to participate on the squad. In Popovich’s fury, you could sense how the fear of losing overwhelmed the elation of winning, transforming their victory into a herculean maintaining of the status quo. That is melancholy, yet to me, in its own weird way, more valiant than anything the original Dream Team achieved.

1. 1992 College All Stars. Hey, it’s a list of dream teams, right, and what’s the ultimate dream team if not one that never even existed? Well, that’s not entirely true. It’s part of the original Dream Team lore that the only game they lost was a scrimmage against a squad of American college basketball players culled from the 1991-92 season – Chris Webber, Penny Hardaway, Bobby Hurley, Grant Hill, Jamal Mashburn, Allan Houston, Rodney Rogers, and the late Eric Montross. Coach K, an assistant on the 1992 Dream Team, always says their head coach, Chuck Daly, threw that scrimmage, but c’mon, nobody believes Coach K. Now, take that amateur all-star team and add a few other 1992 collegians like Shaq, Christian Laettner, Harold “Baby Jordan” Miner, and I don’t know, maybe future Virginia coach Tony Bennett to run the show when Hurley got tired, or FSU’s Sam Cassell for the same role if you wanted more swagger. To me, someone who has always preferred college basketball to pro, and to quite possibly no one else in the whole world, seeing if that team could have taken Croatia or Lithuania for the Gold, remains the ultimate Olympic basketball fantasy unfulfilled. 

Challengers

Set in the world of tennis, “Challengers” begins with a match between Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) and Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor), the former a successful but aging pro looking to regain his mojo, the latter talented but mercurial and clinging to the edge of the profession. The event is in New Rochelle, seventeen miles outside New York as an establishing shot shows, and presented as a kind of country club idyll, underlined in the chirping birds and Henry Purcell’s Sound the Trumpet as sung by the Toronto Children’s Chorus on the soundtrack. Then, the idyll is wrecked as Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s pulsing electronica score kicks the baroque music to the curb and the camera zooms in past the judge’s chair and across the court to find Tashi Duncan (Zendaya) in the crowd. The way she watches Art and Patrick, and the way they turn to watch her watching them, clues us into their prickly codependent relationship even before we learn the considerable backstory. True, “Challengers” is short on emotional and intellectual depth, often as glossy as a commercial during a tennis match which the frequently blatant product placement evokes. But there is a primal ferocity that sticks, nevertheless, brought home in the capping shot, as if director Luca Guadagnino made his movie in the spirit of a Serena, or a Seles, or a Sharapova shriek. 

Art and Patrick’s match provides the framework for “Challengers” as we do not merely flash all the way back to the beginning and then move forward to this showdown but skip around in time, days, months, and years, to see what led them here. One-time doubles partners, Art and Patrick’s friendship begin to fray when they fell under the spell of Tashi, an extraordinary rising star. Screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes has said he was inspired by the contentious 2018 US Open Final between Serena Williams and Naomi Osaka, but watching the sequence in which Art and Patrick watch Tashi on the court took me back further, to the fraught days of Anna Kournikova when sex appeal and on-court skill seemed to blur into something indistinguishable.

That sequence, in which Art and Patrick first watch Tashi obliterate an opponent, and then meet her afterwards at a party, and then invite her back to their motel room, are funnier, really, than sexy, framing Faist and O’Connor by frequently placing them in the same shot with his sort of overcome slack-jawed expression renders them as two fluffy-headed boys bobbing in her wake. Physically, these scenes are attuned to Art and Patrick specifically as that, boys, clueless and hapless horndogs, and Zendaya’s performance here is deft, demonstrating complete control over them without making it obvious to them that she’s in complete control. And when she summons to the two boys to bed, brings them in close to her and then presses their lips together, the way she leans back, satisfied, she is essentially pitting them against one another. It’s a competitive love triangle, in other words, and “Challengers” charts the progression of that semi-romantic back and forth.

It is a fantastic set-up, yet the resulting follow-through only manages to reproduce the scintillating nature of this sequence in fits and starts. It’s clear the structure intends to evoke the shifting nature of a tennis match, yet the rhythm of the match itself quite blatantly mimics where things stand in terms of the love triangle. It’s not so much that it counteracts the match’s own sense of tension as it denotes how the characters in “Challengers” have little agency. It’s just one more puzzle box narrative where rather than lives being lived on screen, pieces are being snapped into place, meaning the tension results more from how the movie will put this all together than what are these people going to do, all of which also underlines the one dimensionality of the trio. Patrick as a rich guy cosplaying at being poor, Art wanting a real life outside of tennis, these attributes are reduced to lines of dialogue rather than being baked into the movie. In one scene, Patrick meets a woman (Hailey Gates) for a date merely as a cruel means to get a place to stay for the night. In her arresting anxiety, though, Gates threatens to puncture the movie’s three-person bubble. And because she does, just as the scene truly starts, it ends. If the piece doesn’t fit, it gets tossed.

On the other hand, a limited viewpoint and one dimensionality feel part and parcel of the characters themselves. There is one incredible moment, not long after we have seen Tashi and Art’s daughter and their daughter’s older nanny, when referencing his rehabilitating an injury, she expresses a wish that her own recovery from injury had been as easy as his, that she would have stabbed someone, a child or an older lady, to have his recovery. Zendaya’s voice here, casual, unthinking, earnest, virtually sideswipes you; whether she consciously realizes it or not, she may as well be speaking about her own daughter, or her own daughter’s nanny. Her daughter is an afterthought, not to the movie but to her. When this trio talks about tennis, they’re talking about life, and when they’re talking about life, they’re talking about tennis, and so practically every conversation and encounter between these friends and lovers in “Challengers” is filmed and played with the ferocity of a single point in a tennis match. “Life is bigger than the court,” retired tennis legend Roger Federer said in his recent viral Dartmouth commencement speech; “Challengers” says the opposite. 

10 Times Jerry Seinfeld Was Funny on Seinfeld

Throughout the never-ending press tour for his poorly received “Unfrosted,” Jerry Seinfeld spent as much time putting his foot in his own mouth as hyping his product, an inadvertent late career coming out as a reactionary. It was something to ruefully acknowledge before moving on with the rest of your day. That is not what many people did, however, or at least, not what many social media users did. Many people sought to tell the whole world via social media that they never thought “Seinfeld” was funny, or more accurately, that they never thought Jerry on “Seinfeld” was funny. This was less about appraising art, though, then staking out the moral high ground, or being seen staking out the moral high ground, I should say, performatively staking out the moral high ground even if they tended to stake it out on social media which just exists down there in the mud. It was wearying. The problem with a show of a piety, another American funnyman whose own dubious character was eventually revealed once said, is that it’s open to everybody. Sorry, masses, but I am not impressed. And even if some people were being 100% forthright in their opinion of an unfunny Jerry, that’s not true either. And as the kids say, I’ve got the receipts, ten of them, in fact. 

By his own admission, Seinfeld was not a good actor, and never really even became a good actor by the end of the series. Yet, he was frequently funny, albeit in a different way than his trio of gifted co-stars. The examples of Jerry Seinfeld being funny listed below are, I want to be clear, Jerry Seinfeld being funny independent of the material; this is strictly about delivery of the material or performing to accentuate or underline the material. His “second spitter” monologue, or the “Schindler’s List” make out session, things of this nature, are objectively hilarious but are not necessarily examples of Jerry Seinfeld himself being the foremost reason they are funny. No, in his own unique way, Seinfeld made the following 10 moments as much as the material. 

10 Times Jerry Seinfeld Was Funny on Seinfeld

1. If Seinfeld frequently came across on the verge of breaking during myriad one-liners, his lips curling into a conspicuous grin as he said it, or even as he was about to say it, this habit could also work to advantage. It never worked to his advantage more than the capper to the first half of the beloved Keith Hernandez-starring episode in Season 3. You know the moment, after George’s attempts to extend his unemployment benefits by claiming to have interviewed for a job selling latex and giving Jerry’s phone number as the faux latex sales office only to have it go awry when the unemployment office calls and Kramer answers, causing George to run out of the bathroom and fall to the floor, pants around his ankles, at which point Jerry enters from the hall and remarks, “And you want to be my latex salesman.” It’s a great line, that goes without saying, and is impeccably built to within the script, but Seinfeld the actor is what truly brings it home. If so much of the show was Jerry reacting to the inane behavior of his friends, this is his greatest reaction, when the character’s innate stand-up comic instincts take over. If Seinfeld smiles as he says it, that’s because in that moment he is essentially standing on a stage, observing a hapless member of the crowd, feeling the joke come to him in real-time, and then making it.

2. Was there ever a greater conceit illustrating mankind’s eternal penchant for guilty pleasures than in Season 6’s “The Beard” when Jerry is forced to take a lie detector test by the police sergeant (Katherine LaNasa) he is dating to determine whether or not he watches “Melrose Place.” And if Seinfeld was not a great actor, as previously established, well, that fact only helps him here. Hooked up to so many polygraph chords, he tries to act nonchalant, irrefutably failing.

3. Anyone submitting that Jerry was never funny because Jerry Seinfeld was revealed to be a real-life smug jerk is objectively overruled by Season 4’s “The Airport” in which his character cheerfully, quickly, selfishly accepts a first-class airplane ticket over Elaine, resigning her to coach, because Seinfeld’s innate smug jerkiness has never been deployed to greater comic effect. It’s funny because he’s an asshole; a first-class asshole. 

4. “Seinfeld’s” vision of New York was conspicuously white, a valid criticism, though the show was not entirely blind to it. Or, maybe I should say, the show was aware of a kind of blinkered white perspective that fancies itself aware as Season 5’s “The Dinner Party” illustrates with Jerry’s single greatest monologue in which he boils all of society’s racial problems down to a Black and white cookie. “You really should write an op ed for The Times,” says Elaine, a suggestion that Jerry actually takes seriously, casting his eyes around the room, drinking in this idea, and going “mmmmmmm.” That “mmmmmmm” is just hysterical. I imagine that every time Ross Douthat, or David Brooks, or Bret Stephens sits down to compose an op-ed for The Times, they cast their eyes around the room and go “mmmmmmm” just like Jerry.   

5. There were many great moments involving Jerry’s pathological resistance to germs, of course, like the one in Season 8’s “The Pothole” when he is forced to fish the toothbrush of his girlfriend Jenna (Kristin Davis) out of her toilet bowl. Director Andy Ackerman deserves plaudits for concocting a point-of-view shot from within the toilet, an impressive feat in its own right that Seinfeld the actor, nevertheless, manages to top with the side-splitting expression of a germaphobe literally staring down his greatest fear.

6. Even better, though, is another moment involving another girlfriend’s (Dana Wheeler-Nicholson) toothbrush in Season 6’s “The Doodle.” Upon discovering he has forgotten his own teeth-cleaning device at home, his girlfriend insists he use hers, and Seinfeld has his alter onscreen ego desperately will himself to try and use it until ultimately, finally, as if there is an invisible force field between his lips and the bristles, he realizes he just can’t.

7. The best moment of Season 7’s famed “The Soup Nazi” occurs when George, unable to tamp down his own instincts enough to not complain about failing to get free bread with his soup, gets hit with the first “no soup for you!” and has his just paid-for soup literally taken away. It’s hilarious, of course, the shellshocked George just standing there in the wake of this unbelievable turn of events, and then that hilarity is accentuated when Jerry glares at him for deigning to disregard the rules and physically signals for his friend to get the hell out of there. In the subsequent scene, Jerry literally mentions living under a Nazi regime, but that moment before lives it. There is a hysterically exaggerated desperation and terror in Seinfeld the actor’s mannerism that lets you know he’s been cowed. 

8/9/10. My favorite Jerry Seinfeld moment is, in fact, three of them rolled into one scene in Season 6’s “The Secretary” that takes us through the three stages of agony of what we might deem Mandatory Fun. In this case, the Mandatory Fun is the second time in season 6 in which Jerry is forced to take hack comedian Kenny Bania (Steve Hytner) out to an unwanted dinner in exchange for a personal favor. In fact, this time the pesky Bania has negotiated two dinners. 

When Bania asks if Jerry if he is enjoying his soup, Seinfeld’s reply, “I’m having a wonderful time” is as thinly veiled as thinly veiled contempt can possibly get, a man reconciled to a necessary but torturous life choice.

But after that, when Bania begins pontificating on whether they should have their second meal at the same place, or try a new restaurant instead, unable to sit through the whole foregone spiel, Jerry cuts him off. “Yeah, yeah, I know. This would be good, but it would be the same,” he says, the veil coming off, just leaving the contempt sitting there in the open. “But if we go someplace else, it would be different, but it might not be as good.” And as he concludes, Seinfeld the actor has Jerry lean forward, contempt giving way to pure rage. “It’s a gamble. I get it.”

The rage, though, bounces off the oblivious Bania like he’s brick wall. Then he begins telling Jerry how he has scored a date with a woman from a dry-cleaning ticket previously belonging to Kramer on which Jerry’s next-door neighbor had written the phone number for one Uma Thurman. That’s why when Bania explains his date is with “some woman named Uma...hope she’s good looking,” Seinfeld the actor has Jerry respond with that look right up there, rage now dissolving into sheer disbelieving disgust. In fact, it’s sort of the same look I get whenever someone tries to tell me Jerry wasn’t funny on “Seinfeld.” 

Some Drivel On...Go

“Go” might well have had no grand ambition other than to be a rollicking good time, but released as it was six months before the turn of the century, it has in the years since emerged as something like a summation of the 90s. It begins with supermarket checkout clerk Ronna (Sarah Polley) querying of a patron “Paper or plastic?” in a disgruntled tone of voice and repeating it when she doesn’t get an answer, not so much burned out as just pissed off, in general. She’s a disaffected Gen Xer, in other words, and destined to end up like her customer (“Don’t think you’re something you’re not – I used to have your job”), until Adam (Scott Wolf) and Zack (Jay Mohr) come through her line looking to score drugs since the guy, Simon (Desmond Askew), whose shift Ronna took and normally sells them their stuff has gone off to Vegas with his mates instead. She decides to improvise as a drug dealer so she can make rent, essentially spinning Richard Linklater’s “Slacker” off into Quentin Tarantino territory, the two dueling American indie archetypes of the period sort of converging as Doug Liman’s comedy thriller becomes a triptych with three storylines about all these people and a few more bouncing off each other and resolving in, well, no grand resolution at all beyond one character wondering what they are doing for New Year’s Eve. Call it a Gen X styed elixir to all that Y2K anxiety; take a chill pill, man. 

For as much as “Go” can’t help but come across as Pepsi to its forebear “Pulp Fiction’s” Coke, however, Liman manages to inject enough verve to keep it feeling fresh if not even occasionally original. True, his documented DIY approach can’t quite save the Vegas sequence, all of which still feels as if it’s following a screenwriting treasure map than just getting made up by the characters on the spot, but there all manner of flourishes that elevate the overall movie, nevertheless. You see it almost right from the start, something akin to a point-of-view shot of Ronna watching various grocery store items circle the checkout conveyor belt toward her, the humdrum realities of low wage work, while the close-ups of William Fichtner as the undercover cop trying to bust Ronna for dealing are genuinely hilarious, cutting straight to his whole uncomfortably off-kilter character and performance. The crucial flaw to “Go,” however, proves to paradoxically be its single best element: Sarah Polley. She’s too good! She grounds the proceedings in such a surprisingly real way that when she is ushered off screen a third way of the way through, clearing room for the other two stories, the seesaw goes so far in the other direction that an affecting black comedy becomes a violent cartoon.

Lousy Carter

Typically, when movie characters receive a terminal, or even just ominous, diagnosis, it becomes the impetus for change or self-reflection, like “Ikiru” (1952), or the chance to make a “Bucket List” (2007), or to ignore it completely and go by way of bacchanal a la Michael Douglas in “Solitary Man” (2009). But in “Lousy Carter,” none of those things happen. When its eponymous depressive literature professor (David Krumholtz) learns he has six months to live, he doesn’t ask “Why Me?” so much as figuratively shrug and say it figures. Though Bob Byington’s low budget indie has the feel of a Mumblecore movie, it’s more like a 90s slacker comedy, with unhappy academic types that tend to speak in withering putdowns, diagnose each other without necessarily understanding themselves, but if they had graduated from taking classes to teaching them. Nothing much happens, as the phrase goes, and as movies like these tend to, and yet “Lousy Carter” takes that notion of nothing much happening, turns it around, and makes it the point.

Lousy Carter, we learn, from sessions with his therapist (Stephen Root, affecting a German accent that seems to suggest we are supposed to take this all less seriously, not more), got his nickname as a kid and “didn’t mind it,” so it stuck, neatly encapsulating someone more than willing to drift along, unchanging. He teaches a graduate course on The Great Gatsby, but this barely factors into the plot, and he seems more into Nabokov anyway. Indeed, the one moment Lousy truly seems to light up is when he explains how the Russian author’s Laughter in the Dark was unappreciated in its time. Maybe that’s a warning sign. Given the character’s penchant for Nabokov, an estranged relationship with his mother (Mona Lee Fultz) and sister (Trieste Kelly Dunn), and his affair with the wife (Jocelyn DeBoer) of his colleague and ostensible best friend (Martin Starr), it is not easy to spend 90 minutes in his company. But that’s why you cast an actor like Krumholtz. So dignified in “Oppenheimer,” here he is deadpan, and not redeemed by it so much as made tolerable, even enjoyable. His sparring with Olivia Thirlby as his ex-girlfriend Candela becomes an amusing evocation of misery loves company. His eyes radiate self-deprecation with every line. “He’s an asshole,” to quote Sydney Pollack in “Michael Clayton” talking about someone else, “but he knows it.” 

A one-time animation prodigy, he has an idea for an animated movie based on Laughter in the Dark, and when Candela suggests he have an affair with a student as a kind of kiss-off to life, he winds up sort of heeding her advice by enlisting his pupil Gail (Luxy Banner) to help him make this movie. It’s a darkly comical skewering of the sort of so many six months to live storylines and so is the ultimate rendering of it. She is nonplussed by him and doesn’t take the bait, though ironically, he comes under suspicion of an age-inappropriate relationship, nevertheless, from the Provost (Randy E. Aguebor). It is real schlemiel sort of humor further reflected in how he confesses to never even getting the rights to Laughter in the Dark in the first place meaning his end-of-life desire is just a pipe dream. As Lousy himself says, “No one wants to see a film about a pedophile creeping on a young woman,” which is just about the most sardonic line possible, a movie character ruling his own movie out of order.

In Memoriam: Shelley Duvall

There was a lot in the Shelley Duvall story, much of which she talked about herself, some of which she didn’t want to talk about at all, and so I’ll let her own words, or lack of them, on all those matters speak for themselves. I just want to think about her and her work. I want to think about how she was so impossibly idiosyncratic and ethereal, so unique in her appearance, and her voice, and her air, that there was no one like Shelley Duvall, and that in all those Robert Altman movies she was giving performances that no one on this planet and probably the next few planets over could have given. I want to think about how she didn’t so much steal “Annie Hall” with one of those lines that I sometimes say to myself apropos of nothing as just leave an indelible imprint right in the middle of a movie chock full of indelible moments. I want to think about how my younger sister was for a time in her life obsessed with Faerie Tale Theatre and how a lasting memory of myriad family vacations is my sister in the backseat next to me, pretending to host Faerie Tale Theatre and saying, over and over, “Hello, I’m Shelley Duvall.” But over the years here at Cinema Romantico a tradition has emerged in that we honor the newly fallen of one our personal favorites, “Roxanne” (1987), by commemorating their work in it. 

We have commemorated Fred Willard that way, and Michael J. Pollard too, both eccentric actors playing eccentrics in “Roxanne” and embodying a movie set in a ski town that is full of eccentrics, including the Cyrano-like fire chief C.D. Bales (Steve Martin). But in playing Dixie, owner of the diner where everyone congregates, Duvall proves the mama bear of the whole slightly off-center town, playing the most level-headed of the bunch, including C.D. It’s a trip getting to see Duvall be the calm counterpoint to the wild comic energy of her co-star, all visually summarized in the brief scene where Dixie sports C.D.’s fire chief ballcap. He might have been in charge of the fire department, but she put out the fires.

Duvall died on Thursday. She was 75.